Why Darius Built Persepolis

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Persepolis is a mystery. The ancient Persian city boasts some of the world’s most impressive ruins, but no one knows exactly why it was built. The ruling Achaemenid Persian dynasty already had a capital at Pasargadae when Persepolis was founded by Darius I (522–486 B.C.), also known as Darius the Great, and they had a political and administrative center at Susa. Why 024did they need Persepolis?

Equally strange, the city is hardly ever mentioned in classical texts. While the Greeks had direct information about such Achaemenid cities as Ecbatana (possibly today’s Hamadan) and Susa, they apparently knew nothing of Persepolis.^a The Greek historian Herodotus (485–425 B.C.), for instance, never refers to Persepolis. Nor does the Greek medical doctor Ctesias, who spent 20 years in the Achaemenid court 025working as the personal physician of King Artaxerxes II (405–359 B.C.)—though Ctesias’s history of Persia, Persika, does mention Darius’s rock-cut tomb at the “double mountain” of Naqsh-e Rustam (see photo, only 4 miles northwest of Persepolis.¹

Not until Alexander conquered the city in 330 B.C. did Persepolis (Greek for “City of the Persians”) begin to appear in Greek texts, including works by the Greek historians Diodorus Siculus, who wrote in the first century B.C., and Arrian, who wrote a biography of Alexander in the second century A.D.² Plutarch, who lived around the turn of the first century A.D., recounted that Alexander carried off the treasure of Persepolis on 5,000 camels and 20,000 mules.³

Ancient Persepolis consisted of a huge man-made platform, which supported a number of royal buildings, and a surrounding settlement.^b

The thick walls of the platform’s facade were made of large polygonal blocks of stone, which had been carefully dressed and placed in regular courses without the use of mortar. The royal architects consolidated the wall’s blocks by means of two ingenious techniques. The first was the so-called anathyrosis technique, in which masons smoothed only the outer edges of the stone blocks, leaving the center of each face rough; when two blocks came into contact, 027the inner, rough surface areas held the pieces firmly together, and the smooth outer surface provided a clean join. Also, to prevent blocks from shifting, metallic joints (often called dovetailed clamps) of different shapes were used. Usually made of iron (and rarely of bronze), they were set in rectangular holes in the stone and fixed in place with lead. (This practice contributed to the destruction of many of Persepolis’s ancient buildings during the Middle Ages, when people plundered the ruins for metals.)

Darius’s architects filled the inside of the walls with rubble—which they obtained by leveling a good portion of the nearby Kuh-e Rahmat (Mount of Mercy)—and installed an elaborate drainage system. Then they covered the surface of the platform, taking advantage of the natural irregularities of the terrain to create a multi-leveled terrace with “podiums” upon which different structures were to be built.

The platform is roughly quadrilateral (to be precise, a 43-sided polygon), 1,500 feet on the west, 1,000 feet on the north, 1,400 feet on the east and 950 feet on the south. The facade walls on three sides of the platform (the east side of the platform abutted Mount Rahmat) were of different heights, with the 60-foot-high western wall probably the highest (we do not have evidence for the entire course of the walls). The northern wall, by contrast, was only about 15 feet high. The terrace was also protected by a strong mudbrick fortification wall—parts of which have been uncovered 330 feet west of the platform—16.5 to 33 feet in height.

Originally, a part of the northern wall was probably used as a service entrance to the platform; the remains of three sharp-edged rock slabs indicate the existence of a gateway.

This northern gateway probably went out of use once Xerxes (486–465 B.C.), Darius’s son and successor, built the citadel’s famous monumental stairway. Set into an enormous recess of the northwest 028wall, the structure was a large double-reversing stairway; that is, staircases at both the north and south sides of the entrance would rise to a landing, switch back, and then rise to the surface of the terrace. The staircases were broad enough for ten men to pass abreast, and they had a gentle slope of 111 steps, with 63 steps to each landing and another 48 steps to the terrace.

At the top of the stairway was the Gate of All Lands. One side of the gateway was decorated with colossal human-headed figures; the opposite side had four winged bulls, whose forequarters leapt out from the masonry. Inscribed on the wall above the bulls was a cuneiform inscription in three languages: Elamite, Old Persian and Babylonian Akkadian:

I am Xerxes, the great king, king of kings, king of the lands of many people, king of this great earth far and wide. By [the god] Ahuramazda’s favor I made this Gate of All Lands. Much has been built in this Parsa which I and my father have built. What now has been built and appears beautiful, all that we have built by the favor of Ahuramazda.

