Pasargadae

On the high plain called Dasht-e Morghāb, in the north of the ancient highland the Persians called Cyrus's own (Pārsa, Persis), a scatter of pale limestone ruins stands among the fields and the willows of the River Pulvar. This is Pasargadae, the first capital of the Achaemenid house and the resting place of its founder. It lies about forty kilometres in a straight line to the north-east of Darius's later terrace at Persepolis; the plain sits some 1,900 metres above the sea, cool and well-watered, and the old highway ran to it up the direct course of the Pulvar through the gorge of the Tang-e Bolāghi. Strabo preserved the reason Cyrus honoured the place above all others: it was here, tradition held, that he had beaten Astyages the Mede in his last battle, 'transferred to himself the empire of Asia, founded a city, and constructed a palace as a memorial to his victory' (Strabo 15.3.8).^[5] Whatever the exact truth of that battle-site, Pasargadae is the ground on which the empire's memory of its own beginning was fixed.

The controlling modern description of the site is the Encyclopaedia Iranica article of David Stronach and Hilary Gopnik (Stronach being the archaeologist who dug the site for the British Institute of Persian Studies between 1961 and 1963 and whose monograph Pasargadae (1978) remains the standard report), and the reading here follows it. This entry keeps to the Achaemenid monuments: the name, the palace park and its garden, the sacred precinct, the tower, and the tomb; and it lets the tomb of Cyrus, the one building the ancient world itself described, carry the weight.

The name and the plain

The Greeks knew the place as Pasargadai, and it is under a form of that name that it enters the record. Herodotus (1.125) gives Pasargadae not as a place but as the name of the most renowned of the Persian tribes, the one from which the royal Achaemenid clan sprang; he does not name it as a city, so whether the tribal name and the place-name are truly one has been argued back and forth. A firmer anchor came from the clay: shortly before finishing his edition of the Elamite Persepolis Fortification tablets, R. T. Hallock recognised that the toponym Batrakataš, which appears on seven of the tablets (dated 497–491 BCE) in connection with a royal treasury and royal stores, is very probably the Elamite form of the name of Cyrus's capital (Hallock 1969, via Stronach & Gopnik).^[10] A long scholarly habit supposed the Iranian name had originally begun Parsa- and been transformed by metathesis; Stronach reports the objection of Martin Schwartz that the plainly recognisable Parsa would hardly have been garbled into something else, and that both the Elamite name and the weight of the classical testimony tell against the supposed change. The name that stuck is the Greek one.

One point of the name-history matters for the whole site. The belief that Cyrus's capital was first called Parsa founders, Stronach notes, on the record of Darius's own inscriptions: it was Darius who chose to stamp the explicitly Persian character on his patrimony, renaming the old highland (formerly Anshan) as Pārsa and, above all, giving that same name to his new capital, Persepolis. The 'Persian-ness' that later flowed through Persepolis was Darius's programme, laid over a foundation Cyrus had built under other names.

The palace park and Gate R

The ceremonial heart of Pasargadae lies about a kilometre north of the tomb, in a broad flat tract that the excavations have shown to have been laid out as a series of contiguous gardens. Older scholarship read the scatter of buildings as the haphazard camp of a first nomad settlement; it is now clear, Stronach writes, that the gardens served to bind the uniformly oriented structures (Gate R, Palace P, Palace S) into a single planned whole. The basic building unit was the columned hall, a form long known in western Persia; but its expression at Pasargadae was wholly new, and it drew on the superb stone-working (the finely jointed ashlar, the anathyrosis joints, the dovetailed iron-and-lead clamps) that had recently evolved in Lydia and Ionia, the very regions Cyrus had conquered around 547 BCE. From about 540 onward the finished stone platform, staircase, doorway and column became the hallmark of Achaemenid architecture, and they begin here.

