The Ancients - Palaces in Paradise: Centres of the Persian World

Episode Date: August 15, 2021

Persepolis is arguably the most famous ancient site associated with the Achaemenid Persian Empire, but it certainly wasn’t the only administrative centre of this ancient superpower. In this second part of our interview with Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd talks us through some of the other key urban centres of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. From Susa to Ecbatana to Pasargadae.Lloyd is a Professor in Ancient History at Cardiff University. His new book, Persians: The Age of Great Kings, will be out next year.

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on other key centres, particularly the centre of Susa, further west, west of the Zagros Mountains. But we're also going to be looking at other places such as Ekbetana, further north, and Pasargadae. So without further ado, here's Lloyd. So let's go to Susa now, because it's just sort of imagining that trek of the whole Royal Achaemenid baggage train, the royal quarters that made its way from Persepolis to Susa, that way or the other way. It's so interesting, Lloyd, if we now focus on Susa and cross-reference it to Persepolis,

because Susa, unlike Persepolis, it is constructed long before the rise of the Persian Empire. It's got a long and rich history, but it becomes incredibly significant for the Achaemenid Persians. Yes, it does. So, you know, Susa, modern- day Shush, is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on Earth. That's an incredible feeling when you go there. It has a river that runs right the way through it. It's built on the very, very flat plains of Elam. These, of course, nowadays are the oil rich fields, you know, that straddle Iraq and Iran and therefore very desirable, much fought over. The great, great ability to grow crops there. It's incredibly fertile, not too far from the Persian Gulf. And of course, the Tigris and Euphrates all came down to that area as well. So it had always been part really of a kind of Mesopotamian world.

The Elamites had been building there from at least 3,500 BC, if not 4,500 BC. In fact, we can push back that way. It was one of the great, truly, truly Mesopotamian urban centres of antiquity. In a stone's throw from Susa, just a half an hour drive by car these days, is the mighty ziggurat of Chogha Zambil, dating to about 1,500 BCE. The best preserved ziggurat in the world, really quite remarkable. BC, the best preserved ziggurat in the world, really quite remarkable. It shows us that Elam was part of this Mesopotamian world. And yet, you know, it sat in close proximity to the Zagros, and then the world of the Iranian plateau. So its cultural output, if you like, straddled both this sophisticated urban society of Mesopotamia, and then these kind of new nomadic peoples who were

settling in the landscape around Elam. And now we know that the Elamites really are the kind of missing link with the Persians. We used to think, you know, that the Persians and the Medes were kind of dependent on another. Now we understand that the Persians actually were really dependent on the Elamites for basically all of their cultural heritage, which was taken from Mesopotamia. And then, of course, they mix that with their amazing nomadic background as well. And what we get is, ta-da, Persian. So the city has been occupied for thousands of years. It already has large palatial quarters. It had large artisan centres. We know that there was a very extensive population living around it. There's

a natural sort of acropolis on the city as well, which was built on. And when Darius the Great came to power, he immediately focused on Elam as his epicentre, really. In a way, Susa was more of an administrative capital than Persepolis was. So could you imagine if we ever discovered the archives from Susa, what we'd get there? Man, it'd be several podcasts. Oh, I tell you, it'd be mouthwatering. It really would. And we know that, you know, the Royal Road, for instance, which ran from Sardis came all the way down to Susa. There was another one that ran from Susa to Syria, another one that ran from Susa to Memphis in Egypt, Susa to Kandahar. So this was kind of like the great bureaucratic hub of the empire. Now, the question is,

why does Darius build there? Well, my theory is that he was Elamite himself. We think we've identified his mother. You might remember when we talked about the text, a woman called Idabama, and that's an Elamite name. So it's highly likely that his mother was Elamite and his father was Persian. And it would really make sense to me. That's why it became such an important centre for him and why he started building there straight away before Persepolis was conceived of. So he's really a Sousa boy, I think, Darius. That's what he's all about. And what's interesting is his son Xerxes gets the same

feeling as well. He seems to be quite proud of his Elamite ancestry. So for instance, he has transported to Susa two vast, well over life-sized statues of Darius that were made and set up in a temple in northern Egypt in the delta. These were transported overland to Susa, where they were set up at the new gateway that had been built there as well. Only one of these statues survives now. It's in the National Museum in Tehran. It's the only example we have of a three-dimensional sculpture from Iran, from Persia. But it's really interesting that it's almost like Xerxes is bringing his father home back to Susa again. So I think there's very much a kind of family

feeling about the city, why Darius and the other Achaemenids want to build there. We know that when there was a great fire at the Apadana, Ataxerxes I rebuilt it, you know, his grandfather's great palace he rebuilt. And then Ataxerxes II also builds a new palace on the other side of the river there. So it had a different feeling, a different function to Persepolis. But while it didn't have that kind of ceremonial cachet that we have at Persepolis, nevertheless, Susa had that kind of family centre about it, I think. It's renowned also, correct me if I'm wrong, Lloyd, but doesn't it have the,

