Persepolis

In about 518 BCE Darius the Great chose a plain at the foot of the Kuh-e Rahmat in Fars to build a new ceremonial capital for the empire his cousin Cyrus had founded. Persepolis was never the administrative centre — that work was done at Susa, Ecbatana and Babylon — but it was the symbolic heart, the stage on which the Achaemenid theatre of empire was performed each spring at Nowruz.

The terrace alone is 125,000 square metres, raised 12–18 metres above the plain and faced in dressed limestone blocks fitted without mortar. Construction continued for 150 years under Xerxes I and Artaxerxes I, ending only with the empire itself.

"And Ahuramazda was of such a mind, together with all the other gods, that this fortress should be built. And I built it. And I built it secure and beautiful and adequate, just as I was intending to."

The eastern staircase of the Apadana carries the most famous image surviving from antiquity: a procession of delegates from every corner of the empire, each in their national dress, bringing tribute to the Great King at Nowruz. Twenty-three delegations are identified — Medes with their round caps, Elamites with lions, Bactrians with two-humped camels, Ethiopians with okapi and elephant tusk, Lydians with bowls of gold, Indians with axes and gold dust.

In January 330 BCE Alexander of Macedon captured Persepolis after defeating Darius III at Gaugamela. He stayed four months. Then, in May, the palace burned. Greek sources disagree on whether the fire was a calculated political statement closing the Persian wars or, as Plutarch tells it, the result of a drunken party at which the Athenian courtesan Thaïs threw the first torch.

Excavations have confirmed the fire: the cedar beams of the Hundred Columns Hall collapsed and baked the floor red. Crucially, the inferno also baked the unfired clay tablets of the Fortification Archive — the accident that preserved 30,000 administrative records of the empire.

Persepolis was never quite lost — Iranian shahs, European travellers and Safavid pilgrims left graffiti on its columns for centuries. Real excavation began with Herzfeld in 1931 and Schmidt's Chicago team in the 1930s. In 1979 it was among the first sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, where it stands today as the canonical monument of pre-Islamic Iran.