The stone jambs of this gateway also bear inscriptions with the names and dates of travelers who visited Persepolis between 1638 (the German traveler Johann Albrecht von Mandelso) and 1962 (a certain Victor Wall).

Directly south of the Gate of All Lands is the Apadana, a great audience hall, one of the most impressive structures at the site. Built on an 8-foot-high podium, the Apadana consisted of a square central hall (200 feet on a side) with six rows of six columns. On the north, east and west sides of the structure were large porticoes, each with two rows of six columns more than 60 feet high. The bases of the richly decorated columns were adorned with plant designs, and the shafts have as many as 48 flutes. The magnificent capitals were composed of Egyptianizing palm-leaf designs capped by bull figures (for the main hall) or lion figures (for the eastern portico).

The Apadana was accessible by means of two monumental stairways leading into the northern and eastern porticoes. Identical trilingual inscriptions, carved in each of the stairways, state that Xerxes built or 029completed many of Persepolis’s structures, including, probably, the Apadana: “This house have I built by the grace of Ahuramazda. May Ahuramazda and the gods protect me and my kingdom, and what I have built.”⁴ The stairways were decorated with relief carvings showing Persian guards and dignitaries and representatives of the empire’s vassal lands bringing gifts or tribute to the Achaemenid king; the gifts include silver and gold vessels, jewelry, woven fabric, weapons and animals. The architecture of the Apadana and the scenes carved on the walls of the stairways suggest that the palace served as an audience hall where the king greeted important visitors, who were no doubt impressed by this majestic structure that rose 65 feet above the platform and 125 feet above the surrounding plain.

Running east from the Gate of All Lands was a passageway to another monumental gateway, which was never finished. This gateway opened into a court in front of a second large audience hall: the Hall of a Hundred Columns (also called the Throne Hall). The northern entrance led through a porch that had two rows of eight columns and was flanked by walls decorated with figures of colossal bulls. Eight stone doorways (two on each of the hall’s four sides) led into the main room; the doorways on the north and south were decorated with reliefs of throne scenes, while those on the east and west were adorned with reliefs depicting the king fighting monstrous creatures. The enormous main hall, which, like the Apadana, probably served as a reception chamber and as a place to display objects from the royal treasury, was a square, 230 feet on each side, with ten rows of ten columns to support the building’s roof. An inscription uncovered in the hall states that Xerxes began the construction and that his son and successor, Artaxerxes I (465–424 B.C.), completed it.

The middle and southern parts of the platform are 030occupied by smaller complexes. Near the southeast corner of the Apadana is the Central Palace (also called the Tripylon or Council Hall), which is built on an 8.5-foot-high podium. The palace’s double stairway, which is decorated with reliefs of Persian and Median dignitaries, provides access to a portico that opens into a square central hall. Two other entrances to this hall are located on the south and east sides.

The Central Palace seems to have been a sort of intermediary construction between the public and private areas of the platform—between the great audience halls in the north and the royal and administrative buildings to the south.

To the west and southwest of the Central Palace are the palaces of Darius I and Xerxes. Darius’s palace was built on a 10-foot-high podium and had a 12-columned central hall. Trilingual inscriptions found in the structure name Darius I as the builder of the palace. The two stone piers flanking the southern portico of the palace bear the name of Xerxes, who completed his father’s construction. This palace is also called the Hall of Mirrors because of its use of glossy, polished black stone, especially inside niches and windows. Leading down from the central hall are three small stairways decorated with relief carvings showing servants carrying food in covered dishes, the king 031about to depart the palace with his entourage, and the king in combat with monsters. The entire building had a red-surfaced flooring (as did other buildings on the terrace).

The palace of Xerxes was about twice as large as Darius’s palace. Two monumental stone stairways lead up from courtyards on the east and west to the palace, which was built on a platform of bedrock (large denuded patches of bedrock are still visible at some spots). The palace’s main hall had 36 wooden columns; relief carvings on the eastern and western doorways depict the king’s servants with ibexes. Trilingual inscriptions mentioning Xerxes have been found on door jambs, on doorway frames and on the garments of the king in relief carvings. The palace is constructed of very fine stone, and it was therefore largely destroyed in the fire set by Alexander’s Macedonian army.

