Quick questions on Persian art and architecture: Persepolis, Pasargadae and Susa (HSC Ancient History)

Darius I founded Persepolis (Old Persian Parsa) in Fars, near modern Shiraz, from about 518 BC, and it was expanded by Xerxes I and Artaxerxes I. Unlike Susa, Babylon, or Ecbatana, Persepolis was not a working administrative capital; it functioned chiefly as a ceremonial centre, most famously for the Nowruz (New Year) festival and for receiving tribute, built on a vast artificial stone terrace roughly 450 by 300 metres, cut partly into the mountainside of Kuh-e Rahmat.

Xerxes I began the Gate of All Nations after Darius I's death in 486 BC, as the monumental gatehouse through which every visitor to the terrace had to pass. A square hall with four columns and doorways on three sides, it is guarded by colossal stone bulls: human-headed winged bulls (in the Assyrian lamassu tradition) at the western entrance, and plain, Persian-style bulls at the eastern exit. Xerxes' own trilingual inscription (Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian) names him as builder, records his descent from Darius, and states that "much else that is beautiful was built in this Persepolis, which I built, and my father built."

Cyrus the Great founded Pasargadae, also in Fars, as the first Achaemenid royal capital during his reign (559 to 530 BC), before Persepolis existed. Its palace complex, arranged within a formal, symmetrical garden watered by stone channels, an early example of the Persian quadripartite garden (chahar bagh), the origin of the modern word "paradise", combined a residential palace with a separate columned audience hall. A relief of a winged guardian figure survives at one gateway, associated with an inscription (now lost or disputed as a later addition) reading "I am Cyrus, the king, the Achaemenid."

Susa, an ancient Elamite city, became one of the Achaemenid Empire's working administrative capitals under Darius I, who built a palace there with its own apadana modelled on the later Persepolis design. Darius's Foundation Charter for the palace (the trilingual DSf inscription, in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian) is the single richest Achaemenid text on how an imperial building project was organised: it lists cedar from Lebanon, teak from Gandhara and Carmania, gold from Sardis and Bactria, lapis lazuli and carnelian from Sogdiana, turquoise from Chorasmia, silver and ebony from Egypt, ivory from Ethiopia, India, and Arachosia, stonecutters from Ionia and Sardis, and goldsmiths from Media and Egypt, closing with a prayer that "Ahuramazda protect me, and my kingdom, and what I have built."

A cliff face a short distance from Persepolis, Naqsh-e Rustam, holds four cruciform rock-cut royal tombs, their facades carved to resemble a columned palace front. Only Darius I's tomb is securely identified, by its own trilingual inscription (DNa); the other three are usually attributed on stylistic grounds to Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II, though the attribution of the two later tombs is less certain than Darius's own.

Achaemenid palace art fused borrowed elements, Assyrian gate guardians, Egyptian column-base mouldings and craftsmen, Ionian and Lydian stonemasons, Elamite and Babylonian building and glazed-brick traditions, Median dress and glyptic conventions, into a single new "Persian" style. This eclecticism was not accidental: by visibly incorporating techniques and materials from every corner of the empire, the buildings themselves argued for a unified realm built by, and for, all its peoples under one king.