Gate R, at the eastern edge of the precinct, is the earliest known free-standing gatehouse (propylaeum) in the world, and it may well have been the model for the famous Gate of Xerxes at Persepolis.^[8] Its great doorways were flanked by colossal winged bulls copied from the lamassu that had guarded Assyrian palace gates; those are gone but for fragments of carved hair and a piece of a crown. What survives, almost miraculously, is a carved winged figure three metres high on one jamb of a side doorway, a man's figure with four wings, wearing a composite dress that gathers up the conquered world: a Syro-Phoenician Egyptianising ḥmḥm crown, an Elamite robe with an Ionian rosette border, worked within the Assyrian tradition of the winged genius. Stronach reads it not as a copy of any one model but as a deliberate fusion of the visual languages of the newly conquered lands, made to conjure the protective power of the new empire itself. (For the wider argument over what such a winged ensign signifies, see the winged symbol.) The Gate's very concept, a monumental doorway divorced from any wall, was without precedent; by de-emphasising defence for ceremony, Stronach suggests, Cyrus may have meant to display an empire that had little need of static walls and a ruler who sought to welcome rather than exclude the peoples of his dominions.

The two palaces

Palace S (Herzfeld's 'palace with the column', for the one shaft that long stood there) was the principal public hall, a central columned room with porticoes 'in antis' (each ended by a stone pier, another Ionian borrowing) opening to the gardens; its black-stone animal capitals took the form of lions, bulls and a unique horse, the sculptors still experimenting with a motif that would become an Achaemenid leitmotif. Palace P, more intimate, with a low roof over many columns, held the reliefs that matter most for the dynasty's memory of itself: a king in a long pleated robe inlaid with gold, an attendant behind him, and on the folds of the robe a trilingual label naming the figure as Cyrus. But the cut of the pleats belongs to the reign of Darius, not Cyrus, and every current sign, Stronach argues, is that Palace P (begun under Cyrus, halted at his sudden death) was completed by Darius, who enriched these reliefs with gold and inscribed Cyrus's name here as part of a deliberate effort to knit himself to the founder's heritage.

The garden: the first paradise

Before the main façade of Palace P ran a garden, and enough of it survives in stone to make Pasargadae a place of the first importance in the history of gardens. A series of carved stone water-channels and basins defined the greater part of two adjoining rectangles laid out in front of the palace (Stronach 1978; 1994). The palace's paved throne-portico, a king's retreat, carried a centrally placed throne-base, sited so that an unbroken vista ran down the middle of the planted ground; from it the king could hold court while looking out over the green expanse of his estate. That central opening divided the garden into four quarters, and here Stronach makes his celebrated, carefully hedged claim: if the reconstruction is right, the Pasargadae garden documents 'the first known occurrence of the čahārbāgh or fourfold garden', the very form that went on to become a characteristic mark of later garden design, in Iran and far beyond it (Stronach 1994).^[9]

Two cautions are owed, and the compendium keeps them. First, the fourfold reading is a reconstruction from the axis, not a fully excavated cross-plan: what the channels physically define is two adjoining rectangles, and the quadripartite division follows from the central throne-vista and, perhaps, from Cyrus's Mesopotamian-derived title 'king of the four quarters', a suggestive fit, not a proof. Second, the fully formalised čahārbāgh as a named and canonical type is a later development (Sasanian and Islamic); Cyrus's designers made the thing, or its beginning, long before the name existed. With those cautions, the wonder holds: the walled watered pleasure-park (in Old Iranian a pairidaēza, 'a walled place', the word the Greeks took as parádeisos and Europe took as paradise) is a Persian invention, and its earliest surviving example is the ground Cyrus watered here. Xenophon, a century and more later, still caught the ideal exactly: the Great King, he wrote,

"Nowhere among the various countries which he inhabits or visits does he fail to make it his first care that there shall be orchards and gardens, parks and 'paradises,' as they are called, full of all fair and noble products which the earth brings forth; and within these chiefly he spends his days, when the season of the year permits." (Xenophon, Oeconomicus 4, trans. Dakyns)^[4]

That the Pasargadae garden was tended down the whole life of the empire is shown by a small human detail: a cache of exquisite jewellery and worked precious metal, hidden in a water-jar beside one of the garden's pavilions in the last days of the empire, was found in the excavations: someone's treasure, buried in the paradise as the Macedonians came.

