{"it":{"id":"MES-006","kind":"site","sub":"Mesopotamia and Iran","name":"Persepolis","place":"Iran; Achaemenid Empire; Macedonian Empire","lat":29.935,"lon":52.89,"date":"Persepolis was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550–330 BC).","mat":"limestone;marble","nfacts":4,"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"Persepolis, ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire in Iran, stands on a stone terrace of about 125,000 m², partly built up and partly cut from the mountain. On its stairways, carved delegations from across the empire still file forward with gifts for the king.","why":"The Persepolis tablets let us read the economics behind a monument, not just its propaganda.","src":[372],"nsrc":2,"yt":"Plan or drunken accident?","rel":["MES-005"],"hook":"Persepolis's own clay tablets record rations paid out to workers and official travellers."},"S":{"372":["Wikipedia: Persepolis","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis"]},"rec":{"id":"MES-006","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"The site includes a","a":"area","v":"125000","u":"m2","o":"The site includes a 125,000 m2 terrace, partly artificially constructed and partly cut out of a mountain, with its east side leaning on Rahmat Mountain.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Persepolis&oldid=1382427650","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1382427650 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2041"},{"f":"dated to the Achaemenid Period measures 40 by","a":"plan dimension (pair)","v":"30","u":"meters","o":"The gate, which has been dated to the Achaemenid Period, measures 40 by 30 meters and features glazed brick decoration produced in the same manner and featuring the same motifs as the glazed bricks used to adorn the Ishtar gate and the rest of the ceremonial procession in Babylon.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Persepolis&oldid=1382427650","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1382427650 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2042"},{"f":"grand hall that was a square of approximately","a":"length","v":"25","u":"m","o":"The Gate of All Nations, referring to subjects of the empire, consisted of a grand hall that was a square of approximately 25 m in length, with four columns and its entrance on the Western Wall.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Persepolis&oldid=1382427650","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1382427650 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2043"},{"f":"covers an area of 2550 square meters 40","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"55","u":"meters","o":"It covers an area of 2550 square meters (40*55 meters).","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Persepolis&oldid=1382427650","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1382427650 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2044"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"Grey limestone was the main building material used at Persepolis.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Persepolis&oldid=1382427650"},{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"All are constructed of dark-grey marble.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Persepolis&oldid=1382427650"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"Persepolis was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550–330 BC).","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/114","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"29.935","lon":"52.89","src":"Wikidata P625 + UNESCO WHC list XML (agree ≤0.05°)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0004 deg (~0.04 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/95531795"},"src":[{"id":"S0364","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Persepolis&oldid=1382427650"},{"id":"S0573","t":"Wikipedia: Persepolis","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis"},{"id":"VMES-006-3","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Persepolis","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/114/"},{"id":"VMES-006-4","t":"Encyclopaedia Iranica: Persepolis Administrative Archives i. Persepolis Fortification Archive","u":"https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/persepolis-admin-archive/persepolis-administrative-archives-i-persepolis-fortification-archive/"},{"id":null,"t":"Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander, trans. E. J. Chinnock (London, 1884), Book III, ch. 18. Project Gutenberg.","u":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46976"},{"id":null,"t":"Plutarch, Life of Alexander, in Plutarch’s Lives, trans. John Dryden, rev. A. H. Clough. Project Gutenberg.","u":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/674"},{"id":null,"t":"George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. II (London, 1892), ch. on Persepolis. Internet Archive.","u":"https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.69513"}],"sum":"Among the tens of thousands of clay tablets dug out of a wall at Persepolis, one is written in Greek letters. It says almost nothing: an amount of wine, and the name of a month. Somewhere in the heart of the Persian Empire, around 2,500 years ago, a clerk who could write Greek noted down a delivery and filed it with everyone else's. It was never meant to be read by anyone but the next official down the line. That is exactly why it matters.