Persian Empire
Deep Dive 10 min read

Persepolis: The Ceremonial Capital of the Achaemenid Empire

If you have ever stood on the Persepolis terrace in late afternoon, with the sun behind the Kuh-e Rahmat and the relief sculptures lit from the side, you have probably noticed something the photographs do not show. The reliefs are not flat. The carvers worked in three planes, with the figures slightly undercut and the background subtly recessed, so that the lines have a real depth. This is not a surface decoration. It is a sculptor’s understanding of light, and it is the kind of work that only makes sense if you have been on the site at the right time of day. Margaret Cool Root, in The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art (1979), is the closest the scholarship has come to writing a book that takes the visual programme as seriously as the political programme. Boardman (2000) and Calmeyer (in various Achaemenid History volumes) are the other names to know. The original excavation publication is Erich Schmidt’s three-volume Persepolis (1953–1970), which is still the most thorough site report, and the most recent overview is John Curtis and Nigel Tallis, eds., Forgotten Empire (2005), the British Museum companion to the 2005 exhibition.

The Greek name Persepolis is a translation of the Old Persian Pārsa, the name of the Persian people and of the region in which the site was built. The modern Farsi name Takht-e Jamshid (“Throne of Jamshid”) preserves the Sasanian and Islamic-era memory of the ruins, which the medieval Iranian tradition associated with the mythical Jamshid. The site is now a UNESCO World Heritage property and is the most important surviving expression of Achaemenid art, architecture, and imperial ideology.

The platform

The decision of Darius the Great to found a new capital at Persepolis is one of the consequential choices of Achaemenid history. Before Persepolis, the Achaemenid state had been a peripatetic monarchy. Pasargadae, the dynastic sanctuary founded by Cyrus the Great, held the royal tombs and the great fire altar. Ecbatana, the Median capital, was the summer residence. Babylon was the Mesopotamian seat. Susa, in lowland Khuzistan, was the administrative capital and the place where the great inscriptions of Darius were found. The decision to add a new ceremonial capital at Persepolis reflected the importance of the Persian heartland — and particularly the region of Persis — as the dynastic centre of the empire.

The site was a natural terrace at the foot of the Kuh-e Rahmat (“Mountain of Mercy”), watered by the Pulvar River and protected on three sides by the mountain itself. The terrace had to be levelled and supported by massive retaining walls of cyclopean masonry, then extended by Xerxes and his successors to accommodate the Apadana, the Throne Hall, the Gate of All Nations, the Treasury, the private palaces, and the rock-cut royal tombs. The work was done in stages. Darius began the terrace c. 518 BCE, Xerxes extended it to the south, and Artaxerxes I and Darius II added the Treasury and the Hadish, the palace of Artaxerxes I. The whole complex is on a single elevated platform, and the effect — of the buildings grouped on the terrace, with the mountain behind and the plain below — is a striking piece of architectural theatre in the ancient world.

The Apadana

The Apadana, the great audience hall founded by Darius and completed by Xerxes, is the most famous building of Persepolis. It was a hypostyle hall about 60 metres on each side, with a roof supported by columns 19.5 metres high. The roof was of cedar, brought from Lebanon, and the doors were of carved wood, possibly overlaid with gold and silver. The hall could accommodate large numbers — capacity estimates for ceremonial use run to several thousand, though the 10,000 figure sometimes repeated is speculative.

The Apadana staircase is decorated with the most thoroughly studied relief programme of the ancient world. The northern and eastern stairways depict processions of tribute-bearing delegations from twenty-three subject peoples, each identified by costume, hair, and gift: Medes bringing metal vases, Armenians bringing vessels of gold, Bactrians bringing camels and vases, Indians bringing gold and ebony, Arabians bringing ivory and cloth, Ethiopians bringing ebony and ivory, Egyptians bringing grain and linen, Babylonians bringing bullion and wool. The delegations are led by court officials, in a continuous frieze around the staircase on three sides. The king is shown enthroned on a high platform, receiving the tribute, with the royal family, courtiers, and the imperial guard in attendance. The visual analysis is Margaret Cool Root’s; the ethnographic identification of the delegations is the work of several generations, culminating in the publications of the late 1970s and after, and the more recent refinements by Mark Garrison.

The message is unambiguous: the Achaemenid empire is the sum of all its peoples, and the king’s role is to receive, by the favour of Ahura Mazda, the offerings of the nations. The relief programme is a piece of political theology as much as it is a piece of art. The Apadana is the most fully articulated surviving statement of Achaemenid imperial ideology, and it is the place to start if you want to understand how the Achaemenid kings saw themselves.

The Gate of All Nations and the Throne Hall

The Gate of All Nations, built by Xerxes I, was the formal entrance to the Persepolis complex. The gate, a square hall about 25 metres on each side, was flanked by two massive stone bulls, modelled on the lamassu of Mesopotamia. The gate was roofed by four columns, of which the bases survive, and the walls were decorated with reliefs of the king on his throne, attended by courtiers and the imperial guard. The inscription of Xerxes on the gate, in the three official languages of the empire, declares: “A great god is Ahura Mazda, who created this earth, who created that heaven, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Xerxes king, the great king, king of kings, king of the lands of many peoples, son of Darius the king.” This text is one of the canonical formulations of Achaemenid royal ideology, and it is the inscription that most visitors remember.

