The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE–642 CE 9780520964365

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THE IR A NI A N E X PA N S E

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Joan Palevsky Imprint in Classical Literature.

THE IRANIAN EXPANSE TRANSFORMING ROYAL IDENTITY THROUGH ARCHITECTURE, LANDSCAPE, AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, 550 BCE–642 CE

MATTHEW P. CANEPA

U NIVER SIT Y OF CALIFOR NIA PR ESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Canepa, Matthew P., 1975- author. Title: The Iranian expanse : transforming royal identity through architecture, landscape, and the built environment, 550 BCE-642 CE / Matthew P. Canepa. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017031740 (print) | LCCN 2017036164 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520964365 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520290037 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture, Ancient—Iran. | Iran—Kings and rulers—Dwellings—History—To 1500. | Architecture and state— Iran—History—To 1500. | Architecture and religion—History—To 1500. | Palaces—Iran—History--To 1500. | Sacred space—Iran— History—To 1500. | Cultural landscapes—Social aspects—Iran— History—To 1500. | Iran—History—To 640. Classification: LCC NA225 (ebook) | LCC NA225 .C36 2018 (print) | DDC 722/.5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031740 Manufactured in the United States of America 27

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For Friedrich Orin Canepa

CONTENTS

1

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

PART THREE

PREFACE xi

Landscapes of Time and Memory

Introduction: Conceptualizing Iran and Building Iranian Empires / 1

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PART ONE

11 Dynastic Sanctuaries / 232 12

Sasanian Memory and the Persian Monumental and Ritual Legacy / 251

13

Reshaping Iran’s Past and Building Its Future / 271

Ordering the Earth 2

Building the First Persian Empire / 23

3

The Destruction of Achaemenid Persia and the Creation of Seleucid Iran / 42

4

The Rise of the Arsacids and a New Iranian Topography of Power / 68

5

Rival Visions and New Royal Identities in PostAchaemenid Anatolia and the Caucasus / 95

6

Sasanian Rupture and Renovation / 122

Iranian Funerary Landscapes / 211

PART FOUR

Palace and Paradise 14 Persian Palatial Cosmologies / 295 15

The Seleucid and Arsacid Transformations of Iranian Palatial Architecture / 307

16

The Palace of the Lord of the Sevenfold World / 324

17 Earthly Paradises / 345 PART TWO

Epilogue / 375

Sacred Spaces NOTES 379

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Persian Religion and Achaemenid Sacred Spaces / 149

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The Seleucid Transformation of Iranian Sacred Spaces / 170

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Ancient Sacred Landscapes and Memories of Persian Religion in Anatolia and the Caucasus / 188

BIBLIOGR APHY 427 INDEX 477

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a pleasure to thank the many people and institutions that made this book possible. This book would not have been finished without the support of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which allowed me to work on it full-time while on sabbatical (2015–16). A membership at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2016) provided the ideal environment to finish writing and revisions. The earliest stages of the project can be traced to a summer as a North American Fellow of the German Archaeological Institute (2007), which allowed me to begin exploratory research as well as provided the felicitous opportunity to consult with Dietrich Huff, whose advice and perspective were invaluable. Work on this book began in earnest with support from an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship (2009–10) and a Senior Research Fellowship from Merton College Oxford (Fall 2009). The Grant-inAid program of the University of Minnesota’s Office of the Vice President for Research, and awards from the College of Liberal Arts’ Imagine Fund, were crucial in supporting my foundational field research. A fellowship from the Getty Villa/Getty Research Institute (Spring 2013) allowed me to research and draft early portions of parts 1 and 2. Thank you to Touraj Daryaee and Rahim Shayegan for their hospitality while in LA, and to Sara Palaskas, my research assistant while at the Getty. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to present ideas in this book as a part of a series of lectures given while Directeur d’études invité at L’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris (Summer 2016). My gratitude to Philip Huyse for the invitation. This book greatly benefited from the generosity of Rémy Boucharlat and Frantz Grenet, who took the time to attend some of these lectures and meet with me to share their expertise. Thank

you to Samra Azarnoush, Rika Gyselen, Christelle Jullien, Florence Jullien, and Abolala Soudavar for their collegial hospitality while in Paris. Some ideas in this book were presented in earlier nascent forms in select publications given in the bibliography. In addition, ideas in certain chapters have also been shared in earlier forms in other conference presentations and lectures, including the Seminar in Ancient History and Civilizations, University of Utrecht, June 6, 2017; the Seminar in Religion and Writing, Columbia University, April 4, 2017; the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, September 22, 2016; the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins, University of Pennsylvania, March 31, 2016; the ISAW, New York University, March 2, 2016; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, February 17, 2016; the symposium The Maccabaean Moment, Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, January 17–21, 2016; the symposium Religious Materiality,” sponsored by the British Museum’s Empires of Faith project, June 19, 2014; the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, June 17, 2014; the Symposium on Kingship in Ancient Iran, Institute of Iranian Studies, St. Andrews, June 12–13, 2014; the Symposium on Persianisms, Netherlands Institute, Istanbul, April 24–26, 2014; the Byzantine Studies Conference, Yale University, October 31–November 3, 2013; EastWest Relations in the Ancient World, Williams College, October 10–12, 2013; the Getty Villa, Malibu, California, June 17, 2013; the Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies, University of California, Irvine, April 25, 2013; the 2012 Biennial of Iranian Studies, Istanbul, August 2, 2012; Temple Topography, Ritual Practice, and Cosmic Symbolism in the Ancient World, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, March 2–3, 2012; the ASOR

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annual conference, San Francisco, November 16–19, 2011; the 7th European Conference of Iranian Studies, September 7–10, 2011, Cracow, Poland; the Daniel H. Silberberg Lecture Series, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, March 8, 2011; and the College Art Association annual conference, Los Angeles, February 26, 2009. Thank you to Rachel Mairs, Mark Garrison, Bruce Lincoln, Rolf Strootman, John Miguel Versluys, Andrea Piras, Mahnaz Moazami, Antonio Panaino, Margaret Cool Root, David Stronach, Pierfrancesco Callieri, Soroor Ghaniamati, Ömür Harmans¸ah, Paul Kosmin, Ian Moyer, Sören Stark, Judith Lerner, Arash Zeini, Parvaneh Pourshariati, Richard Payne, Touraj Daryaee, Gunvor Lindström, Omar Coloru, Felipe Rojas, Robert Rollinger, Margaret Olin, Josef Wiesehöfer, and many others for their comments and input at these events and through other avenues. I thank Yve-Alain Bois for welcoming me in his seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study. Thank you to Margaret Graves and to Ben Anderson for kindly serving as interlocutors on the later Islamic and medieval European texts and traditions. Thank you to Joel Walker and Lori Khatchadourian for their feedback on an earlier stage of the manuscript. In addition to all those mentioned in the image credits, I am especially grateful to Carlo Lippolis, Vito Messina, and Laurianne Martinez-Sève for generously providing archival photographs of key sites; to Florian Knauss, Guy Lecuyot, and Artefacts Berlin for allowing me to

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ACK NOWLEDGMEN TS

republish their reconstructions; and to Alejandro Gallego Lopez of the Oriental Institute for obtaining new photographs of the material in the Kabul Museum for me. Thank you to my undergraduate research assistants, Kevin Kallmes, Eric DeBord, Jacob Van Blarcom, Hannah Williams, and Olivia Mullenax. A special thanks to my (first) undergraduate RA and (then, later) graduate student, Johnathan Hardy, for his tireless editing efforts and brilliant work on the computer reconstructions. Thank you also to Tony Lauricella for the maps. Thank you to Marian Rogers for her masterful copyediting and to Kate Mertes for her work on the index. I owe a debt of gratitude to Eric Schmidt at the University of California Press, who has supported and shepherded this work through all stages. Finally, my sincere appreciation to Francisco Reinking, whose expert work as production editor immeasurably improved the book’s final outcome. My heartfelt thanks to Alythia Scully for her valiant and painstaking work reconstructing my back, destroyed by years of writing, which enabled me to finish this book. Finally, my love and profound gratitude to my wonderful family, especially my dear wife, Beth, and son, Fritz, for their support, love, and patience through the years, especially during my long absences conducting field research and writing. Santa Fe, New Mexico October 2017

PREFACE

The Iranian Expanse explores how natural and built environments—everything from paradise gardens, mountaintop sanctuaries, and rock art to royal cities, palaces, fire temples, and tombs—were utilized by kings in Persia and the ancient Iranian world to form and contest Iranian cultural memories, royal identity, and sacred cosmologies. While many studies of ancient Iranian history, art, architecture, and archaeology end or begin with the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the coming of Alexander, or the rise of the Sasanians, this book reaches before and extends beyond these major points of rupture. At its analytical core lies the means of understanding such revolutions, their aftermath, and the long-term ramifications of Iran’s cataclysms.