The southeastern part of the platform was covered with a large building known as the Treasury, which served as an armory and royal storehouse. In this building was kept the booty of conquered nations and the annual tribute paid to the king by Persian and vassal peoples, especially during the celebration of the New Year. Before the Hall of a Hundred Columns was finished, the Treasury was probably used as a reception chamber as well. Two large stone reliefs found in this building show the Achaemenid king seated on his throne; a dignitary stands before the king with his hand raised to his mouth in a gesture of respect; the crown prince stands behind the king, at the head of a number of court officials.

The last of the structures on the great terrace, located just west of the Treasury, is an extensive L-shaped building. Persepolis’s first excavator, the University of Berlin archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld,^c called this building a harem, because of its relatively hidden and protected location. Herzfeld thought the structure once housed the many wives and concubines of the king. There is no Achaemenid source mentioning the function of the structure as such, however, and nothing in the building’s architectural remains would support this conclusion. Herzfeld and his architect, Friedrich Krefter, 033reconstructed the main portion of the building in 1931 for the double purpose of providing a house for the expedition and an example of the original architecture as it looked in its day.

Excavations at Persepolis over the last 70 years have uncovered a number of inscriptions that provide a reasonably clear picture of how and when the citadel was built.⁵

One group of trilingual inscriptions—the longest set of inscriptions found at Persepolis—appears on a large stone slab, 23.5 feet long and 6.5 feet wide, in the south wall. Unlike other Achaemenid trilingual inscriptions, in which the same text is recorded in the Elamite, Babylonian Akkadian and Old Persian languages, the south wall inscription has those three languages recording four different texts. The text of the Elamite inscription, which is a kind of foundation inscription, states that Darius built “upon this place this fortress.” The Akkadian inscription praises the god Ahuramazda and lists vassal lands of the empire. The two Old Persian inscriptions are longer and more detailed versions of the Akkadian text.

Why do these inscriptions, contrary to the normal procedure, have different texts?

Until the reign of Darius, the Old Persian language was simply a spoken language, not recorded in script. Darius himself ordered the creation of this system of writing for encoding royal inscriptions. The scribes themselves were either Elamite or Babylonian, and the Elamite and Akkadian languages were used for record-keeping and administrative purposes. It is possible, then, that the royal scribes first engraved the inscription in Elamite, and that only later—once cuneiform writing had been adapted for the Old Persian language—did they add the Old Persian and Babylonian versions.^d This would mean that the “fortress” Darius refers to in the Elamite text preceded the invention of the Old Persian system of writing, which can be dated to 518 B.C.

In addition, two of the four inscriptions mention the name of Darius’s father, Hystaspes, so they were likely carved while Hystaspes was still alive. From some of Darius’s texts found at Susa, we know that Hystaspes died in 519 or 518 B.C.⁶ This would indicate that Darius had begun laying the foundations of the platform by 518.

The Elamite foundation inscription suggests that Darius began building the citadel at the south wall, which in later years became a somewhat inconspicuous spot isolated from the other structures. The Iranian archaeologist Akbar Tadjvidi’s excavations at the south wall near the inscriptions have uncovered the remains of an entryway to the platform (probably a stairway) that gave access to the Treasury and to the garrison building just east of the Treasury. When the monumental double-reversing stairway was built at the northwest part of the platform, this southern entrance was closed off with large blocks of stone.

In 1933, while excavating the Apadana, Krefter discovered what came to be called the Foundation Tablets. Embedded in the northeastern and southeastern 034corners of the walls of the Apadana’s mail hall, these tablets indicate that Darius began building the great audience hall before his European campaign against the Scythians in 513 B.C.⁷ In 1963 restoration work at the stairway of the eastern portico of the Apadana brought to light a parallel wall behind the stairway. Further research revealed that the southern part of the Apadana had at one time been significantly modified structurally.⁸ And fragments of another inscription found in the Apadana indicate that the construction of the hall, completed by Xerxes, occurred over a period of some 30 years.⁹

The whole scheme of the structures on the terrace can now be better understood. Initially, access to the platform was through a stairway set in the south wall, where Darius placed the Elamite foundation inscription. A passageway led through the western part of the Treasury, which was probably among the first structures to be completed on the platform. The Treasury, in fact, was at first an east-west building, the western part of which later became the base of the L-shaped Harem.¹⁰ Two narrow stairways connected the westernmost part of the Harem to Xerxes’s palace, which stands on a podium 23 feet higher than the base of the Harem. Very likely Xerxes’s palace was a later addition; originally, the stairways probably mounted to a large open court in front of the Apadana.¹¹

