Persepolis

A capital kept secret

When Darius I "the Great" began building Persepolis around 518 BC he did not call it the capital of Persia.

The administrative capitals of the Achaemenid Empire were Susa, Ecbatana and Babylon. Persepolis was something else: a private royal ceremonial city in the Fars highlands, accessible only by a single road over the mountain passes, used once a year for the spring equinox festival of Nowruz when the twenty-three satrapies of the empire sent ambassadors to renew their oaths.

For nearly two centuries Greek geographers did not know it existed.

An ethnographic atlas in stone

The eastern staircase of the Apadana — Darius's great audience hall, seventy-two columns each nineteen metres tall — is decorated with the Procession of Nations: a continuous low-relief frieze showing representatives of the twenty-three peoples ruled from Persepolis, each in distinctive dress and bringing a distinctive tribute.

The Medes bring horses, the Bactrians lead two-humped camels, the Indians carry baskets of gold dust, the Ethiopians lead a giraffe, the Lydians bring vessels and bracelets, the Scythians lead horses and carry folded trousers, the Babylonians bring textiles.

The frieze is the most detailed visual catalogue of an ancient empire ever made.

Polychrome, not grey

The most pervasive modern misconception about Persepolis is that it was always the bare grey limestone visible today.

It was not.

The columns, capitals, friezes and reliefs were brightly painted in red, blue, green, yellow and gold, with details picked out in contrasting hues. Recent spectroscopic analysis has identified Egyptian-blue pigment (a synthetic copper-calcium silicate), red ochre, malachite green and orpiment yellow on protected interior surfaces. The carved soldiers of the royal guard had purple cloaks on yellow tunics. The carved lions had golden manes. The columns themselves were originally painted dark red with gold detailing on the bull-headed capitals.

The grey-stone aesthetic familiar from neoclassical architecture is a Renaissance-era misreading of antiquity.

Alexander's fire

In January 330 BC, Alexander the Great captured Persepolis after his victory over Darius III at Gaugamela.

According to the Greek historian Diodorus, Alexander held a great drunken banquet in the palace. A Greek courtesan named Thaïs — the future mistress of Ptolemy I of Egypt — suggested the guests set fire to the palace in revenge for the Persian burning of Athens 150 years earlier. Whether the fire was a drunken impulse or a calculated act of imperial closure is still argued.

What is certain is that Persepolis burned down to the foundation in a single night. The cedar roof beams, the wooden columns, the painted decoration and the silk tapestries went up together. The carved stone reliefs survived because limestone does not burn — but the colour, the wooden architecture, and the royal archives in clay tablets baked hard in the conflagration were all destroyed.

The site was abandoned and never rebuilt.

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