I'm thinking from my successes from my Hellenistic background right here, but doesn't it have a huge treasury there too? There was absolutely another enormous treasury there, another huge archive. It was a huge functioning site. And don't forget, Susiana was its own capital of the Elamite province as well. So yeah, it was functioning on many different levels. We also know that Alexander found it quite difficult to take Susa because we found lots and lots of arrowheads, Macedonian arrowheads everywhere there as well. So the Susans put up quite a fight around Alexander, whereas, of course, the people of Persepolis didn't. Because Persepolis was so at centre of Iran, of the Iranian world, they never found the need really to fortify it. You know, Iran itself, the empire was its fortifications.

Susa, because it was this a bit more liminal space, was heavily fortified in antiquity. And we get a really good picture of Susa if you go to the Hebrew Bible, if you open the Old Testament, and the book of Esther, which I believe was written around about 400 or maybe 350 BCE, so it's an Achaemenid text, it actually is set in Susa in the reign of Xerxes. And you get this incredible description, really, of the city itself. The scribe, whoever penned the book, knew the area, knew the area very well. It's quite forensic in a way he describes it. So there's the citadel, there's the workman's area, there's the lower city, which is where the populace worked and lived. And then within the palace itself, he talks about throne halls, he talks about a royal gateway. And the other thing he talks about are the royal gardens as well. And Xerxes holds a banquet there for his household and for the representatives of the provinces, which lasts seven weeks or something, the great largesse of the king. This isn't unfathomable. We have texts from Ashur in Assyria, which talk about Ashurbanipal holding equally lavish banquets in the palace gardens as well.

That whole idea actually that becomes very important to the Persians of inside space and outside space. They kind of merge together really. The garden space is something which is also part of that living space. And that happens, of course, because what we hear in Esther is that the apadana or the columned hallway had beautifully coloured sort of torpolins stretched out from it into the garden and suspended on and hung up on poles, you know. So really, the garden space becomes part of that indoor space as well. And if you think about it, the upper damas themselves at Persepolis and Pasagadae are actually like tents in stone. Their great columns are actually meant to be tents, essentially. They're poles that are holding up a roof.

So, you know, the architecture is playing with this inside and outside space. And that becomes really important in the kind of long durée of Persian royal architecture. So by the time we get to the Sassanians, the first Sassanian king, building at a beautiful place in southern Fars called Firuzabad, Ardashir there builds this gorgeous palace with a domed hall. And at the front of it, he puts, for the very first time, an ivan. And an ivan is a kind of like a crescent kind of stone awning, which essentially takes the place of the cloth awnings that the Achaemenids were using. There's such a continuity in the kind of

architectural traditions of the Iranians. It's really remarkable. Even when you go to like a 19th century palace, like the Palace of Gulistan in Tehran today, there the main building is an apadana with a porticus. And then from that, a huge canopy which comes out into the garden. And then, of course, a long water channel at the front of it as well. So, you know, this continuity just goes on and on and on. And maybe that's a good place to talk about Pasargada as well, maybe. Can I anticipate a question? Let's go into Pasargada. All right, absolutely. You know me too well. What caused the anarchy? How did medieval migrants shape the language I'm speaking right now? Who won the Hundred Years' War? Could England's lost patron saint be buried under a tennis court in Suffolk?

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Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go into Pasargada right now then, Lloyd. Well, it works because, of course, Pasargada is exactly that. Pasargada is a palace garden or a garden palace. Pasargada itself was the very first stone construction to be built in Iran. And when compared with Persepolis and with Susa, it's on a miniature scale. You know, it's not a grand site. When you go there today, actually, in some respects, it's quite disappointing. It's quite a hard site to envisage because what you have are low-level ruins of very elegant, I must say, dressed stone platforms, some column bases and a few kind of standing columns, clearly indicating this was a small Apadanas in two

palaces. There's also a separate gateway as well. And around these Apadanas went definitely a portico which was colonnaded as well. So straight away there was an indoor and outdoor space but most importantly around all of these palaces we have discovered water channels they're going everywhere and i don't mean sort of just like ditches where water could run these are wide water channels dressed with stone and also interspersed every now and then with little fountain receptacles for bubbling water. So this whole area around the palace pavilions was a formal garden, essentially. What in Persian today is called Chahabag, a four-quarter garden. It's the kind of thing which has gone down in Islamic history, you know, beyond the Achaemenids.