The sacred precinct: the plinths and the Zendān

At the northern edge of the site stand two stone plinths, some nine metres apart, over two metres high, of white limestone rising from black borders. The southern of the two, reached by a monolithic flight of eight steps, has been convincingly read as a platform from which the king could worship before an elevated fire-altar standing on its fellow, exactly the tableau carved a generation later over Darius's tomb, where the king stands raised on a stepped plinth, hand lifted before the flames (see Naqsh-e Rostam). Fragments of stepped stone altars have been found elsewhere on the site. This close correspondence between the Pasargadae plinths and the fire-rite shown at Naqsh-e Rostam is, Stronach notes, one of the few hard archaeological signs of religious continuity between the reigns of Cyrus and Darius, the same open-air worship at height that the outside sources describe for the Persians.

Not far north of the palaces stands a fourteen-metre stone tower, known locally as the Zendān-e Soleymān, 'the Prison of Solomon', still boasting an almost intact entrance face. Built of finely cut white limestone broken by three rows of blind windows in dark stone, it held a single small chamber raised above nearly eight metres of solid masonry, reached only by a monumental external stair to a high doorway. Its shallow patterned recesses are otherwise found only on one other building in the world, the Kaʿba-ye Zartošt at Naqsh-e Rostam, which is an almost exact copy of it. What the twin towers were for has been argued for a century: fire-temples, tombs, treasuries, or investiture towers are all in play (Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1983; Stronach). Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg proposed to reconcile the readings by making the towers the setting for the critical initiation rites at the opening of each reign, so that, in a ritual sense, they might have served all of these functions at once.^[11] The compendium leaves the tower's purpose an honestly open question, as its twin's is left open in the Naqsh-e Rostam entry.

The tomb of Cyrus

A kilometre south of the palaces, alone on the plain, stands the one monument of Pasargadae that the ancient world itself described: the tomb of Cyrus. It is built in massive ashlar in two clean elements: a stepped plinth of six receding tiers (the lower three tall, the upper three lower) and, upon it, a small gabled tomb-chamber with a steeply pitched stone roof, the whole once reaching almost eleven metres. Its lines are austere and its upward thrust deliberate; the few decorative details, at the doorway and the pediment, are Lydo-Ionian in origin (the splayed lintel, the double-curved cyma reversa moulding), so that the ornament looks west even as the total design looks like nothing else on earth. The gabled chamber descends from western Anatolian tomb-houses, but those were buried under mounds; the free-standing plinth has no good funerary parallel but the uncertain 'pyramid tomb' at Sardis, and may owe something in concept to the Mesopotamian ziggurat. No single source explains it. Whatever its parts, Stronach writes, the monument 'continues to convey a compelling sense of integrity and sanctity.'

The Greeks who came with Alexander read and reported the tomb's epitaph, and two versions reached us. The shorter, from Onesicritus, is terse to the point of bleakness:

"Here I lie, Cyrus, king of kings." (the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae, the version Onesicritus reports; Strabo 15.3.7, trans. Hamilton & Falconer)^[2]

The fuller version, from Aristobulus, who was charged by Alexander with the tomb's care, is the one that has echoed down the centuries, the founder of the world's empire asking a stranger only not to begrudge him his grave:

"O man, I am Cyrus, son of Cambyses, who founded the empire of the Persians, and was king of Asia. Do not therefore grudge me this monument." (the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae, reported by Arrian, Anabasis 6.29, trans. Chinnock)^[3]

Alexander is the tomb's second protagonist. When he came to Pasargadae late in his eastern campaign he found the grave had been broken into and plundered (the golden coffin and its furnishings gone, the body disturbed), and he ordered Aristobulus to make it good and to punish the guardians, though nothing was got from them (Arrian 6.29).^[6] The great stone platform of the Tall-e Takht nearby held the storehouse of Pasargadae that had been surrendered to Alexander intact in 330 (Arrian 3.18.10), and the site kept a treasury under Greek control for decades after. The tomb long outlived the memory of the man: to the people of Fars from the Middle Ages onward it was the tomb of the Mother of Solomon (qabr-e mādar-e Soleymān), an object of women's devotion, and it is under that name that the Venetian Giosafat Barbaro described it in 1474 and generations of European travellers drew it. Only in the nineteenth century (James Morier first floating the idea, Robert Ker Porter pressing it after Grotefend read the name of Cyrus in the site's inscriptions) was the 'Mother of Solomon' recognised as Cyrus, and the identity of Pasargadae itself established beyond reasonable doubt by 1908.