Structure of the Book I offer here an overview of the book’s structure and major themes, which the reader may choose to read now or consult later as a map of the book’s organization and major arguments. The Iranian Expanse is organized into four parts, which serve as thematic chapter groupings, in addition to an introduction and epilogue. Each part focuses on a central problem or institution arising from the intertwined development of Iranian royal identity and the built and natural environments. Chapter 1 introduces the book’s main theoretical and analytical problems and provides an overview of the empires, kingdoms, and dynasties on which the later chapters focus. Part 1, “Ordering the Earth,” examines the creation, transformation, and destruction of the infrastructural and environmental foundations of royal identities,

concentrating on changes in Iranian urbanism and its interrelationship with the landscape. Part 2, “Sacred Spaces” studies the natural and architectural contexts of Achaemenid religion and the afterlife of the dynasty’s ritual traditions subsequent to their fall. In doing so, I reevaluate evidence for the development of fire temple architecture and investigate the inscription of new sacred topographies on ancient Western Asian landscapes after Alexander. Departing from previous scholarship, these chapters show that the Achaemenids did not impose a uniform imperially sponsored tradition of fi re temple architecture on their empire. The expectation that there should be a continuous transmillennial tradition of Iranian temple architecture stems primarily from a problematic strain of early twentieth-century German scholarship. A diverse array of spaces and structures served Persian religion and received imperial sponsorship; however, the heterogeneous evidence of structures hosting fi re cults does not bear the marks of imperial patronage, nor does it represent a dominant tradition of Persian religious architecture, much less an imperially implanted architectural system. Instead, I argue that the Iranian world experienced something like a centrally instituted tradition of temple architecture under the Seleucids. Monumental fire temple architecture, on the other hand, proliferates with imperial support only well after their fall. Part 3, “Landscapes of Time and Memory,” analyzes the development of Iranian funerary traditions and dynastic sanctuaries and scrutinizes how natural and architectonic space shaped the Iranian memory, royal identity, and perceptions of time. Chapter 10 concentrates on

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pivotal moments of innovation in funerary architecture under the Achaemenids, Seleucids, and Arsacids. Focusing particularly on the Perso-Macedonian dynasties of Anatolia and the Caucasus, it examines regional efforts to claim and shape ancient landscapes and regional memory while still connecting to an ancient Persian royal legacy. Chapter 11 argues that the array of dynastic cults that appear across the Iranian world after the fall of the Achaemenids grew primarily from the competitive environment that flourished among ambitious dynasts after the dissolution of the Seleucid Empire rather than from an Achaemenid institution or from a single Iranian religious precedent. Despite the dynasty’s rhetoric of continuity and renewal, the Sasanians extinguished or radically reshaped many venerable Iranian religious traditions and sites of memory, while promoting new visions of the past and manufacturing “newly ancient” sites that they presented as reflective of the true order of things. Chapters 12 and 13 explore the Sasanians’ relationship with the Achaemenid and Kayanid legacies and investigate the central role ritual and the ruined Achaemenid monumental patrimony played in reshaping Iran’s history around their new dynastic vision. Just as importantly it analyzes the Sasanians’ appropriation or complete construction of a new empire-wide sacred topography related to Iran’s primordial history. This is another place where I depart from previous scholarship. I argue that late antique Iran’s most venerable fire sanctuaries, which were associated with the oldest traditions of Zoroastrianism and linked to toponyms and legends from the Avesta, were founded well after Alexander and substantially reshaped in late antiquity. Rather than ancient institutions whose origins were lost in the mists of time, I argue most (though not all) of these traditions and even the sites were in fact newly ancient complexes rebuilt, moved, or even fabricated outright to emplace a recently constructed primordial history. Finally, part 4, “Palace and Paradise,” concentrates on the transformation of Persian palace architecture and royal estates. These chapters offer, for the fi rst time, a sustained analysis of the development of Iranian palace and garden architecture from the Achaemenids through the Sasanians, focusing directly on pivotal moments of innovation or change as a result of the impact of nonIranian influences. For example, departing from previous scholarship, I identify and emphasize the importance of a post-Achaemenid “Perso-Macedonian” architectural tradition for the establishment of the

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PREFACE

Seleucid Empire and development of later Iranian architecture. Arising out of the Seleucid court, this PersoMacedonian architectural tradition was subsequently appropriated as an idiom of royal power by both the Greco-Bactrians and early Arsacids to monumentalize their new claims and eventually to challenge and subsume the Seleucid legacy. Chapter 17 turns to gardens, estates, and hunting parks, commonly approached as a single institution. Modern scholarship, following Greco-Roman literary conventions, has frequently applied this term to Sasanian estates as well; however, the term “paradise,” arising from the Old Persian word for Achaemenid imperial plantations, disappears from Iranian usage after the Seleucids. Although Persian hunting estates or gardens have been portrayed as essential and unchanging bulwarks of Persian kingship, as will become clear, massive changes often overshadow even the most noticeable continuities, complicating any narrative of continuous unbroken development of these and other Iranian royal traditions.

Note on Scholarly Conventions, Editions, and Translations The transcription and transliteration systems for Avestan, Middle Persian, and New Persian adhere as far as possible to those adopted by Stausberg and Vevaina (2015a), as do abbreviations for Avestan and Pahlavi texts. Exceptions or additions include the abbreviations for Old Persian (Old Pers.), Middle Persian (Mid. Pers.), New Persian (New Pers.), Parthian (Parth.), Armenian (Arm.), Ša¯ buhr I’s Ka‘ba-ye Zardošt inscription (ŠKZ), and Narseh’s Paikuli Inscription (NPi) and the system of short titles/editions created by Encyclopaedia Iranica. Editions are specified in the notes. If otherwise unspecified, Avestan texts correspond to Geldner 1885–1895 (reproduced in Gippert-Fritz et al. 1985–2008); the ŠKZ corresponds to Huyse 1999; Pahlavi texts correspond to Jamasp-Asana’s Corpus of Pahlavi Texts (CPT; as reedited by Said Orian and reproduced in Gippert, Cereti, and Jügel 2007–2008), and Anklesaria 1908 for the GBd. Old Persian texts correspond to the edition of Schmitt 2009. Abbreviations for classical authors and texts conform to the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The transcription and transliteration systems for Old Persian and abbreviations for the Achaemenid royal inscriptions conform to Schmitt 2009 and 2014. The transliteration for ancient Greek use the Library of Congress system, while Armenian employs the Hübschmann-Meillet system.

Georgian follows Rapp 2014. Commonly used proper names or concepts are transliterated without diacritical marks in the main body of the text (e.g., Shabuhr instead of Ša¯buhr, frauuashi for frauuaš. i-, Pars for Pa¯rs, Aghdzk instead of Ałc‘k‘, etc.). All translations from the

Iranian languages, as well as ancient Greek, Latin, Armenian, and Sanskrit and modern European languages are my own unless indicated otherwise. All photographs, illustrations, and site plans are my own unless indicated otherwise.

PREFACE

xiii

CHAP TER ONE

Introduction I, Ahura Mazda, fi rst fashioned forth the Aryan Expanse (airiianəm vae¯jo¯ ) by the Good Lawful River, to be the best of places and settlements. But then the Evil Spirit, full of death, hacked out its adversarial counterfeit (paitiia¯ r m): a dragon, the red, and the winter, e

fabricated by the Demons.1

The Iranian Expanse is a study of the natural and built environments of power in Persia and the ancient Iranian world from the consolidation of the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century BCE to the fall of the Sasanian Empire in the seventh century CE. Its chapters analyze the formation and development of some of the most enduring expressions of power in Iranian royal culture: palaces, paradise gardens and hunting enclosures, royal cities, sanctuaries and landscapes marked with a rich history of rock art and ritual activity. It explores how these structures, landscapes, and urban spaces constructed and transformed Iranian imperial cosmologies, royal identities, and understandings of the past. Implicit in this book’s arguments is the understanding that royal engagement with natural, urban, and architectonic space was not merely an ornament or a natural outgrowth of Iranian kingship, but a fundamental tool by which kings in Iran established their dominance, manipulated cultural memory, and appropriated, subsumed, or destroyed the traditions of their competitors. Understanding the continuum between the conceptual, spatial, material, and practical bases of Iranian kingship and their role in forming, supporting, and changing Iranian royal identity lies at the book’s methodological core. Setting as its goal a sustained analysis of the role of the natural and built environments in the construction and transformation of Iranian royal identities, this book opens an analytical space that can encompass multiple competing understandings and expressions of Iranian kingship and their competitive or appropriative relationship with sites, traditions, and images of preAchaemenid or non-Iranian royal traditions. Although

it focuses on the ancient evidence and does not contain extended discussions of theoretical literature, this book often engages debates in the humanities and in the social and behavioral sciences. I approach these issues not simply as theoretical problems, but as important methodological tools that have the potential to shed light on historical processes. This book’s arguments grow from the conviction that both personal cognition and collective cultural identities are highly implicated in the natural and built environments. Moreover, the personal and collective memories that constitute those identities often crystallize at specific sites, natural or man-made: they shape and were shaped by the built and natural environments.2 It should not be surprising that a change in one could be understood to yield a change in the others. A wide variety of external resources can “scaffold,” that is, support and shape, human cognition and offer affordances for meaningful perceptions and actions, including those relating to personal or collective memories. 3 Within theories of an extended mind, “when parts of the environment are coupled with the brain in the right way they become parts of the mind,” though the inverse of this statement is equally true: when parts of our mind, relating to both cognitive and somatic processes, are coupled with the environment in the right way they become part of the environment.4 This is a problem that occupies not only contemporary theoretical approaches but was deeply implicated in ancient Iranian understandings of existence. According to Iranian religious theorizing, everything in the living, material world (Av. gaeˉiθiia-, Mid. Pers. geˉtı¯g) also participates in a world “of thought” (Old Av. manahiia-,