So you find it in Seville, in Samarkand, at the Taj Mahal, you know, these great four-part tared gardens. We find the prototype there with Cyrus and it was planted, we know, with trees which were brought from all over the empire. So it's almost like an empire in miniature. There were these cypress trees, there were plantings from all over the empire. It must have been an incredible display of color and also fragrances as well. And of course, this is basically where the Persians got their idea of what they call the pardashu. The Greeks hear it as a paradisos, a paradise. That's where we get the word from. So it's no coincidence, I think, that when the Hebrews were writing the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, most of it was written down in the Persian period, what we have of the Bible today. When they came to think about the original paradise on earth, the Garden of Eden, it's actually crafted in the style of a Persian garden. It's a Persian paradise.

So, you know, the Persians actually even give us the concept of a paradise. And for a people who is constantly on the move, very often through desert conditions, I mean, how else could you express paradise but a garden, you know, a flowering garden, which of course is walled. A Persian paradise is always walled to keep the wild out, to contain the domesticated in, to keep that living. And when you go to Pasagada and you finally notice this intricate layout of the water channels, that's when it becomes real to you. When you see beyond, you know, just the ruins of the stone themselves, and then you realise how harmonious the Persians were in building these structures in the midst of nature. It's quite a remarkable thing. It's quite interesting because from my quite ignorant viewpoint on Pasagadae, Lloyd,

all I think about sometimes when someone mentions that place, I initially think of the tomb of Cyrus. But it's quite interesting from what you're saying there. It's almost as if Cyrus's tomb is placed in the middle of a paradise. It was. The paradise extended way around. Now, the tomb itself is a good mile away from the palaces. You can see it from the palaces very clearly. And you can walk there, you know, in 40 minutes kind of thing in the heat. Now it kind of stands on its own. In antiquity, we know that there was a large sanctuary that was built around it, which priests, the magi looked after. We know that there were sacrifices to the dead Cyrus going on there as well.

So a lot of that there. And of course, all of that was plundered and pillaged in the Middle Ages by locals who were using the stone for building their own walls and so forth. But it was an integral part of the whole of the palace, the gardens and the tomb were completely joined, integrated through these water channels. And what's really interesting is that we've got this quite a monumental gateway near the two little palace pavilions. And it shows a figure on the inside. He's a bearded figure. He's wearing an Elamite robe, which is kind of like a wraparound sari-like garment. He has four huge wings which come from his shoulders. And then he's wearing on his head this kind of folie bougie nightclub crown, which is all feathers and ram's horns. Actually, it's a really interesting composite.

So the Elamite robe obviously stretches the Susan background. The wings are all based on Babylonian spiritual guardians or genie called Apkallu. And then the crown is actually taken from Egyptian. It's the Atef crown. And people have said, oh, that's a portrait of Cyrus. It's not. And in fact, I think the image postdates Cyrus because of the Egyptian crown. It probably dates to the reign of Cambyses or after.

Don't forget, Cambyses conquered Egypt. So therefore brings all of this sort of influence back with him. But what's important about it, I think it's not a portrait of Cyrus at all, it's actually a guardian figure, you know, so it's a great sort of talisman. There probably were two of them originally, only one survives, and now that's so badly weathered. But it's fascinating that they need that kind of spirit guardian there, because the gateway stood there as a monumental piece of architecture but there were no walls around it at all it wasn't connected to any walls so it was an open space a huge open landscape through which somehow you just came through this doorway you know this great monumental

gateway as kind of like a spiritual cleansing as it were you know the guardians the apkallu looked at you and said oh you're okay and then you're processed into the entranceway so it says even from cyrus's time there was this feeling of using these spaces in quite theatrical ways you know you're kind of forced to go through certain routes and so forth we see that happening very clearly at persepolis susa it's harder to tell but certainly it's kind of stage managed you know when you go for an audience with the great king it's harder to tell, but certainly it's kind of stage managed. You know, when you go for an audience with the great king, it's all about theatrics, essentially. Let me just take you back to Persepolis for a second. So just imagine this. So when you go to the Apodama at Persepolis, you would have gone through huge doors, huge, huge cedar doors. Imagine that, you know, these would have shucked behind you, slammed behind you. And then there would have been the

