The Palace of Darius at Susa: The Great Royal Residence of Achaemenid Persia

"This is a very beautiful book. It’s a large-scale book, translated from the original French. It was funded by the Institute of Iranian Studies. How they managed to fund it, I don’t know, because it sold originally for £30 and it is a rich, coffee-table, picture-heavy, colourful book. First of all, it has the visual appeal, which I love. But what is really magnificent about it is that it goes into detail about the archaeology, the art and architecture of just one site, the royal city of Susa. Susa was one of the main palatial centres of the Achaemenid Empire and it’s also one of the oldest cities on Earth, going back to at least 4000 BCE. This book offers a wonderful description, first of all, of the archaeological site and the layers and layers of civilization there. Then the author focuses on the palace itself. We get to see the layout of the palace, the wonderful Apadana, or throne hall, and the council and harem. Then there is the wonderful art that has survived from Susa, most particularly the colourful brick compositions showing immortals or royal guards in their costumes and magnificent beasts—bulls, lions and so forth. “There are big source problems, but not insurmountable ones” It’s a magnificent visual compendium to the Persian Empire. It really starts you off thinking about the Persian world visually and, for me at the moment, it’s an important book because the biblical book of Esther is set in the city of Susa. The book I’m going to write next is a commentary on the book of Esther, but looking at Esther from a Persian perspective. There’s great scholarship on Esther from the biblical studies field, but very few of them have any real understanding of Persian history or Persian culture. The book of Esther itself is a product of the 4th century BCE. It was written by somebody who knew a lot about the workings of the Persian court. My commentary will, essentially, bring in all the Persian material, just to show how au fait the author of Esther is with that. But I want to go a step further and do what’s called an ‘iconographic exegesis’. An idea that’s become really big in Germany and Switzerland over the last decade is that literature only takes us so far, but that there’s a wonderful world of iconography out there as well. A biblical scholar called Othmar Keel in the 1970s and 80s did this incredible commentary on the book of Psalms and the Song of Songs using the iconography of the ancient near East. I think Esther, which is a very visual book, lends itself to the same kind of process, of trying to look at it through as many visual sources as possible. For instance, when I’m talking about the beauty of Esther, described in Chapter 2 of the book, I’ll be drawing on images of Persian women and that kind of thing. This book really gives me a wonderful visualization, a way in to thinking about the colourful world of the Persian court in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. It was originally the work of Darius I, that’s Darius the Great. He was probably born in Susa and from that area. We know that his mother’s name was Irdabama and that’s definitely an Elamite or Susa name. The probability that he was born there is really emphasized by the fact that he glorifies the city. He built up these wonderful palaces and made a big play of building the city. We have one beautiful inscription from Susa dating to Darius’s reign, in which he talks about the building of the palace itself and that it was a labour of love. He talks about commissioning different people from different parts of the Empire to come and work on the palace: that people from Egypt brought gold and did the gold work and the ivory work; that the Babylonians were renowned for their bricks and they came and did the brick building; that the Assyrians transported the timber from Lebanon. There’s all this kind of rhetoric. He’s putting out this idea that the whole of the Empire is for his use. And he uses the wealth of the Empire to build a superstructure at Susa for him, as a monument to the belief that the Empire works in harmony and is better together, as it were. For the last year 40 years the British really haven’t had much of a look-in in Iran as far as archaeology is concerned. I’m the director of the ancient Iran project for the British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS) and, while we often get funding inquiries from scholars wanting to work in Iran, very, very few of them ever get visas or the permissions to dig. Other countries are far more successful. At the moment—for instance at Persepolis—the Italians are working with Iranian archaeologists at that amazing site. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . A lot of archaeological work is still being done within Iran, but not much by the British and Americans. It’s a great shame, but it’s a product of the politics of the day."