004
Putting together a “book”—shop talk for “magazine”—is not as simple as it sounds. Take, for instance, Ali Mousavi’s “Why Darius Built Persepolis”, one of the three features in this issue. The origins of the article trace all the way back to a paper delivered in 1997 at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) in Chicago. According to the paper, the sixth-century B.C. citadel of Persepolis, in modern Iran, had largely been interpreted as a ritual city used for religious festivals; archaeological excavations conducted around the citadel, however, were uncovering residences and palaces, suggesting that Persepolis had in fact been a city where people lived and worked. This new interpretation of the site, I felt, would make for a wonderful article in Archaeology Odyssey.
In retrospect, the timing of the article is interesting. The first copies of the first issue of Archaeology Odyssey (Premiere Issue 1998), which printed the last week of December 1997, were sent to me in Chicago, where I was attending the AIA conference. In a sense, then, the article on Persepolis is exactly as old as the magazine in which it appears!
The scholar who delivered the paper in Chicago was eager to write for the fledgling Archaeology Odyssey, but the outside world intervened—in the form of personal problems and other commitments. In March 2000 the scholar wrote me a painful apology, “I have gotten so MIRED in the complexities of this topic that that I have been utterly paralyzed,” signing off, “All best (with a bag over my head).” Believe me, not all authors take their commitments so seriously.
Three years later, while looking for articles on ancient Iran, I contacted a scholar at Dartmouth College, Kamyar Abdi, who suggested that I speak to Ali Mousavi, at Berkeley, whose father had excavated at Persepolis in the 1960s. Ali Mousavi agreed to contribute an article—due early 2004—but he was called to perform archaeological salvage work in Iran when a devastating earthquake struck the ancient city of Bam on December 26, 2003, and so he was delayed. He sent us the manuscript in the summer of 2004, around the time my wife and I had our second child, and so I was delayed.
Meanwhile, another article on ancient Persia was bubbling to the surface. While attending a meeting of the American Oriental Society in April 2003, Hershel Shanks (then editor of this magazine) heard a paper on the Persian Achaemenid dynasty—which has become “Making (Up) History: Darius the Great Invented a Past to Legitimize His Rule”, by Matt Waters of the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. This manuscript arrived in October 2004; one reason it took so long was that Matt and his wife had their second child, Elise, in the summer of 2003.
Now we had two articles that were narrowly focused on a single Persian king: Darius the Great. In April 2005 I decided to publish them as companion features, and they do complement one another splendidly: Matt Waters’s account of Darius’s uneasy rise to power provides a compelling reason for Darius’s building of Persepolis—as an emblem of power, a “panegyric in stone.”
That brings us up to date. But, of course, I have discussed only two articles in the book, and I have given only the textual history of those articles. Describing everything else—the wonderful work by associate editor Nancy Breslau Lewis, outgoing assistant editor Claire Bohnengel and incoming editorial assistant Meghan Dombrink-Green in gathering photos, researching captions, creating maps and time lines, and on and on—would require another history.
Putting together a “book”—shop talk for “magazine”—is not as simple as it sounds. Take, for instance, Ali Mousavi’s “Why Darius Built Persepolis”, one of the three features in this issue. The origins of the article trace all the way back to a paper delivered in 1997 at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) in Chicago. According to the paper, the sixth-century B.C. citadel of Persepolis, in modern Iran, had largely been interpreted as a ritual city used for religious festivals; archaeological excavations conducted around the citadel, however, were uncovering residences and palaces, suggesting that Persepolis […]