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Young Av. mainiiauua-, Mid. Pers. meˉnoˉg), that is, the conceptual, spiritual dimension of existence.5 While I am not arguing that contemporary theoretical approaches map onto ancient Iranian concepts, the importance of the relationship between the conceptual world and the living, material world in a number of Iranian religions challenges us to take such “hylonoetic” continua between place, space, and human minds and bodies seriously when approaching the relationship between Iranian royal identities and the art and archaeological evidence. This was at the forefront of the minds of the patrons and designers of the great Iranian palaces, sacred spaces, and landscapes and gardens, from Achaemenid Pasargadae to Sasanian Ayvan-e Kisra: Iranian sovereigns knew that meaningful places and powerful natural and architectonic spaces not only shaped human subjectivities and behavior day to day, but had the potential to bring into alignment and restore to primordial perfection the deeper realities of both the living and the spiritual worlds.6

Conceptualizing Iran and Building Iranian Empires As a work of cultural and religious history as much as art, architecture, and archaeology, this book deliberately defines “Iranian” and “Iranian kingship” broadly. Certain philological points of view might attend solely to texts produced in an Iranian language, such as Avestan, Persian, or Parthian, while conversely, field archaeology often uses “Iran” or “Iranian” as merely geographical designators referring to sites within the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Iranian plateau. Instead, in this book “Iranian” refers to a range of overlapping linguistic and cultural spheres that extended well beyond the borders of the modern nation-state or geographical region. This encompasses peoples or ruling aristocracies that produced religious or official texts in an Iranian language and whose kings proudly proclaimed they were Iranian (Av. airiia-, Old Pers. ariya-, Mid. Pers. eˉr, Bactrian ariao).7 But it also includes many that did not, yet were ruled by kings who nevertheless showcased cultic practices drawn from Iranian religious traditions or courtly practices intended to engage or appropriate ancient Persian royal traditions or competing contemporary Iranian cultures of kingship. After Alexander, large parts of the former Achaemenid Empire were ruled by dynasties that celebrated their Iranian family roots and connection to the Persian royal legacy, and cultivated certain Iranian religious practices,

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CHAP TER ONE

though their main mode of royal expression was Greek and the majority of the peoples they ruled were not Iranian. This certainly includes the postsatrapal dynasties of Anatolia and the Caucasus, but this characterization could equally apply to the early Seleucid dynasty. Despite clear differences and temporal distance, the dynasties under study shared one or more common religious and cultural practices. Not all dynasties participated in all traditions, and even those that did fostered a variety of different, often conflicting and competing formulations of Iranian royal and religious identities. But the styles of kingship and court cultures they fostered, including specific modes of feasting, hunting, and worshipping, and the palaces, paradises, cities, and sanctuaries built for these purposes, contributed to and laid claim to the developing aristocratic common cultures associated with Iranian kingship that flourished during their lifetimes. Some dynasties engaged and adapted eastern Iranian religious, ritual, or mythical traditions drawn from or related to those contained in the Avesta, a compilation of the earliest Iranian religious texts that served as the “holy book” of later Zoroastrianism, but whose texts descended from an centuries-long process of oral composition and transmission. These traditions included Iranian eschatological or cosmological frameworks, cultic protocols and purity conventions, epic stories of a long line of Iranian kings and heroes fighting the forces of evil, concepts of Royal Fortune (e.g., Av. xᵛarǝnah-; Mid. Pers., Parth. farrah or xwarrah; Arm. p‘ar˙k‘), and legendary sites or lands, including the “Iranian Expanse” (Av. Airiiana-Vaeˉjah-, ˉ ra¯nweˉz).8 Other dynasties, especially in AnaMid. Pers. E tolia, foregrounded vaguer memories of “the lore of the Persians” or Persian cultic traditions descendant from Achaemenid rather than eastern Iranian traditions. All traced their family roots to a venerable line of Iranian ancestors, be they scions of a historical dynasty like the Achaemenids or of a mythical line like the Kayanids. All worshipped one or more Iranian gods like Ahura Mazda, Anahita, Mithra, or Verethragna, though the deities might also bear the names or cultic attributes of other non-Iranian deities. In certain cases, the king or external observers even deemed such divinities to be “gods of the Iranians” or understood their worship to be specifically implicated in the god’s or king’s Iranian identity. For example, the Elamite version of Darius I’s Bisotun inscription designates the great god Ahura Mazda as “the God of the Iranians”; he is called “the Iranian Aramazd” when a late antique Armenian text recounts his worship by Armenian kings; and Sasanian royal

titulature incorporates “Mazda-worshipping” or even “the Mazda-worshiping Iranian” as an expected title of the ruler of the “Empire of the Iranians” or his princes.9 Perso-Macedonian kings like Mithradates VI of Pontus or Antiochus I of Commagene venerated gods such as Zeus Stratius or Zeus-Oromasdes with ritual protocols involving fire cults, massive sacrifices, or specific ritual implements, such as sacred twigs drawn into a wand (cf. Av. barəsman-). They foregrounded these gods and ritual practices to connect them to the royal traditions and religious practices of their royal Persian ancestors and, possibly, to a wider Iranian religio-cultural realm.10 Ancient Iranian religious and political theorizing produced several detailed geographical and cosmological explanations of Iran’s place in the world and its symbolic topography.11 In all formulations, Iran enjoyed a religiously or imperially sanctioned terrestrial centrality, with differing real or imagined lands forming the center. This cosmological vision appears in various places in the Avesta.12 It was elaborated in later Middle Persian priestly commentaries as well as late antique and medieval epic poetry. According to the earliest formulations, the earth was divided into seven continental sections (Av. karšuuar, Mid. Pers. kišwar); the central continent (Av. Xᵛaniraθa; Mid. Pers. Xwanirah) was the largest and the only one originally inhabited by humans.13 At the center lay “the Aryan” or “Iranian ˉ ra¯nweˉz). It Expanse” (Av. Airiiana-Vaeˉjah-, Mid. Pers. E was, according to the Great God Ahura Mazda, “the first and the best of places and habitations” and the homeland of Zoroaster.14 Moreover, the Iranian Expanse was the place of Ahura Mazda’s primordial creations of earth, water, plant, animal, and human, where the first king, Yima, ruled over an undivided earth and a golden age, and where early heroic struggles against evil, and original acts of sacrifice and revelation, all transpired.15 All other lands inhabited by Iranians constellated around it, and eventually, all other nations and peoples, who spread throughout the world.16 In other Avestan texts we hear of the “Aryan Lands” more generically, or, in the Hymn to Mithra, the “dwelling place of the Aryans,” which includes a similar, though smaller, group of lands without Airiiana Vaeˉjah, suggesting that multiple variant formulations of this geography coexisted.17 Over the years, scholarship has generated numerous conflicting theories of the “original” location of the Iranian lands as reflected in the Avesta. While debate will continue on the exact location of a few of the lands mentioned in the Avesta, the oldest portions were clearly related to regions of the Oxus River valley, the

Pamirs, and the Hindu Kush, corresponding roughly to present-day Afghanistan and Tajikistan, southern Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and northern Pakistan with a small, but important, sliver of eastern Iran centering on the Helmand River.18 The Avestan list extends from this core into Western, Central, and South Asia, often following river valleys. With the Vaŋhuuı¯ Da¯itiia¯, the “Good Lawful River,” at its headwaters, the ancient Oxus (OIr. Waxš, mod. Amu Darya) river flowed northwest through ancient Bactria into Sogdiana. Beginning in the Hindu Kush and flowing southwestward, the Haraxᵛaitı¯ (mod. Arghandab) and Haeˉtuman.t (mod. Helmand) joined and flowed into Lake Hamun, one of the holiest sites of Zoroastrianism. Western Iran and, most notably, Persia do not appear. Despite certain continuities between the Avestan material and later religious and political texts, it is clear that neither the concept of the Iranian lands nor their geographical or mythical locations were stable throughout history. Iranian cosmology, geography, and identity were labile and subject to active manipulation. Like any culture, Iranian royal culture was iteratively recreated in every generation, with numerous redefi nitions and counterformulations, subject to frequent ruptures as well as influenced and significantly affected by the cultures of their non-Iranian neighbors, subject populations, and, at times, overlords. Previous scholarly debates have centered primarily on oral and textual discourse to trace the development of Iranian religious and political identity. In contrast, this book gives equal weight to the material and spatial “deep history” of Iranian identity—that is, the role of places, spaces, objects, and ritual practice in the continual reconstruction and transformation of Iranian royal and religious identities. The interactions among such cosmological theorizings and their spatial and material emplacement and enactment lie at the core of this book.