The Throne Hall, also built by Xerxes, was the largest of the Persepolis halls, about 70 metres by 70 metres. The older literature refers to “100 stone columns,” but the original columns were cedar wood on stone bases; the surviving bases and fluted shafts number rather fewer than 100. The hall was used for imperial receptions and feasts, and it was decorated with reliefs of the king on his throne, fighting mythical beasts, and being attended by the court. The reliefs of the Throne Hall, in combination with those of the Apadana, give an unparalleled view of Achaemenid court ceremonial, royal regalia, and the visual programme of imperial power. The Throne Hall reliefs are rougher in execution than the Apadana reliefs, and the difference is sometimes taken as evidence of a decline in the royal workshop. I am not sure this is right. The Throne Hall reliefs are also a different size, scale, and purpose, and the comparison is not straightforward.

The Treasury

The Treasury of Persepolis, also built by Xerxes and expanded under Artaxerxes I, was a complex of rooms and halls at the southeastern corner of the terrace. It was used to store the tribute, the gifts, and the precious objects of the Achaemenid state. Herzfeld and Schmidt excavated it for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in the 1930s, recovering a large number of gold and silver vessels, jewellery, weapons, cuneiform tablets, and the collection of foundation tablets inscribed in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. The Elamite tablets in particular are the richest single body of Achaemenid administrative texts, and Matthew Stolper’s work on them, beginning in the 1970s and continuing, has been central to the reconstruction of Achaemenid administration.

The royal tombs

Behind the terrace, carved into the rock face of the Kuh-e Rahmat, are the great rock-cut tombs of the Achaemenid kings. The four royal tombs at Persepolis are those of Darius I, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II. (Artaxerxes II and Artaxerxes III are buried at Naqsh-e Rostam, not at Persepolis.) The tomb of Darius, the oldest, is a façade carved in the shape of a cross: a square central chamber with a false window, surrounded by four wings, each supported by four columns. The façade is decorated with reliefs of the king on a platform supported by rows of subject peoples, and the entrance is marked by a fire altar. The trilingual inscription above the entrance declares the king’s achievements, his faith in Ahura Mazda, and his hope that the god will protect “this house, this woman, this child, and this slave” — a phrase that became a touchstone of Achaemenid royal rhetoric.

The burning

Persepolis was burned in early 330 BCE by Alexander the Great, in circumstances that have been debated since antiquity. According to Plutarch and Arrian, the burning was an act of deliberate revenge for the Persian sack of Athens in 480 BCE, and was carried out against the advice of Parmenion, who urged Alexander to spare the city. According to other sources, particularly Cleitarchus, the burning was a drunken accident, in which the Macedonian soldiers set fire to the palace in the course of a banquet, and Alexander was unable to control the flames. The truth is probably somewhere in between: the burning was a deliberate act, but carried out in a way that was at once revenge, imperial theatre, and a calculated gesture of Macedonian control over the Achaemenid ceremonial centre. Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia (1996), p. 144, treats the fire as at least partly deliberate, and I think he is right.

Whatever the circumstances, the burning marked the end of Persepolis as a functioning capital. The palace, the Treasury, and the residential buildings were largely destroyed; the stone-built halls, the rock-cut tombs, and the platform survived. The Greek and Macedonian sources preserve vivid descriptions of the columns burning, the wooden roofs consumed, the gold and silver melting and running into the cracks of the floor, and the great hall of the Apadana collapsing. The fire was the symbolic end of the Achaemenid world, even though the Achaemenid legacy would be claimed and adapted by every subsequent Iranian dynasty.

The afterlife

After the burning, Persepolis was largely abandoned as a ceremonial site, though the surrounding region of Persis remained an important centre of Iranian identity. The Hellenistic, Parthian, and Sasanian dynasties all claimed descent from the Achaemenids. The rock-cut tombs of Naqsh-e Rostam, near Persepolis, became the burial site of the Sasanian kings, in deliberate imitation of the Achaemenid model. The Sasanians, in particular, saw themselves as the restorers of the Achaemenid tradition, and the rock reliefs of the Sasanian shahanshahs at Naqsh-e Rostam and Bishapur continued the Achaemenid programme of imperial self-representation. The city itself was referred to in the Sasanian and Islamic periods as Taj (“the Crown”), and the ruins remained a place of wonder and a focus of Iranian memory.

The site was visited by medieval Muslim travellers, who described the columns, reliefs, and inscriptions in terms of wonder. It was rediscovered by the Italian traveller Pietro della Valle in 1621, and the first systematic European study was conducted by the French traveller Jean Chardin in the 1660s. Cornelis de Bruijn’s Engravings and Persepolitan Studies, published in 1704, gave the wider European public its first detailed view of the site. The first modern excavations were Herzfeld and Schmidt’s in the 1930s; work has continued in the decades since, with major contributions by the Italian Institute of the Middle and Far East (IsMEO) and the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organisation.

In the modern era, Persepolis has been a focus of Iranian national memory and a symbol of the antiquity and grandeur of the Persian tradition. The site is featured on the Iranian currency, in modern Iranian schoolbooks, and in the iconography of the modern Iranian state. The Persepolis reliefs, particularly the Apadana staircase, are reproduced in museums and books throughout the world, and have become a standard reference in the study of ancient art. The conservation of Persepolis is a national priority of the modern Iranian state.

For further reading

  • Root, Margaret Cool. The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art (1979)
  • Schmidt, Erich F. Persepolis (3 vols., 1953–1970)
  • Boardman, John. The Persians (2000)
  • Curtis, John, and Nigel Tallis, eds. Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia (2005)
  • Calmeyer, Peter. “Zur Genese altiranischer Motive” and other articles in Achaemenid History (multiple volumes, 1987–)
  • Briant, Pierre. From Cyrus to Alexander (2002), chapters 10–11
  • Dusinberre, Elspeth. Empire, Authority, and Autonomy in Achaemenid Anatolia (2013), for the broader cultural context
  • Wiesehöfer, Josef. Ancient Persia (1996), chapter 5