Ectabane

Ectabane

It took ten days’ march a long increasingly narrow valleys before they came into sight of the splendour of Ecbatana, surrounded by a crown of snow-capped mountains and a green valley. The upper edge of the walls and the ballements, decorated with blue tiles and with gold leaf, shone like a pendant on a queen’s forehead while the pinnacles and the spires of the palaces and the sanctuaries, all dressed in pure gold, glittered brightly.

Ectabane. Photo by Elena

French translation:

Dix jours de marche le long de vallées étroites furent nécessaires pour parvenir en vue d’Ectabane. Cette ville splendide était ceinte d’une couronne de montagnes enneigées et d’une vallée verdoyante. Le bord supérieur de la muraille et des crénelures, orné de céramiques bleues et de feuilles d’or, brillait comme un joyau sur le front d’une reine. Les créneaux et les flèches des palais et des sanctuaires étaient revêtus d’or pur.

Pasargadae

Pasargadae

The army started moving towards the end of spring and headed north, climbing up to the centre of the highlands with the desert on their right and the snow-covered Elam Mountains on their left. The travelled in four stages for a total of twenty parasangs and as evening fell they reached Pasargadae., the ancestral capital of Cyrus the Great, the founded of the Achaemenid dynasty. It was a small city, inhabited predominantly by shepherds and peasants but at its centre stood the first pairidaeza that had ever been built – the breathtaking grounds surrounding Cyrus’s old palace. A complex system of irrigation took water from a spring at the base of the hills and kept all the plants fresh and green – the grass, the roses, the cypresses and the tamarinds, the fragrant gorse, the yews and the junipers.

To one side, to the west, lay the tomb of the founder. It was extremely simple in form, like the quadrangular tent of skins with a double-sides sloping roof, typical of the nomads of the steppe the four-centuries-old ancestors of the Persians.

Antics. Photo by Elena

French translation:

L’armée s’ébranla à la fin du printemps et se dirigea vers le nord, montant vers le centre du haut plateau, le désert à main droite et les mont enneigés de l’Élam à main gauche. Elle parcourut vingt parasanges en quatre étapes et, à la tombée de soir, atteignit Pasargades, la capitale ancestrale de Cyrus le Grand, le fondateur de la dynastie achémédie. C’était une petite ville de bergers et de paysans, qui renfermait en son sein le premier pairidaeza qu’o eût jamais réalisé : un merveilleux par, qui s’étendait autour du vieux palais de Cyrus. Un système d’irrigation très compliqué, qui puisait de l’eau à une source située au pied des collines, arrosait la pelouse verdoyante, les buissons de roses, les cyprès et les tamaris, les genêts parfumés, les bouillons-blancs et les genévriers. À côté, vers l’ouest, se dressait la tombe du fondateur, majestueuse et solitaire.

Sa forme dépouillée et simple, évoquait la tente quadrangulaire à deux versants des nomades de la steppe d’où les Perses étaient venus quatre siècles plus tôt.

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.

Babylon

Babylon

The welcome Babylon produced for the young conqueror was like something out of a fantastic tale. For ten stadia along the road leading to the city thousands of youngsters – girls and boys – had lined up and were throwing flowers before Alexander’s horse. The majestic Ishtar gate, one hundred feet high and finished in enamelled tiles carrying figures of dragons and winged bulls, seemed to loom more and more as the King advanced with his companions and followed by his army in formation, his soldiers and his officers all dressed in their finest armor.

The inhabitants of the city had taken up position on the ramparts of the towers flanking the gate and along the gigantic walls – wide enough to allow the passage of two four-horse chariots side by side. They were anxious to see the new King who had defeated the Persians three times in less than two years and had forced many heavily fortified cities to surrender.

The priests and the dignitaries greeted Alexander and accompanied him to offer a sacrifice to the god Marduk whose shrine was at the top of the Esagila, the great stepped temple that stood towering over the wide sacred area. Before the immense crowd gathered in the great courtyard, Alexander, together with his companions and his generals, climbed the steps which led from me terrace to another right up to the sanctuary on the summit which housed the god’s bed of gold in this his earthly dwelling.

Bablyon destroyed. Photo by Elena

From up there the King was able to look upon and absorb the amazing spectacle of the majestic metropolis. Babylon extended before him at his feet with all its marvels, with its endless walls, the triple bulwark that protected the royal palace and the ‘summer palace’ located in the northern part of the city. He could see the smoke from the burning incense as it rose from the more than one thousand sanctuaries in the huge urban area – the wide, straight roads that met one another at right angles and all the main arteries, paved in terracotta tiles all bound together with asphalt. Each of the roads began and terminated with one of the twenty-five gates that provided access through the walls, with their colossal doors dressed in bronze, silver, and gold.

The city was split in two by the River Euphrates, shining like a ribbon of gold extending from one side of the walls to the other, flanked by gardens and exotic trees of all kinds in which flocks of multicolored birds were roosting.

Beyond the river, connected to the western part of the city by massive stonework bridges, the royal palaces stood out because of their finish in polychrome enamel tiles, resplendent in the sun with images of fantastical creatures, storybook landscapes, scenes from the ancient mythology of the Land of the Two Rivers.

Not far from the royal palace stood the greatest structure in the entire city, considered to be one of the most impressive wonders in the known world – the Hanging Gardens.