Rupture and Renovation in Iranian History and Iranian Identity The history of Persia and the ancient Iranian world is marked with both remarkable continuities and deep ruptures. With rise of the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE), Iranian ideas and institutions of kingship became the supreme idiom of legitimacy, power, and prestige in Western Asia, overshadowing and subsuming those of earlier kingdoms and empires. For nearly two hundred years the Persians ruled an empire that extended from the Aegean to the Aral Sea and from Egypt to the Indus

IN TRODUCTION

3

with periodic expansions into the Balkans and Central Asia. The empire welded together an incredibly diverse array of lands, many of which themselves ruled their own empires or had until very recently been independent kingdoms or city-states. The founder of the Persian Empire was Cyrus the Great (550–530 BCE), originally the king of Anshan in Elam, who began a rapid conquest of the Iranian plateau, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia, overthrowing the Neo-Babylonian Empire and sweeping aside local kingdoms and would-be empires from Media to Phrygia.19 Cyrus’s son Cambyses (530– 522 BCE) expanded the empire into Egypt in 525 BCE before dying in somewhat mysterious circumstances. The primary beneficiary of the period of chaos following Cambyses’s death was Darius I (522–486 BCE), a nobleman who took power after putting down rebellions throughout the empire, including in its Persian, Elamite, and Median heartlands. Darius I expanded the empire further and substantially reorganized it. Building on Cyrus the Great’s early eclectic experimentations, Darius I fashioned a powerful and coherent royal ideology expressed with a new unified royal art and architectural style, one that his descendants elaborated. Darius I and his successors clearly defi ned the cosmological place and role of the king as well the lands and peoples of the empire, which was theoretically coterminous with the inhabited earth (bu ¯ mı¯-). 20 Just as importantly, Darius I was instrumental in consolidating and defi ning an Achaemenid dynastic and Persian imperial identity for the ruling dynasty and its aristocracy. As well as patronizing many non-Iranian cults, the Achaemenid kings were adherents of an early form of the Iranian religion later known as Zoroastrianism.21 With the rise of Darius I, evidence appears in abundance that the worship of Ahura Mazda, “the god of the Ariyas,” was a hallmark of Achaemenid royal and dynastic identity.22 Auramazda (Av. Ahura Mazda¯) is prominent in the Achaemenid royal inscriptions, and the Old Persian versions of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions are rife with allusions to, and deliberate plays off of, the ethics, cosmology, and eschatology of many of the ancient Avestan texts, which are also detectable in other genres of Achaemenid imperial discourse. These concepts also underpin a variety of ritual performances, royal policies, and artistic and architectural expressions. 23 In addition, Darius I’s narrative of his rise to power deploys ancient Iranian “epic” themes, also preserved in the legends of the Avesta, such as the “evil brother,” though not the epic narratives or personages

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themselves.24 The priestly elite and (likely) the nobility of the Persians and Medes were well versed in the tales of the legendary kings of the Avesta, and a few Avestan names appear in in the Western Iranian onomasticon of the nobility, though, of course, not among the names of the Achaemenid kings and their family.25 The Achaemenids’ descriptions of their empire did not map onto that of the Avestan description of the Iranian lands, but do play off of it in the same way their royal narratives engage epic formulae.26 The Achaemenid inscriptions, rock reliefs, and the decorative programs of Achaemenid palaces portray the Persian homeland (Old Pers. Pa¯rsa) and its people at the center of the empire, with all other lands and people constellated around it.27 These are the lands, which I took, far from Persia; I lorded over them, they bore me tribute, what was proclaimed to them by me, that they did; my law held them: Medians, Elamites, Parthians, Arians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Chorasmians, Drangians, Arachosians, Sattagydians, Gandharans, Indians, Haoma-drinking Scythians, Pointed-hat Scythians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Arabians, Egyptians, Armenians, Cappadocians, Lydians, Ionians, Scythians beyond the Sea, Thracians, Petasos-wearing Ionians, Libyans, Ethiopians, Omanis, Carians.28

Here as in their palaces’ sculptural programs, the Achaemenid imperial formulation echoes and plays off of Avestan cosmology, with a similar movement from center to periphery with relative proximity to the center affecting a land’s relative civilization and its people’s “moral preeminence.”29 The empire’s lands (Old Pers. dayhu-) encompassed the eastern Iranian lands (Av. daŋ́hu-) of Bactria (Old Pers. Ba¯xtriš, Av. Ba¯xdδı¯), Arachosia (Old Pers. Harauvatiš, Av. Haraxᵛaitı¯), and Aria (Old Pers. Haraiva, Av. Haroı¯uua), as well as the eastern portions of Drangiana (Old Pers. Zranka, Av. Haeˉtuman∙ t), southern Sogdiana (Old Pers. Suguda; Av. Gaa¯uua, Suγda), and northwestern Gandhara/Parapamisos (Old Pers. Ga¯ndara, encompassing Av. Ra¯γa, Caxra, and Varəna).30 Darius I understands himself to be “an Ariya of Ariya lineage” (Old Pers. Ariyaciça-), who worships “Ahura Mazda, the god of the Ariyas.” He proclaims that he invented a writing system for the “Ariya” language, a politically constructed court language of power and authority, but one that was nevertheless clearly connected with his self-defi nition. 31 In some early enumerations of their subjects, non-Iranian-speaking peoples, such as the Elamites, stand nearer to the privileged center than Iranians, though in later iterations Iranians take precedence over the Elamites. Still, while other Iranian peoples played an important role in

the empire, often contributing more militarily and paying less in tax, Persia was the center of gravity of the empire and Achaemenid kingship was the dominant political, visual, and spatial culture: Iran does not yet appear as a political concept. Moreover, the xᵛarǝnah, the luminous Royal Glory of the rightful Iranian king and central pillar of Avestan kingship prominent in post-Hellenistic Iran, is completely absent from royal texts, as are any direct references to the mythical Iranian dynasties, though the Old Persian onomasticon hints these concepts were in circulation during the Achaemenid period.32 It is important to emphasize in this regard that the religious practices of the Achaemenids differed in profound ways from later Zoroastrianism, especially its “orthodox” form, which only takes shape in the late Sasanian period. Some scholars emphasize the historical and doctrinal differences with later periods by using the term “Mazdaism,” while others favor “Achaemenid” or “Persian religion,” to emphasize the heterogeneous nature of Achaemenid religious practices, which include sacrifices made to many non-Iranian gods, as indicated most notably by the predominance of Elamite gods in the Persepolis archive. 33 Such distinctions have met strong protest that these are “invented religions,” which is a fair enough point.34 The fact remains, however, that terms such as “Zoroastrianism” or “Zoroastrian” are no less modern scholarly impositions on the ancient material than “Mazdaism” or “Mazdaean.” In fact, after Darius I, a self-proclaimed Mazda-worshipping identity becomes a hallmark of Achaemenid royal identity and appears repeatedly in the Achaemenid primary sources, whereas Zoroaster is completely absent.35 In the Achaemenid period as in other periods, it makes no more methodological sense to fi ll in lacunae with later evidence than it does to evaluate the “purity” of Achaemenid, Seleucid, or Parthian practices by checking them against the strictures of post-Sasanian Zoroastrianism. This may sound simply like a debate over nomenclature, but such terms are laden with methodological and ideological assertions or assumptions of rupture or continuity, be they acknowledged or not. Many of the primary questions on which this book focuses deal precisely with royal efforts to shape and change cultic practices and sacred topographies and the traditions associated with them, including the transfer or transformation of sites of deep significance for Iranian royal identity and even the outright fabrication of “newly ancient” sacred sites associated with primordial events, mythical toponymns, and ancient heroes.

Iran after Alexander While the 220 years of the Achaemenid Empire were foundational for the development of Iranian kingship, the nine centuries between the Achaemenids’ fall and the coming of Islam were the true crucible of medieval and modern Iranian identity. Like that of Islam, Alexander’s conquest of the Achaemenid Empire brought about one of the deepest ruptures in the cultures of the ancient Iranian world and with it defi ned one of the most important, yet least understood periods of Western Asian history. The effects of this turbulent, yet brilliantly creative period are a primary focus of this book. From the very start of his invasion, Alexander was attuned to Achaemenid modes of governance, and formulated his own claims in reaction to them.36 Alexander sought, in his own way, to portray himself as a legitimate successor to the last Achaemenid king, Darius III, and left in place many Achaemenid political structures. Yet, while Alexander became intimately familiar with Achaemenid royal practices, how he chose to deploy them was shaped and constrained by his ambitions to be something more than just a Persian king of kings, and by the objections of his traditionalist Macedonian army.37 In contrast to Egypt and Babylon, in the Achaemenid Empire Alexander found no ready tradition of divine kingship that he could exploit, and his attempts to use Persian royal traditions often appear to have backfi red. 38 Far from a king who seamlessly incorporated himself into the Achaemenid model, Alexander experimented with aspects of Persian royal practice that suited him and invented or ignored the rest. Although Alexander’s brief reign was certainly epoch making and cataclysmic, the period of Seleucid control of Iran (ca. 310–ca. 140/39 BCE) had a much greater impact on the later formation of ancient Western Asia and Iranian kingship. Even if its role is often unacknowledged in the indigenous sources, the new halfMacedonian, half-Iranian dynasty founded by one of Alexander’s most able Successors reshaped Persian institutions and introduced many profoundly important innovations. While Alexander tried to present himself as both a Macedonian and an Achaemenid, the Seleucids developed a markedly different strategy, no doubt observing that Alexander’s solution left the Macedonians uneasy and the Persians largely unconvinced. Instead of directly appealing to the Achaemenid dynastic identity, the Seleucids chose to downplay it and elide the Achaemenids from Western Asia’s history and political landscapes. Moreover, the Seleucids set out to