smell of incense in the air and also all of this kind of smoke from the frankincense and the myrrh burning in the braziers and the room would have been almost dark apart from skylights we know that the roof of the apadana had lots and lots of little apertures for the light so the sunlight would have come streaming into it like pinpoints you know like spotlights on the stage. And we know that the roof of the Apadana and the top of the pillars were all coloured. They were beautifully coloured. The closest thing I can ever get to that is when you have that amazing experience, when you go into a great Gothic cathedral and there's the stained glass up above and everything,

the whole eye goes up above you to this melange of colours high, high above you. But you walk into that space, you know, this darkness. And somewhere at the centre there, and you're standing on no doubt carpets that spread everywhere, somewhere at the centre in this darkness is the great king. And you're going to put yourself in front of him. You know, imagine coming from Ethiopia or from Thrace. You'd never have seen anything like this at all. This is the theatricality of kingship.

Something actually that the Greeks get right about the Persians is the idea of the mystique, the magic of monarchy. The Greeks get that because they've experienced it for themselves, I suppose. This is what these stone palaces are all about. And you see its infancy with Cyrus himself, and it just gets more and more developed. That's incredible. So it gets more and more developed alongside the actual site of Persepolis getting more and more developed too which is a lovely parallel. Now we could talk all about these places for hours I have no doubt Lloyd but let's move on to our final urban centre that we're going to be talking about. We're going to be going a bit further north and we're going to be going to the place of Ekbatana. Lloyd, take it away.

All right, Ekbatana. I really like modern day Hamadan. It's a really cool city. It's got one huge roundabout in the middle of it. And all the roads go off from there. And you can never get lost because every road brings you back to the big roundabout. So it's about a good five hours drive from Tehran into the west. What's difficult, because Ramadan is still very much a living city, it's very, very hard to pin down the archaeology of it. Much of the archaeology that's there, there is a large tell, but it's mainly Parthian and Sasanian. So unfortunately, we don't have the spectacle that we get at Persepolis or even at Susa. Nevertheless, it's still a fascinating site because there's a very fine museum there, which has in it many, many really top quality median and Achaemenid finds, including gold and silver tableware. So that's a good thing. But certainly when we're trying to look for

ancient Ecbatana, we just don't see it, you know. Now, Ctesias and some other Greeks talk about an Apadana being there. And it's certainly, I think it's absolutely feasible that there was, because it was, you know, a major centre on the royal route. So I can't see why they wouldn't be. Herodotus, of course, in his Median Logos, he gives us this long description about the city of Ecbatana, and he says that it had, I think he says it was seven walls which surrounded it, and each wall was a different color. So he says, you know, I can't remember, I'm paraphrasing here, but the outer wall was red, the next one was blue, the next one was green, and so forth. The third wall was bronze, the second wall was silver, and the final wall which went around the palace was gold. OK, so you can dig up every section of Ecbatana, but you'll never find that, of course, OK? It just didn't exist.

What is Herodotus doing? I think he's getting muddled up with actually what was a tented city. hearing and not quite getting are descriptions of tents, you know, of everywhere around what was an Apadana, what was once a columned hall, a ceremonial hall, and maybe a small palace there. But little more than that, and certainly we haven't found it. But it was an important centre. The great kings there are there regularly throughout the year. Of course, it's in very close proximity to where it all kicked off for Darius the Great when he took the throne. And also Darius III utilised the place at the end of Gaugamela. He went back to Epitana and managed to get troops back together again.

Alexander had to go there. So, you know, it wasn't a proper big place. It's a legitimate thing, but it comes as a sad disappointment when you go there now and you're just not seeing any of it any longer. However, to compensate, you can drive just 15 miles to the north of the city. And there are the beautiful site with lots of waterfalls. It's a really popular little tourist attraction for local Iranians. There are two magnificent old Persian inscriptions carved into the rock there, one just beneath the other. Today, in Persian, they're called ganjname, which means the books of the treasures. Because, of course, in times before we could read the inscriptions, it was thought that these were directions to gold and silver hordes somewhere.

What they actually are, are huge statements of authority. Basically, I built this place. I am king because of Hurumazda, first of all by Darius, and then Xerxes repeats his father almost verbatim down below as well. So there is something equivalent that you can get out of the place. But I think it's a hard work to try to envisage ancient Ecbatana. It's a great shame, but who knows? Things might still emerge. Well, as you say, the archaeology in that part of the world, we're learning more and more as the years go on.

So fingers crossed with that one too. Lloyd, this has been an incredible chat. As always, it's a pleasure to talk with you. Finally, your book coming out all about this is called? It's simply called Persians, The Age of the Great Kings. Fantastic. Lloyd, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. Trust me, any time. It's a great pleasure. It's always a joy talking to you. Thank you.