Two other caches of clay tablets with Achaemenid administrative texts help fill in the rest of the picture. The so-called Fortification Tablets were found by Herzfeld at the northwestern tower of the platform, and the Treasury Tablets were found by the German archaeologist Erich Schmidt, who directed excavations at Persepolis from 1934 to 1939, in one of the rooms in the Treasury. These Elamite documents are accounting records recording payments to construction workers. They thus provide a good barometer of phases of construction at the site. From these tablets, we learn that work proceeded at the site from 512 to 458 B.C., with a heightening of activity between 503 and 497 B.C.¹² Some of the earliest Treasury Tablets mention a columned hall (probably the Apadana), which seems to have been built during the last years of Darius’s reign.¹³

Most of the construction activities at the Persepolis citadel were probably undertaken during the early years of Xerxes’s reign. In his inscriptions, he often explicitly states that he has completed what his father began—for example, in the trilingual inscription on the Gate of All Lands. It seems likely that Xerxes was most active immediately following his father’s death and before his military expedition against the Greeks (486–480 B.C.).

Nonetheless, Xerxes continued to build throughout his reign—and even during the war years in Greece. (By invading Greece, Xerxes was also completing work begun by his father, Darius, who had invaded mainland Greece in 490 B.C. only to be stopped by the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon.) By the 19th year of his reign (467 B.C.), 1,300 workmen were employed at Parsa, and the following year more than 2,000 men were involved in building activities, implying that a large project was taking place. This project was probably the construction of the Hall of a Hundred Columns, which was completed by Xerxes’s son and successor, Artaxerxes I (465–424 B.C.).¹⁴ By the seventh year of Artaxerxes’s reign, the last year covered 035by the documents on the tablets, building activity had come to a standstill.¹⁵

So we are left with our initial question: Why Persepolis? There have been lots of different answers. Some, including Ernst Herzfeld, have argued that Persepolis was built to host the Persian New Year festivities,¹⁶ whereas others have seen it as a ritual city or a royal summer residence.¹⁷ The German scholar Wolfgang Lentz suggested that Persepolis was built in connection with the vernal equinox, whereas the Canadian scholar James George argued that the site was built in connection with the summer solstice.¹⁸ Akbar Tadjvidi, the last excavator of Persepolis, suggested that Persepolis “was a sacred and symbolic place for the Persians in the heart of their homeland, an earthly manifestation of a heavenly world … which was kept hidden from foreigners’ eyes.”¹⁹ One of my own contributions was to suggest that the site had essentially a military function, but now that idea seems untenable.²⁰

Perhaps we need not strain to solve the mystery of Persepolis’s raison d’être. The magnificent walled city on its lofty pedestal symbolized the power and stability of the king. After reorganizing and reinvigorating the empire after a period of political turmoil (Matt Waters, “Making (Up) History,”), Darius created distinctive symbols of power in monumental inscriptions, in relief carvings (in which he is often associated with the great god Ahuramazda) and, perhaps especially, in a great citadel: Persepolis. The work that Darius began, both in strengthening the new dynasty and in building Persepolis, was completed by his son and heir, Xerxes, and by Xerxes’s son and heir, Artaxerxes.

For the same reason, Persepolis was used less and less during the later Achaemenid period, when it seems to have been transformed into a private royal retreat. Every Achaemenid king endeavored to complete portions of this “ceremonial” city, which was still unfinished when Alexander destroyed it in 330 B.C. Perhaps that is why Persepolis remained unknown to the classical Greeks: The Persian kings may not have wanted to reveal treasures of their royal, ceremonial city until it was complete—which never happened.

Persepolis is a mystery. The ancient Persian city boasts some of the world’s most impressive ruins, but no one knows exactly why it was built. The ruling Achaemenid Persian dynasty already had a capital at Pasargadae when Persepolis was founded by Darius I (522–486 B.C.), also known as Darius the Great, and they had a political and administrative center at Susa. Why 024did they need Persepolis? Equally strange, the city is hardly ever mentioned in classical texts. While the Greeks had direct information about such Achaemenid cities as Ecbatana (possibly today’s Hamadan) and Susa, they apparently knew nothing […]