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impose a competing topography of power that disturbed and superseded that of the Achaemenids. Already by the second generation of Seleucid kings, the dynasty had succeeded in appropriating, superseding, or ruining all major Achaemenid sites and institutions to the point that the Achaemenids’ role in Iranian history was all but omitted. In the Sasanians’ official history, the Achaemenid dynasty is not known by that name. The last Achaemenid king “Darius son of Darius” (Da¯ra¯y ¯ı Da¯ra¯ya¯n) is simply the last of the legendary Kayanid kings of Iran overthrown by Alexander. The Seleucids appropriated many Persian traditions but did not portray their dynasty or their traditions of kingship as necessarily continuous with Achaemenid kingship. The Seleucids subsumed many Persian traditions, most notably in architecture, but just as often Seleucid royal culture sidelined and replaced Achaemenid institutions, presenting a radically new royal image. As Macedonian kings, the Seleucid dynasty introduced a new political culture that connected Iran to the wider Hellenistic world. While Greek art, architecture, and religious practices eclipsed those of the Achaemenids, the Seleucids’ strategic synthesis of Macedonian, Babylonian, and Persian traditions became, in effect, a new rival tradition of Iranian kingship. We have no evidence that the Seleucids directly engaged with Avestan ideas of Iranian kingship; however, the fact that their empire displaced Persia as the locus of power over the Iranian world allowed or compelled new visions of Iranian royal identity to emerge.39 Not long after the foundation of the empire, the Seleucids faced a series of satrapal revolts, which yielded the independent Greco-Bactrian kingdom and detached Parthia from the empire. Arsaces (ca. 247–211 BCE), who was venerated by his descendants as the founder of Arsacid dynasty, carved out a kingdom from the former provinces Parthia and Hyrcania and repelled Seleucus II’s attempt to reassert control over the provinces.40 The Arsacid Empire (ca. 247 BCE—ca. 228 CE) held sway over Western Asia for the greatest duration of time of all Iranian empires, and with the survival of the Arsacid dynasty of Armenia until 428 CE, the Arsacids were the longest-ruling of all ancient Iranian dynasties.41 The Arsacids cultivated the Western Iranian dialect spoken in Parthia, and as a court language, it became an idiom of poetry and epic. The Arsacids conquered the Iranian plateau before sweeping over Mesopotamia and pushing the Seleucid Empire to their western capital of Antioch-on-the-Orontes. The rise of the Arsacids, their competition with the Seleucids, and that empire’s subsequent decline yielded

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one of the most creative and important periods of Western Asian art and architectural history.42 Neither art objects nor archaeological material nor textual sources from the Parthian period survive in great abundance, yet all streams of evidence indicate that the Arsacid Empire was a pivotal period of change. It oversaw the decline or radical transformation of many of Western Asia’s most enduring institutions and cultural practices, including those of Babylon, Achaemenid Persia, and Seleucid Asia.43 Within Parsa itself, the forms of the languages that the Achaemenid Empire used for official inscriptions and record keeping, Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, fell out of use, and knowledge of their cuneiform writing systems disappeared permanently. Within Babylon, cuneiform writing and archives survived along with the temples for the first two centuries of Parthian rule as a local tradition before disappearing almost entirely in the early fi rst century CE.44 Conversely, the Arsacid period produced a new court culture and royal architecture, especially palatial architecture, that had a deep and lasting influence. The fact that the Parthian Empire succeeded in maintaining its territorial integrity while facing simultaneous pressures from Rome at the height of its military strength and from waves of Central Asian nomads is a testament to the resilience of the imperial structure. Indeed the Parthian Empire fell to revolution rather than invasion. Despite the Seleucids’ and Arsacids’ ascendancy over the Iranian world and the Romans’ eventual dominance over Anatolia and the Levant, kingdoms ruled by Persian dynasties in Anatolia, the Caucasus, and northern Iran presented rival claims to the Persian and Macedonian royal legacies. Between Antiochus III’s defeat at Magnesia (190 BCE) and Rome and Parthia’s fi nal absorption of Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia in the fi rst century CE, sovereigns of this wider Western Iranian world presented powerful visions of a new postAchaemenid “neo-Persian” kingship. But for a different outcome of a few battles against the Seleucids or the Romans, many of these “alternative visions” of postAchaemenid Iranian kingship could have become dominant, rivaling or even displacing that of the Arsacids. Some, like the Orontids of Armenia and Ariarathids of Cappadocia succeeded in retaining or reestablishing power over their ancestors’ former satrapies. Still more kingdoms emerged from Seleucid attempts to fracture and destroy overly ambitious client kingdoms and, finally, from the Seleucid Empire’s own demise. In the course of the dissolution of the Seleucid Empire, these dynasties sought to reinvigorate, reinvent, and fore-

ground an array of Persian royal practices and claims. Like the ascendancy of the Arsacids in the east, that of kings such as Mithradates VI and Tigranes II in the west brought the claims and expressions of a reborn Persian kingship into renewed prominence and power. What is noteworthy is that these rival visions were predicated primarily on regional memories of Persian identity not on those of the eastern Iranian royal and religious traditions. This western post-Achaemenid “Persianism” was only one royal discourse among many, and for a time it presented an important rival vision of a new Iranian kingship. At the same time that the Seleucid Empire lost the Iranian plateau to the Parthians, the Greco-Bactrian kingdom fell to several waves of Central Asian mounted warriors, including the Saka, known in Chinese sources as Sai-wang, and Yuezhi, whose name we know only from Chinese sources.45 The Indo-Scythians established kingdoms in eastern Iran and, once pushed out by Parthian and Yuezhi encroachment, moved into northern India.46 The former satrapy of Chorasmia had flourished after emerging from the Achaemenid Empire as an independent state, and its appearance has been associated with the construction of extensive irrigation systems, numerous fortresses and walled cities that incorporate principles of Hellenistic fortification design, and temple complexes.47 Disturbed by the same nomadic incursions, Chorasmia regained prosperity under local dynasties, whose ascendancy has been associated with renewed expansion. Chorasmian and early Kushan urbanism adapted principles of Seleucid and Greco-Bactrian urbanism and defense that parallel early Parthian developments, yet, with the Kushan Empire’s eventual pivot toward India and Chorasmia’s relative isolation, these regions do not play a central role in our study of the main lines of Iranian urban and palatial design.48 Their numismatics provide important evidence of divergent yet creative efforts to claim the Iranian royal heritage in the east, but given the nature of the evidence, lie outside of the scope of this book.

From the “Iranian Expanse” to the “Empire of the Iranians” Between the establishment of the Seleucid Empire and the rise of the Sasanians, eastern Iranian epic history and Avestan cosmology began to move from the realms of religious and poetic discourse to the core of Iranian identity, with the late Parthian period marking an important point of transition. The spread of eastern Ira-

nian epic traditions along with the sacred texts and practices of the Zoroastrian religion is not understood with great precision; however, its historical transformation from a religious and poetic discourse to a political one can be sketched in broad brushstrokes. The Old and Middle Iranian texts that preserve or allude to these creation myths and heroic legends bear the marks of many changes, “updates,” amalgamations, expansions, and elisions as they passed through multifarious chains of first oral and then textual transmission. The Arsacids began this Middle Iranian program of rewriting the past to consolidate their hold on their Iranian power bases throughout their empire. By at least the late Parthian period, the legendary Avestan kings and heroes had been organized into “dynasties,” and the Avestan legends had been elaborated in the vernacular and “updated” to make sense of the recent and distant past as well as the current state of affairs. These narratives provided a “historical structure with which all Iranians could identify.”49 The vernacular epic traditions of eastern Iran not only spread across Western Asia, but with Parthian influence, thoroughly imbued the local legends, worldview, and self-identity of the Iranian world, evident everywhere from Armenia and Iberia to Mesopotamia and Pars.50 “Wherever the Parthians settled, as administrators or in estates, evidence for Iranian epic conventions pops up.”51 These courtly, heroic, and romantic tales did not subsist in the realm of liturgy or scholasticism, but formed the core of a fresh Middle Iranian epic tradition and historical consciousness. Even in texts that were heavily redacted in the Sasanian period, the Arsacid kings are celebrated for preserving the Avesta, and stories of the noble Parthian families are interwoven with those of the legendary Kayanid dynasty (Av. Kauui-).52 For example, the medieval historian T_a’a¯lebı¯ preserves what might be a rare fragment of the Parthian royal narrative, celebrating the Parthian king Pakores for finding and caring for the “the Banner of the Kaya¯ nids.”53 Similarly, T_a’a¯ lebı¯ records that the same Arsacid king Pakores sought to avenge Alexander’s murder of Da¯ra¯y ¯ı Da¯ra¯ya¯n and to punish Rome (Ru ¯ m), vocations and claims that Ardaxshir I and his successors soon took over with a vengeance.54 Much like the Sasanians, many Arsacid kings took the field to beat back incursions on their northern and eastern frontiers, and the Arsacid king Artabanes II died fighting nomadic incursions. Several of the Iranian heroes celebrated for their valor in battles against the Turanians conspicuously bear the names of Arsacid kings. These include Godarz (Gotarzes), Gew (Geo),