\n\nPersepolis, on the plain of Marvdasht in Fars province, Iran, ringed by the southern Zagros Mountains, was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the dynasty that ruled from about 550 to 330 BC. Its rulers called themselves kings of kings. UNESCO says Darius I founded the city in 518 BC on \"an immense half-artificial, half-natural terrace,\" partly built up and partly cut from the mountain behind it. The platform covers about 125,000 square metres. On it stood ceremonial palaces, residential quarters, a treasury and a chain of fortifications. Darius began the work, and his successors Xerxes and Artaxerxes I carried it on. The main building stone was grey limestone, and some columns stood about 20 metres tall.\n\nThe place was planned down to its plumbing. The historian Alireza Shapur Shahbazi, writing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, describes channels that brought drinking water from a spring and others that led rainwater into a moat, and a well 26 metres deep cut into the rock of the hill. The doorways and stairs were carved with courtiers and guards. Some of the carved figures once wore real jewellery of metal and stone, set into the sculpture.\n\nThe most famous carvings line the Apadana stairway. Twenty-three delegations, each in its own national dress and separated by cypress trees, climb toward the king with gifts, every group led by a Persian or Median usher. In UNESCO's words, carved dignitaries and tribute bearers parade there endlessly. It is a picture of a world arriving to pay respect, drawn by the people who received it.\n\nKings also edited that picture. Shahbazi writes that Artaxerxes I removed the \"Audience Reliefs,\" which showed his father Xerxes with the crown prince Darius, and stored them in the Treasury, where the excavator Erich Schmidt later found them. Xerxes had been murdered in 466 BC, allegedly by his son. Whether the panels were put away out of grief, politics or simple housekeeping, the stone does not say. But a new king choosing which faces stay on the wall is the oldest kind of statecraft.\n\nThe palace did not last. In 330 BC Persepolis was \"looted and burnt by Alexander of Macedon,\" as Shahbazi puts it, and the stone of one palace still shows the scorching. Even ancient writers disagreed about why. Arrian says Alexander burned it on purpose, against the advice of his general Parmenio, who pointed out that it was now Alexander's own property. Alexander answered that he wanted revenge for the Persian invasion of Greece, when the Persians \"razed Athens to the ground and burnt down the temples.\" Arrian's own verdict was that Alexander did not act \"with prudence.\" Plutarch tells a wilder story: at a drinking party, the Athenian courtesan Thais urged the king on, and Alexander led the way \"with a lighted torch in his hand.\" Plutarch admits that others called it deliberate, but says \"all agree that he soon repented of it.\" Policy or drunken impulse, the looters had already stripped the jewels from the reliefs \"before setting fire to the structures.\"\n\nWhat survived the fire best was the clay. In March 1933 Ernst Herzfeld, digging for the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, found tablets packed into two small rooms of a bastion in the fortification wall. He estimated the find at about 30,000 or more tablets and fragments. In 1935 the Iranian authorities lent them to the Oriental Institute for study.\n\nThey are the empire's paperwork. About 70 percent are in Elamite, and they run from April 509 BC to the spring of 493 BC, the middle of Darius's reign. They track the intake, storage and handing out of crops, livestock, flour, beer, wine, oil and meat. According to the Iranica entry by Matthew Stolper and colleagues, about three quarters of one main type record outlays: rations for official travellers, rations for workers, fodder for animals, payments to officials, and \"sacrifices to various deities.\" The system fed \"livestock, workers, craftsmen, administrators, travelers, religious personnel, courtiers, and gods.\"\n\nThat is the mainstream picture, and it is a powerful one. Persepolis was not only a stage set for royal theatre. It was a working centre with storerooms, accountants and a payroll. The archive also holds oddities beyond the Greek wine note: one text in Old Persian, a Babylonian legal document recording the purchase of a slave, and some tablets stamped with Greek and Persian coins in place of seals. Richard Hallock and later scholars have published 2,284 Elamite texts, and 2,550 more are widely cited from Hallock's drafts. The archive is still not fully published.\n\nThen there is the question of what the terrace was for. Herzfeld, Ghirshman, Porada and others argued that it was built for Nowruz, the Persian New Year, and read the procession of delegations as the empire arriving to celebrate. Carl Nylander and Peter Calmeyer replied that there is no evidence Nowruz was celebrated in Achaemenid times at all. Shahbazi notes that Darius himself said he was building a stronghold, yet he still judged the festival case one that \"cannot be taken lightly.