The typically Persian concept of the pairidaeza had taken shape here in a completely flat location whose climate was unsuitable for a large tree-filled park. Everything here was artificial, created with notable effort and ingenuity by the hand of man. The priests explained to Alexander that according to the story of the gardens’ origin, a young Elamite queen, having arrived in Babylon as bride to King Nebuchadnezzar, suffered so much from homesickness for the wooded mountains of her homeland that the King gave orders for an artificial mountain to be created and covered with a shady wood and with the most beautiful flowers. That was why the architects had created a series of platforms, one above the other, reducing in size as they increased in height. Each was supported by hundreds of stonework pillars carefully covered in asphalt and linked by curved vaults, and the huge platforms which carried all the soil necessary to allow the bushes and the high trees to root and flourish were also asphalted. Many birds, even the high species, started nesting in the trees and bushes while exotic species, such as peacocks and pheasants, were brought from the Caucasus and far off India. Fountains of all types were created with ingenious machines bringing the water from the Euphrates, which flowed past at the bottom of the wonder.

From the outside it looked like a hill covered with a flourishing wood, but here and there were signs of man’s intervention -terraces and parapets hidden away among the climbing and trailing plants, all of them rich in flowers and fruits.

It moved Alexander to think that such a wonder had been ordered by a great king to ease the melancholy of his queen, a young woman born in the high, woody lands of Elam, and he thought of Barsine who slept now for ever on her ‘tower of silence’ in the arid desert of Gaugamela.

‘Gods above!’ he murmured as he looked around him. ‘How many wonders there are here!’ and his friends too, Ptolemy and Perdiccas, Leonnatus and Philotas, Lysimachus and Eumenes, Seleucus and Craterus, all looked in amazement at the city which for millennia had been considered the heart of the world and God’s Gate’, as its very name in the local language – Bab-El -actually meant. Vast green spaces opened up between the houses and the buildings, orchards and gardens with all sorts of fruit, and out on the river there were many boats moving agilely through the water. Some of these, made of bundles of reeds and driven by .irge square sails, came from the estuary areas where the oldest ernes of Mesopotamian myth were located: Ur, Kish, Lagash. Oners, round in shape, like large baskets and covered with tanned sens, came from the north and brought with them the fruits of those far off lands – produce from the green fields of Armenia, rich in wildfowl, animal skins, wood and precious stones.

The sky, the water and the earth all contributed towards the creation of a universe of harmonious perfection within the great city walls with their imposing crown of towers. Yet Alexander continued to look around in search of another marvel he had heard tale of since his childhood. Indeed, his teacher, Leonidas, had been the first to mention the ‘Tower of Babel’, a mountain of stone and asphalt some three hundred feet high and as wide as that at its base. All the peoples of the world were said to have worked on its construction.

The priest pointed to a huge area that was completely abandoned and covered in weeds, “That’s is where the sacred Etermenanki stood, the tower that touched the sky, destroyed by the Persians in their fury when the city rebelled, at the time of King Xerxes.

Ancient Walls. Photo by Elena.

CSI Las Vegas

CSI Las Vegas

Nick, who was taking notes, asked, Where do you live, Ms. Denard?

East end of Charleston Boulevard. There are some houses at the foot of the mountains…

“Yes,” Catherine said, thinking, Nice digs for a secretary. “I know those houses. Very nice.”

Two prowl cars blotched the road on either side of the crime scene. The CSIs had already passed another patrol car at Craig road, the first major intersection south of here, where an officer was diverting all northbound traffic west onto Craig. Grissom knew another officer would be stationed to the north at the mile-market 58 interchange on Interstate 15, an officer whose job would be to divert the few cars heading toward Las Vegas Boulevard back onto the freeway and to the Craig Road exit to the south.

Her car, a three-year-old Lexus, had been found in the driveway of her townhouse within a gated community near the intersection of Green Valley and Wigwam Parkways…. Given the arid nature of Vegas, Grisson hadn’t been that surprised that no other prints had been found. Fingerprints exposed to the weather didn’t las long here; and even those protected by being inside the the car and under a carport didn’t have a terribly long lifespan.

Witness of a crime. Photo by Elena

In the corridor, they informed Austin and Randle of their intention, loaded up their gear and a small caravan took off for Crown Vista Drive: CSI Tahoe in front, then Randle and Austin in the lawyer’s Jaguar, finally O’Riley’s Taurus. Nick caught the Beltway and followed it around to Flamingo, taking that to Fort Apache Drive. From there the twisty streets of the Lakes development swooped around, until the Tahoe drew up in formt of 9407 Crown Vista Drive.

Nick parked, Austin’s Jag pulling up into the driveway of a three-car garage, itself bigger than the average house in Vegas.

Within half an hour, Catherine and Nick – with O’Riley chaperoning – were on the front porch of a one-storey house in a quiet neighbourhood on Gunderson Boulevard.

The older home, with its white and gray siding, tall trees sprouting from a lush, trim lawn, could hardly compare with Randle’s Lakes area residence, but it had a quiet, homey appeal. In the driveway outside a one-car garage, a black Lincoln Continental seemed slightly incongruous next to the modest but well-kept home.

The address was way up north, Cotton Gum Court, above Craig and off Lone Mountain Road and Spruce Oak Drive. From the Strip, even in relatively light midmorning traffic, the trip took the better part of an hour and, when they finally pulled up to the house, the distinct signs of nobody-home awaited them,

The two-story stucco with two-car garge had one of those new xeriscape yards.

Situated on Lake Las Vegas, a gated community for the truly wealthy, the plus digs of Mayopr and Mrs. Harrison were just down the road from the multimillion-dollar estate of pop singer Celine Dion. … The rambling castle-like brick structure would have look out of place in any other part of the city; here it was just one more grandiose homemaker statement. Hell, for this area, Warrick thought, the place was downright downscale, – there wasn’t even a helipad! Five white pillars held up a widow’s walk between the thow main sections of the many-windowed house, which was seventy-five hundred square feet, easy. Four or five bedrooms, Warrick would bet, and more bathrooms than a small hotel.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Body of Evidence. Max Allan Collins Pocket Star books, 2003.