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Milad/Merhdad (Mithradates), and Farhad (Phraates), providing a legendary precedent for, and commentary on, contemporary conflicts with the steppe.55 This amalgamation of eastern Iranian religious cosmology, royal epic, semilegendary history, and local tales produced a potent political discourse that could be leveraged to make coherent sense of the world and to mobilize power bases. However, this production of politically useful epic history was by no means restricted to the Arsacid dynasty. Many of the courts of the Arsacid client kings and rivals, most notably those of Sistan, elaborated regional legends that extolled eastern heroes like Rostam or Shahriyar.56 Moreover, some of these legends revolved around specific sites, like Lake Hamun and the sanctuary of the Future Savior.57 Many of these legends were so popular and powerful that the Arsacids and, eventually, the Sasanian courts co-opted them and subordinated them to their official narratives. These tales survived in regional oral histories, which were integrated with official Sasanian narratives of the Xwa¯day-na¯mag.58 This process continued well into the Middle Ages when dynasties such as the Samanids, Tahirids, Saffarids, Ghaznavids, and Ziyarids used such legends to manufacture their own royal genealogy, and many of the texts bear the marks of their mediation and alteration.59 While no evidence attests to Kushan epics elaborated from the Iranian sacred historiographical tradition, we know that the Kushans defi nitely engaged with it and incorporated it into their royal self-presentation and possibly even their dynastic identity, if not to the extent that the Arsacids and Sasanians did. The Kushan numismatic pantheon is extremely broad and includes many gods whose names have Avestan equivalents, but which do not appear or, like xᵛarǝnah (Bactrian Pharro), are not represented anthropomorphically in western Iran. Among this vast pantheon the first king, Yima, appears in a rare coin of Huvishka, where he is identified as Iamšo. He wears a unique headdress on which a bird with outstretched wings perches, but his pose and accoutrements are similar to those of a Kushan king, with legs splayed, holding a spear and wearing a cape, implying a certain qualitative and functional similarity with the living sovereigns.60 Perhaps not coincidentally, this coin appears in the late second century, shortly after the first Kayanid name appears among the Arsacid kings: Osroes I (Av. Haosrauuah). In addition to its South Asian symbolisms, it is even possible that the goads that Kushan kings often hold in their right hand could have had alluded to Yima’s use of a goad to make the earth expand and grow, as recounted in the Avesta.61 The goad

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is especially prominent in another rare coin of Huvishka, where the king holds aloft this multivalent symbol while riding an elephant.62 These Arsacid and Kushan claims, no doubt, caused the early Sasanians to seethe with jealous rage and were a primary impetus for their own efforts to seize control of this tradition and reshape it around their dynastic vision. The Sasanian Empire (224–642 CE) was the last great Iranian empire to rule over Mesopotamia, Iran, and portions of the Caucasus and South and Central Asia before the coming of Islam.63 Supplanting the Arsacid Empire, the Sasanians brutally and efficiently welded together a centralized empire that extended from the Tigris to the Indus. Competing on a truly global stage, they supplanted Roman political and mercantile influence from the Red Sea to the South China Sea. The Sasanian Empire elaborated Iranian sacred cosmology to fit contemporary political realities and underpin the Sasanians’ place within it. Over the course of late antiquity, Sasanian art, architecture, and court culture created a new dominant global aristocratic common culture in western Eurasia, fascinating the Sasanians’ Roman, South Asian, and Chinese contemporaries, and deeply imprinting the world of Islam. Under the Sasanians, the ancient Iranian epic traditions, whose roots can be traced to the Avesta, and even the Zoroastrian religion itself, took the forms in which they are recognizable today. Although the Sasanians were a dynasty that disturbed the status quo of nearly five centuries of Arsacid rule, they were also quick to assert that they were rightful heirs of an ancient line of Iranian kings and heroes. This theme appears across a wide range of evidence, inflecting both propaganda intended to quell internal dissent as the Sasanians consolidated their hold over their new empire, and diplomatic discourse with the Romans.64 Yet, while the Sasanians steadfastly claimed to be continuators and revitalizers of ancient traditions, the ancient traditions themselves were not stable. As well as the eminent kings of their own dynasty, shortly after they seized power the Arsacids began to count as ancestors the historical, yet imperfectly understood Achaemenids, and by the late empire, even Alexander the Great. Amplifying a process that began before the dynasty took supreme power, the fi rst kings of the Sasanian dynasty, Ardaxshir I and Shabuhr I, fashioned a new vision of the past soon after they overthrew the Arsacids. The Sasanians created a new ideology of kingship that encompassed or superseded all previous Iranian traditions, especially those of the Arsacids, but also

those of the Kushans. They calculatingly seized or destroyed all sites and traditions that could be leveraged to buttress a claim to royal power.65 The Sasanians began an intensive campaign to delegitimize the Arsacids and replace them at the center of all traditions of Iranian kingship and Iranian history.66 The Sasanians blotted out the Arsacids from Iranian historiography, despite the fact that the Parthian families continued to play important roles in the empire.67 Several texts drawn from or reflecting the Sasanian epic history, the Xwada¯yna¯ mag, such as the History of Ardaxshir Son of Pabag (Ka¯rna¯mag ¯ı Ardaxšı¯r ¯ı Pa¯baga¯n), Tabari’s histories, the Tansarna¯ma, and the Ša¯hna¯ma, reduce the nearly five centuries of Arsacid control largely to a period of illegitimacy and fragmentation. According to the Ka¯rna¯mag, during this time Iran had been ruled by 120 tribal chiefs (kadag-xwada¯ y) before Ardaxshir I’s rise. This corresponds to the period of the “tribal chieftains” or “petty kings” (mulu¯k al-t.awa¯ʾef ), as Islamic historians such as T· abarı¯ describe the Arsacid era, during which Ardawa¯n IV was merely the king of “the mountain regions.”68 The Sasanians’ political cosmology and royal identity changed over the course of the empire. Because the bulk of our evidence reflects the late Sasanian worldview, it is hard to judge the extent to which the Kayanian elements were prominent in early Sasanian court discourse. Yet it is clear that both western “Persian” and eastern Iranian elements play an important role in the first century of the empire, followed by a progressively heavier emphasis on Avestan sacred cosmology and historiography. Despite the change in emphasis, or at least visibility, these two traditions were not understood to be in opposition. Much like the Sasanians’ active manipulation of Achaemenid ritual and artistic traditions in their homeland, these historically and culturally heterogeneous discursive traditions and cosmologies were fused and refashioned to produce a coherent explanation for—and tangible evidence of—the Sasanians’ sense of their place in history and present role in the world.69 The line of inquiry I wish to introduce shifts the emphasis to archaeological evidence and the architectural, visual, and ritual techniques by which the early Sasanian dynasty shaped the past. The last two decades have nurtured a growing scholarly debate on cultural memory in the work of historians, art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and sociologists. Although none speaks directly to the late antique experience, this debate offers some broadly useful insights. For example, the term “site of memory,” or lieu de mémoire, has

become a common critical term to speak about issues of the past, place, and collective memory in such a context.70 My usage of the term applies only to late antique Iran and contrasts with its sense in contemporary discourse, where such sites function as symbols of modern societies’ alienation from their past. In the late antique Iranian world, a site of memory more often than not was the portal to the past and the means by which the kings of kings actively participated in cultural memory. I argue that the Sasanian kings of kings approached the past and could gain control of it, or introduce dramatic changes to it, through the natural and built environments of their empire. I refer to these joint practical, artistic, and architectural efforts as technologies of memory, whereby certain images, structures, and activities facilitated a vital and compelling experience of the past. To fully understand the early Sasanians’ efforts to come to terms with the past, as archaeologists and art historians, we must widen our conceptual categories to view the interrelation of these elements. The early Sasanian kings adapted the ancient Iranian religious traditions of the “Iranian Expanse” into a political concept, which they transposed onto, and continually updated to match, the contemporary realities of Western Asia. Reflecting an early integration of local Persian traditions with eastern Iranian traditions, the first kings of the dynasty emphasized the Iranian character of their realm and introduced for the first time the ˉ ra¯nšahr), the “Empire political concept of Eranshahr (E 71 ˉ of the Iranians.” The word “Era¯n,” an archaic genitive plural that literally translates to “of the Iranians,” is first used in this political sense in Ardaxshir I’s official titulature.72 Ardaxshir I named himself “King of Kings of ˉ ra¯n) in his coinage and inscripthe Iranians” (ša¯ha¯n ša¯h E ˉ tions. The word “Era¯nšahr” is first attested in the inscription of Shabuhr I at Naqsh-e Rostam, but then becomes ubiquitous in both political and religious discourse.73 After his Roman and Kushan victories, Shabuhr I then expanded the Sasanian royal title to “King of Kings of ˉ ra¯n ud Aneˉra¯n), Iranians and Non-Iranians” (ša¯ha¯n ša¯h E which remained standard until the mid-fifth century.74 The inscriptions of Shabuhr I are one of the most important surviving primary sources from the Sasanian Empire, providing a view into early Sasanian history, court structure, royal funerary cult, onomastics, and much else. They are no less important for the view they provide of the early Sasanian imperial worldview and the expansion in Iranian political cosmology. Shabuhr I describes his Iranian and non-Iranian empire as including

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Persia, Parthia, Khuzistan, Meˉša¯n [Characene], Assyria, Adiabene, Arabia, Azerbaijan [Atropatene], Armenia, Georgia, Iberia, Albania, Bala¯saga¯n [Caspian Coast] as far as the Caucasus and the Alan Gates, all the Alborz Mountains, Media, Gurga¯n [Hyrcania], Merv, Herat [Aria] and all Khurasan, Kerman, the Land of the Sakas [former Drangiana and Arachosia], Turan [east-central Baluchistan], Makran [coastal Baluchistan and Indus delta], Paradan [Quetta], India [Middle Indus Valley], the Kingdom of the Kushans [Bactria] as far as Peshawar [Gandhara] and as far as Kashgar, Sogdiana, Tashkent, and Mazun [Oman] beyond the sea.75