The inscriptions, and who cut them

Three short trilingual texts (Old Persian, Elamite, Akkadian) are attached to the monuments, known by the sigla CMa, CMb, CMc; and their dating has been one of the sharper arguments in Achaemenid studies. The CMa text, once repeated at key points in Gate R, Palace S and Palace P, reads with a stark brevity:

"I am Cyrus, the king, an Achaemenid." (the Pasargadae inscription CMa, Old Persian; trans. after Kent)^[1]

For most of a century this was read as Cyrus's own laconic foundation inscription. Stronach's own case, built through the 1970s and 80s, is that it is not. The decisive turn was the recognition that the Old Persian cuneiform script was itself an invention of the early reign of Darius, most probably around 519 BCE: Darius states in the Elamite version of the Behistun inscription (§70) that the text was also written 'in Aryan' (Old Persian) 'which formerly was not', and the order in which the Behistun texts were cut confirms it. If Old Persian did not exist before Darius, an Old Persian CMa could not have been carved by Cyrus. The internal evidence agrees: the bare title 'king' (with neither patronymic nor the grand Mesopotamian titulary Cyrus used at Babylon), and the very word 'Achaemenid' (an affiliation to a ruling Achaemenid line that appears nowhere in Cyrus's genuine long inscription from Babylon but is the founding claim of Darius's Behistun) both point to Darius's hand. The name of Darius has in fact been detected in the fragmentary CMb (Borger and Hinz), and Cyrus, Stronach argues, would have broken standard Achaemenid practice by cutting CMa on the unfinished fabric of Palace P at all.

So the reading the compendium follows is Stronach's: Darius, not Cyrus, is the author of the Pasargadae inscriptions, cut a decade or more after the founder's death, at his predecessor's unfinished capital, precisely where smooth un-inscribed stone lay ready, to reinforce the new idea (first advanced at Behistun) of a single Achaemenid line to which both Cyrus and Darius belonged. It is a striking thing, and it doubles as this compendium's own recurring thesis in stone: the founder's own first-person voice, 'I am Cyrus', was, on the best current reading, carved for him by his heir. The point is the same as the one argued at Naqsh-e Rostam and the winged symbol: that the Old Persian monumental record we read as the voice of the early kings is very largely Darius's making. This is a scholarly reconstruction, argued from the script's date and the texts' idiom, not a settled certainty; the older attribution to Cyrus is not dead, but the weight of the argument now lies with Darius.^[12]

The excavation and the modern site

The ruins were never lost (they sit on the old road from Shiraz north), but they were long mis-identified, and their excavation is a twentieth-century story. Ernst Herzfeld made minor soundings in 1923 and a fuller four-week season in 1928, producing the first real site-plan and clearing much of the stone of Gate R and Palaces S and P. Aurel Stein mapped the southern plain in 1933; Ali Sami dug and conserved for six years from 1949. The decisive campaign was David Stronach's for the British Institute of Persian Studies, 1961–63, which set the chronology of the monuments, established the character of early Achaemenid stone architecture, brought out the central role of the garden, and recovered the buried jewellery-cache; Stronach's Pasargadae (1978) is the report on which all later work rests. Since 1999, geomagnetic survey (Boucharlat) has shown that far more of the plain than the standing ruins was landscaped on the same governing axis as the royal garden: the palace park was one part of a much larger designed landscape.

In July 2004 Pasargadae was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, both for the tomb and palaces and for its place at the head of the Achaemenid architectural and garden traditions that Persepolis and Susa would carry on. It stands today much as the travellers drew it: the lone gabled tomb on its stepped plinth, the single winged genius on his doorway, the paved throne-portico, and the shallow stone channels of the first paradise, dry now, running out across the Murghab plain.