Persian Capital

Persian Capital

It was founded by King Darius I – Darius the Great – in the very heart of Persis, and it was to be the most glorious capital of all time – fifty thousand people from thirty-five different nations worked on it for fifteen years. Entire woods on Mount Lebanon were cut down, their trunks used for ceilings and doors while marble and other stone was quarried from throughout the empire, precious lapis lazuli was brought from the mines of Bactriana, gold was transported by camel from Nubia and India, precious stones from the Paropamisus Mountains and the deserts of Gedrosia, silver from Iberia and copper from Cyprus. Thousands of Syrian, Greek and Egyptian sculptors created the images that you now admire here on these walls and on the doors of the palace and the goldsmiths added decoration in precious metals and gemstones. The best weavers were called to make the carpets, the drapes and the tapestries that you see on the floors and on the walls. Persian and Indian painters worked on the frescoes. The Great King’s intention was that this city would constitute a harmonious, total expression of the civilization that made up his limitless empire.’

Callisthenes stopped speaking and let his gaze run silently over the death throes of the great capital – rare plants brought to the pairidaeza from remote provinces burning now like torches, the porticoes and the buildings all blackened with smoke. He looked on the roads full of soldiers drunk with looting and raping and all kinds of unspeakable excess, the fountains that continued to gurgle although they were now full of bodies, the blood-red water overflowing into the streets. The historian beheld the broken statues, the columns, the profaned sanctuaries; he turned to Eumenes and saw in his eyes the same expression of terror and confusion.

Remains of the Persian capital. Photo by Elena

This sublime palace, – he continued in the same voice, ‘was called the “Palace of the New Year” because the Great King came here to celebrate the first day of each year, on the morning of the summer solstice, so as to receive on his forehead the first ray of clear light that rose from the east, illuminating his countenance, and he reflected it, almost as though the King himself were a new sun.

Throughout the eve of that dawn, until morning, the priests’ prayers rose up, insistently, towards the stars, invoking light for the Great King, for he who was the living terrestrial symbol of Ahura Mazda. Everything here is a symbol, the entire city is a symbol and so are all the images and the reliefs we see around us in this building”.

We are burning a … symbol, – stammered Eumenes.

‘A symbol, and much more than that. The city was designed the day following a total eclipse of the sun that took place seventy years and six months ago: it was to be a monument to this people’s faith, the faith according to which the world would never again be the dominion of the powers of darkness. Look here, and you see the lion tearing into the bull, the light defeating the darkness, the light of their supreme god Ahura Mazda who for diem was incarnate in their King.

As dawn broke, while the palace was still in shadow, hundreds of delegations waited in religious silence until the light spread trough the halls of purple and gold, through the huge courtyards. Then began the grand procession of which Ctesias and other Greek and barbarian authors who were lucky enough to have witnessed it have written; many of the reliefs that adorn the terraces and the stairways depict this procession too.