Much as in the Achaemenid formulation, Pa¯rs lies at ˉ ra¯n ud Aneˉra¯n the center of Iran, and all provinces of E spiral out from this core. Indeed, this and other early Sasanian royal inscriptions parallel many other aspects of the Achaemenid inscriptions, including themes and even lexical choices. They do so to such an extent that they suggest that a discourse of kingship formed by the Achaemenids, and preserved in Persian cultural memory, influenced Ardaxshir I’s and Shabuhr I’s late antique formulation of power. Much like the Sasanians’ active manipulation of Achaemenid ritual, architectural, and artistic traditions in their homeland, these historically and culturally heterogeneous discursive traditions and cosmologies were fused and refashioned to produce a coherent experience of and tangible evidence for the Sasanians’ sense of their place in history and present role in the world. But no matter its referents, Sasanian Eranshahr was clearly a new creation for a new political reality. Among the fi rst Avestan traditions to appear in the Sasanian primary sources, in this case seals and inscriptions, is the concept and royal ideology of xwarrah, the luminous Royal Fortune of the rightful Iranian king.76 Numismatic evidence suggests that the Arsacids and Kushans experimented with representing the concept visually, either therio- or anthropomorphically as a selfstanding deity or through crown attributes, or in the case of the Kushans, the disk nimbus and, most dramatically, flames rising from the king’s shoulders. We have these iconographic hints only in the Arsacid and Kushan periods, but this concept played an increasingly prominent role in both artistic and narrative portrayals of the Sasanian king. Appearing in Middle Persian as xwarrah or farrah, the Royal Glory linked the Sasanian king to every rightful Aryan ruler since Yima. In the Zamya¯d Yašt, xᵛarǝnah is described as “belonging to the Aryan lands,” and “unobtainable” (axᵛarǝta-) by either non-Aryans or corrupt kings, from whom it would flee in the form of a bird or other animal.77 The xwarrah marked its carrier with divine favor and legitimacy through a somatic glow. The Sasanians took the ancient

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Iranian idea of a spiritual force empowering the rightful Iranian sovereign and developed its visual as well as ideological attributes. As the ancestors of the Kayanids and the culmination of this primordial heritage, only a member of the Sasanian bloodline could legitimately carry the xwarrah, and wear regalia and ornamental patterns associated with it. It at once confirmed the king’s legitimacy and marked him as a divine creature. By the late empire, the Sasanian court had produced the Xwada¯y-na¯mag (Book of Lords), which presented the dynasty as the heritors of an Iranian tradition of kingship that stretched back to the dawn of humanity.78 The Xwa¯day-na¯mag fashioned a continuous royal genealogy that traced the lineage of the Sasanian dynasty through the half-remembered Achaemenids to the mythological Kayanid dynasty. Although they had the same home province as the Achaemenids, spoke a descendant of their language, and lived among the ruins of their monuments, primordial kings and heroes such as Jamshed, the dragon slayer Fredon, or legendary Kayanid kings like Kay Husraw, eventually provided the Sasanians with a much richer store of legend and royal precedent and soon subsumed the native provincial Persian traditions. Not surprisingly, after the fourth century we no longer hear report in the Greek and Latin sources of Sasanian claims to the Achaemenid Empire in their quarrels with the Romans.79 The composition and spread of the Xwada¯y-na¯mag, in effect, converted Iranian oral history into a textual tradition. The text selected among a variety of versions of Iranian history, many of which still continued to circulate in oral form and textual form independently.80 The text wove them together with new material to create a coherent narrative that presented the Sasanian dynasty not only as the culmination of all traditions of Iranian kingship but as paradigmatic analogues of the Kayanid kings of hallowed antiquity. The royal comportment, courtly life, achievements, and enemies of the Kayanids are essentially one and the same as those of the Sasanians. The core of this amalgam of sacred legends and contemporary political realities is traditionally attributed to the reign of Husraw I, though the court chronicles of later Sasanian kings later augmented and continued it, such that a continuous history from the beginning of time to the fall of Husraw II and early reign of Yazdgird III appears to have existed at the time of the Arab conquest.81 The courtly Xwa¯day-na¯mag was one of several sources that later Muslim historiographers and geographers drew from in reconstructing preIslamic history as well as local oral histories. In the

centuries after the fall of the Sasanian Empire, the stories of the Xwa¯day-na¯mag, sometimes combined with its regional variations, were translated into both Arabic and New Persian along with other court chronicles, books of protocol, and wisdom literature.82 Along with oral traditions and poetic license, such translations were also among the sources for Ferdowsi’s stunning New Persian epic, the Shahnama.83 While it was rooted in ancient tradition, the Sasanians continually adapted Eranshahr to changing late antique realities, even while reciprocally redefi ning, relocating, and reshaping the very Iranian sacred cosmology that was informing it. Beginning in the fi fth century to its ultimate expansion under Husraw II, in the late empire, the Sasanians integrated the wider world of late antique Eurasia into this sacred political cosmology. The broader entity of Eranshahr became the focal point and locus of Sasanian identity, displacing Pars as the core of the empire and royal identity. Imperial discourse adapted the traditional Zoroastrian formulation and presented the empire as one and the same as Xᵛaniraθa.84 Whereas the Airiiana Vaeˉjah lay at the center of Xᵛaniraθa and all other nations and peoples constellated around it, the Sasanian king of kings reigned at the center of Eranshahr, the cosmological center of the earth. All other lands and peoples were constellated around him, over which he exercised ultimate sovereignty as “Lord of the Seven Continents” (haft kišwar xwada¯y).85 The Sasanians forged a powerful new pan-Iranian political identity and imperial cosmology that combined the sophisticated sacred cosmology and clear ethical systems of Zoroastrianism with the popularity, ubiquity, and even entertainment value of Iranian epic.86 The Kayanid royal identity and Avestan worldview cast Iran’s troubles and setbacks as part of a long series of struggles with the forces of evil and provided meaning and context even for disastrous defeats. The Sasanian king’s mastery over these traditions of kingship won him loyalty and cooperation from the empire’s nobility and priestly elite and provided a template for behavior (even if those templates were very recently updated) that cast the sovereign’s evolving relationship with his nobles as preordained.87 The Sasanians were not moved by poetic or antiquarian interest to do this: this was a project that had deep political ramifications. Their ambition was nothing less than to rewrite the past to cohere with their new vision of Iranian identity and to portray their present political aspirations as the inevitable culmination of millennia of Iranian history.

Of course, a wide gulf existed between ideology, art, and realpolitik, yet the important point of intersection that gave Sasanian ideas of empire such power was the Sasanians’ ability to encompass and define the current state of affairs in Eurasian politics. The Sasanian vision of the world mapped onto contemporary geopolitical realities much better than Roman claims of absolute domination over the entire oikoumene. It had a “truthy” feel. This is a crucial point: in contrast to Roman, Chinese, and Indian royal cosmologies, which treated the extent of their empires as “the world,” and all other entities as merely barbarians or subjects, the Sasanian kings self-consciously defi ned themselves as kings of kings in relation to a wider Eurasian community of sovereigns, and their cosmology accommodated this reality.88 The Sasanian kings used this subtle but very important distinction to great advantage: great sovereigns and rich empires could exist outside of the kingdom of Iran, yet the Iranian king of kings was the font of all legitimacy and their divinely ordained master. Furthermore, according to the Iranian conception of the past, the kings of the world were indeed brothers, not just in a metaphorical sense, but through an ancient lineage.89 In those texts that reflect the late Sasanian worldview of the Xwada¯y-na¯mag, Fredon the grandson of Jamshed and the last king to rule over the entire world divided his kingdom among his three sons, givˉ ra¯n, to Eraj, and the lesser realms of ing the best land, E “Rome” and “Turkestan” to his lesser sons, Salm and Tur. The story grew from one of several ancient Iranian “fi rst king” myths detectable in the Avesta that were eventually integrated into a single narrative to form the Iranian epic history.90 The story of the division of the earth was elaborated and updated several times over in the process of integrating it into the official Sasanian narrative, and, after the fall of the empire, it was adapted into the later medieval Book of Kings.91 Paralleling the relationship between Roman and Sasanian sovereigns, these primordial kings of Iran and Rome were brothers and enemies.92 Even the customary diplomatic exchanges that developed between Rome and Iran were subtly inflected with this political cosmology. Both courts overtly treated their brother as a true equal, while presenting their relationship in much different terms in internal discourse. By the sixth century, the Romans were well aware of the nuances of Sasanian cosmology and coded references to it in diplomatic discourse as well as how the Sasanians were spinning their relationship to the rest of the world. While the Sasanian worldview was the point of genesis for the

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shared Roman-Persian diplomatic discourse of brotherhood, its elaboration eventually developed into a collaborative project, which I have explored in much greater depth in an earlier study.93 As the Iranian portrayal of the past and present began to have more currency on the global stage than that of the Romans, the Romans were forced to adapt to their new role as “brother” of the Sasanian king, whether they liked it or not.94 The descendants of Tur and the lords of the “Turanian” steppe presented a different set of problems for the Sasanians.95 Unlike the Romans, who at most gained some ground in strategic border areas or refused to pay their “tribute,” Iran’s eastern enemies, including several dynasties of Huns and Turks, succeeded in detaching most of the Iranian east from the empire. The Huns established kingdoms and chiefdoms that extended over lands that the Sasanians had understood to be firmly held by the empire of the Iranians, including not only the former Kushanshah’s holdings in northern India but, more worryingly, the eastern Iranian lands of Bactria and Sogdiana.96 While Persia’s confl icts with Rome are better known and documented in greater detail, the Sasanians expended a great deal of resources expanding, defending, and reshaping their northern borders in the wake of the rise of several successive powerful kingdoms and tribal confederacies ruled by various dynasties of Huns, and eventually the Türks.97 These eastern powers threatened the Sasanians’ claim to rule the Iranian world. The military and ideological threats of these “Turanian” menaces spurred the Sasanians to reassert control over not only the Iranian east, but eastern Iranian sacred cosmology. The Sasanians were able to fully reassert control over the east only in the late sixth century, when sillographic, archaeological, and textual evidence attests to its reintegration into the empire.98 In the time intervening, when they could no longer hold the frontiers, the Sasanians were forced to reinscribe the borders of Iran and even build new “primordially ancient” sacred sites at a safe distance from these threats.