\" Other proposals range from a royal showpiece to an administrative centre to an observatory for keeping the calendar.\n\nLater Persians forgot the old name, Parsa, entirely. They credited the ruins to Jamshid, a legendary king served by demons who built him palaces of stone, and the site is still called Takht-e Jamshid, the Throne of Jamshid. European visitors guessed too. George Curzon listed theories that made the ruins the work of Lamech, or the result of \"volcanic eruption,\" and one writer dated them to 3209 BC. Only the inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes, and the dated tablets, closed those guesses.\n\nSome questions remain open even now. Stolper and his colleagues call the relationship between the Elamite tablets, the Aramaic ones and those bearing only seal impressions \"an unsettled issue.\" Were they parallel records, or parts of a single system nobody has yet reconstructed? The labour behind the terrace is only partly visible. The archive shows workers drawing rations year after year, on the record, but it does not explain everything about how the work was organised. And in time a whole people forgot who built the place and handed it to demons.\n\nThe kings carved their glory in stone, and the stone burned. The storekeepers pressed their notes into clay, and the clay outlived the palace. When an empire's own memory can fail like that, and its greatest building is handed over to legend, how much older knowledge might have been lost the same way, surviving only where some clerk happened to write it down?","qs":["Persepolis's own tablets record rations paid to workers. Why do so many still picture ancient monuments as built by slaves?","What can a ration slip tell us that a carved relief cannot?","Why would an empire keep such careful records?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/2018-09-21_Iran%2C_Persepolis%2C_Tachara_%28from_the_southeast%29.jpg/1280px-2018-09-21_Iran%2C_Persepolis%2C_Tachara_%28from_the_southeast%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2018-09-21_Iran,_Persepolis,_Tachara_(from_the_southeast).jpg","title":"2018-09-21 Iran, Persepolis, Tachara (from the southeast).jpg","lic":"CC BY 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0","by":"Laurens R. Krol","cap":"This is a photo of a monument in Iran identified by the ID","alt":"Persepolis"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/030614-Perspolice-IMG_1273-2.jpg/1280px-030614-Perspolice-IMG_1273-2.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:030614-Perspolice-IMG_1273-2.jpg","title":"030614-Perspolice-IMG 1273-2.jpg","lic":"CC BY 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0","by":"Safa.daneshvar","cap":"Perspolice, Fars Province, Iran 030614 (September 4, 2024) Photo by: Safa Daneshvar"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/2025_Armenian_Philharmonic_Orchestra_Performs_in_Persepolis_26_Mehr.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2025_Armenian_Philharmonic_Orchestra_Performs_in_Persepolis_26_Mehr.jpg","title":"2025 Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra Performs in Persepolis 26 Mehr.jpg","lic":"CC BY 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0","by":"امین فائضی","cap":"Translation of original description: The Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra performed at the Persepolis World Complex and in the presence of the people of Fars on ","alt":"Translation of original description: The Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra performed at the Persepolis World Complex and in the presence of the people of Fars on"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Achaemenid_King_vs_Lion.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Achaemenid_King_vs_Lion.jpg","title":"Achaemenid King vs Lion.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"M.samei","cap":"نگاره سنگی تقابل شهریار (شاه هخامنشی) و شیر در یکی از ورودی های تخت جمشید","alt":"Persepolis"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Achamanid-Woman-Statue-Persia-Persepolis.jpg/1280px-Achamanid-Woman-Statue-Persia-Persepolis.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Achamanid-Woman-Statue-Persia-Persepolis.jpg","title":"Achamanid-Woman-Statue-Persia-Persepolis.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Arashk rp2","cap":"مجسمه زن هخامنشی در موزه ایران باستان","alt":"Persepolis"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"515 BC","h":"Date of the oldest remains at Persepolis","s":[114]},{"v":"550 BC","h":"Persepolis was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550–330 BC)","s":[114]},{"v":"Limestone, marble","h":"Made of","s":[114]}],"hs":{"114":["Wikipedia: Persepolis (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/MES-006.webp","w":1280,"h":848,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/2018-09-21_Iran%2C_Persepolis%2C_Tachara_%28from_the_southeast%29.jpg/1280px-2018-09-21_Iran%2C_Persepolis%2C_Tachara_%28from_the_southeast%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}