Topic: archaeology (3)

• ObjectGold plaque of a barsom-bearer (Oxus Treasure)

  One of the small gold votive plaques of the Oxus Treasure (British Museum 123949): a standing man in Median dress (belted tunic, trousers, and a soft hood with a neck-guard) holding before him a slim bundle of rods, the barsom of Iranian worship. It is the clearest surviving material image of the rite the texts describe, though the treasure's own archaeology is deeply uncertain.

• PlaceNaqsh-e Rostam

  The perpendicular cliff about six kilometres north-west of Persepolis where the Great Kings of the Achaemenid house were entombed. Four cruciform tombs are cut into the rock: the oldest secured to Darius I by its inscriptions, DNa and DNb; the other three attributed on position and style to Xerxes, Artaxerxes I and Darius II. Each façade carries the same religious tableau: the king raised up on a platform borne by the empire's peoples, hand lifted before a fire, beneath the winged figure and the disc of heaven. Before the tombs stands the Kaʿba-ye Zartošt, a windowless stone tower whose Achaemenid purpose is still unresolved. The Sasanian reliefs cut lower on the same cliff give the site its modern Persian name, 'the picture of Rostam'.

• PlacePasargadae

  The first Achaemenid capital, raised by Cyrus the Great on the high, well-watered plain of the River Pulvar in the heart of Persis, some forty kilometres north-east of the later Persepolis. Here Cyrus built a dispersed royal park of columned stone halls (a free-standing gatehouse, Gate R, with its surviving winged 'genius', a public palace, Palace S, and a more intimate one, Palace P, whose throne-portico looked down the central path of a watered garden), set among the earliest 'paradise' garden yet excavated, its plan traced by surviving stone channels. Apart stand two sacred plinths for open-air fire-worship, a tall stone tower (the Zendān), and, a kilometre to the south, the tomb of Cyrus: a gabled stone chamber on a six-stepped plinth, whose Greek-reported epitaph asked the passer-by not to grudge the founder his little earth. The trilingual inscriptions that name Cyrus here (CMa) were, on the current reading of the excavator David Stronach, cut a generation later under Darius. Alexander visited and had the plundered tomb restored in 324 BCE; local memory long knew the tomb as that of the Mother of Solomon.