The Conceptual and the Living World Having introduced the diverse range of dynasties, kingdoms, and empires that engaged or laid claim to Iranian royal identities, we now turn to concepts of space, time, and reality in Iranian religious traditionsand these dynasties’ conceptual and material efforts to reshape Iranian identity and the past, present, and future through the natural and built environments.

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Iranian imperial cosmologies grew from the sacred cosmologies and existential convictions of Iranian religions. They inflect the worldviews and expressive cultures of Iranian kingship, which both shaped and were shaped by them. While they did not equally influence all peoples and empires under consideration in this book, these concepts run as an undercurrent through many political formulations. Just as importantly they affect many dynasties’ relationship with the built and natural environments. One cannot understand the imperial without the religious, and at many key junctures royal will actively manipulated religious discourse as much as it drew from it. Imperial and religious discourse were facets of the same ancient elite effort to theorize and shape reality. Early Iranian religions and later Zoroastrianism in all stages of its historical development consistently emphasize three fundamental realities: the double dimension of existence, the extreme, combative antagonism of good and evil, and the temporary nature of finite time in which this combat takes place.99 These concepts were not stable or present through all periods, and numerous variants and counterformulations also circulated, but they are indeed a persistent force in Iranian culture. They are inherent in the worldview and cosmology of the Avesta and elaborated fully in Zoroastrianism’s late antique and early medieval Middle Persian religious texts and are detectable in various Greek and Roman writings drawing from or reporting on Persian religion and customs as well as Zoroastrian variants and “heresies.” Old Avestan texts describe the material plane of existence, which is the one that we currently live in, as the one that “has bones” (astuuan∙ t-) or the one that is “living” (gaeˉiθiia¯-, from which derives the Middle Persian term geˉtı¯g).100 Everything in the living, material world also participates in the spiritual dimension of existence, that which is “of thought” (Old Av. manahiia-, Young Av. mainiiauua-, Mid. Pers. meˉnoˉg).101 The oldest Avestan texts are vague about the origin of evil. Like some later variants of Zoroastrianism, they hint at preexistent twin spirits whose opposition generates this existential conflict: the “Life-Giving Spirit” (Old Av. Spən∙ ta- Mainiiu-) and the “Dark” or “Evil Spirit” (Old Av. An∙ gra- Mainiiu-, Mid. Pers. Ahreman).102 In the Old Avestan texts, Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, stands aloof from these two spirits, though in the Young Avesta and in the Pahlavi books, the Wise Lord directly faces the Evil Spirit. The creation of the living, material world, along with finite, moving time, arose from the presence of evil and

its potential assault; ironically, creation is in effect a sacrifice. The most detailed account comes from the Middle Persian text the Bundahišn (The Primordial Creation).103 According to the Bundahišn, all originally exist in infi nite, limitless time (Av. zruuan- akarana-, Mid. Pers. zurwa¯n ¯ı akana¯rag). The Wise Lord sensed the Evil Spirit’s impending assault and, therefore, changed the nature of reality to avoid direct contact with the Evil Spirit and entrap him. The Wise Lord fi rst interrupted infinite time and created 12,000 years of finite time so that the inevitable conflict between the two would not be eternal.104 During the first 3,000 years, the Wise Lord sought the Evil Spirit and asked him to participate in creation and make peace, which the Evil Spirit rejected. The Wise Lord then challenged the Evil Spirit to a cosmic duel at a fi xed time and place, which the Evil Spirit accepted, thinking the Wise Lord was weak, not knowing that this time and place, that is, finite time and creation, were, in effect, the trap and the means by which the Wise Lord would ultimately extinguish him. In other words, in ancient Iranian religious theorizing, time and creation were weaponized. During this pause, the Wise Lord created heaven, the primordial elements of fire, air, water, and earth, human and animal life, and put existence in its proper order (Old Av. aš. a-, Old Pers. arta-) in the spiritual realm. This enticed the Evil Spirit to attack. Temporarily forestalling his advance, the Wise Lord temporarily stunned the Evil Spirit through a powerful mantric utterance and knocked him unconscious for 3,000 years. During this period, the Wise Lord fashioned the living, material world (geˉtı¯g), which existed in a perfect unmoving state, wholly aligned with the world of thought (meˉnoˉg). At the end of this 3,000-year cycle, the Evil Spirit awoke and began his assault (Young Av. *aibigati-, Mid. Pers. eˉbgat) with a cosmic invasion, smashing a hole in the dome of the heavens and swarming forth with all his demons (Av. daeˉuua-, Mid. Pers. pl. deˉwa¯n). The creatures of the living, “bony” world, which are the creation of Ahura Mazda, participate in both the material and the conceptual worlds. Evil, that is, the Evil Spirit and his demonic creatures, only truly exists in the mental realm, though it can wreak havoc on the living world by possessing and perverting it. This assault on the Wise Lord’s living world engendered a mixed state (Mid. Pers. gumeˉzišn) where evil has penetrated into all aspects of creation, bringing about corruption, darkness, death, and disorder, forcing things to deviate far from their original state of perfection. The Evil Spirit killed, destroyed, or corrupted all of

the Wise Lord’s creations, bringing death to living creatures, smoke and ash to fire, jagged mountains to once useful land, salt to water, and so on. He filled the world with xrafstras, noxious, polluting violent creatures, brought forth from his own filth.105 The Evil Spirit could hack out perverted “adversaries” or “counterfeits” (paitiia¯ra-) from the material world to oppose the Wise Lord’s good creations and further sow chaos and destruction, including a variety of earthly and planetary demons, but could not create anything substantially new and living himself.106 While the Wise Lord is the father of Order, the Evil Spirit brings its disorderly, deceiving, unreal counterpart: the Lie (druj-). This opposition between the divine, orderly Truth and demonic Lie (Old Pers. drau ga-, Mid. Pers. druz) clearly inflects ˆ later Achaemenid and Sasanian royal discourse and is a cardinal feature of later Zoroastrian thought.107 The final cycle of 3,000 years begins with the revelation of Zoroaster and closes with the coming of the final future Savior or Revitalizer (Av. saošiian∙ t-, Mid. Pers. Soˉša¯ns), a posthumously born son of Zoroaster.108 This final 3,000-year cycle, in which the historical dynasties understood themselves to live, was a time of constant battles between the forces of good and evil, with severe defeats on both sides, but ultimately leading to the final defeat of the Evil Spirit, his expulsion from the cosmos, and his ultimate annihilation in the void, consumed by the demoness of Greed. In these last days, the great kings and heroes of the past would return to battle and defeat the demons, and in one version Kay Husraw will reign as king over the Sevenfold World with the Savior as chief priest.109 The Savior performs the final sacrifice, which leads to the fi nal Renovation of the world. The dead will rise and be purified in a sea of molten metal, and the Wise Lord will make the earth “wondrous” (Av. frašoˉ.kərəti-, Mid. Pers. frašagird).110 At this point the living, material world (geˉtı¯g) is again perfectly aligned with its original state of perfection in the world of thought (meˉnoˉg), and the Wise Lord reestablished infinite time.111 While only the late antique and early medieval Pahlavi texts provide detailed knowledge of Zoroastrian doctrines of time, the Avesta alludes to the coming end of finite time with the postapocalyptic Renovation of the world, and the Achaemenid royal inscriptions engaged such concepts. Leaving aside problems of the multiple and reciprocal paths of influence among Iranian, Jewish, and Christian eschatologies, these concepts both preexisted and survived the coming of Alexander. The experience of living in the world within a constant passage of time, seasons fluctuating between

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extreme heat and cold, with good and evil heavenly bodies moving overhead, was that of living with constant reminders of the effects of the primordial demonic assault on Ahura Mazda’s perfect creations. All evil, small to large, was the mark of the Evil Spirit. This fallen world, while imperfect, was far from simply hopeless wreckage. The present state of the world was a battlefield between good and evil, and existence—that is, the earth and cosmos and the movement of time—was in effect an enormous though ultimately temporary trap, devised to capture, defeat, and eventually rid the world of Ahreman and all his evil works. Ahura Mazda and Good Creations fi rst existed in limitless time. In order to rid the world of Ahreman and ensure that the effects of his assault would not continue for eternity, Ahura Mazda created finite time and tricked the Evil Spirit into entering into this fi nite state, though the Wise Lord himself remained outside of it. Although Ahreman’s continued evil influence was felt in the world, the very fact that he entered the world ensured that his days were numbered. Although all elements of the living world have suffered from the Evil Spirit’s primordial assault and continued assaults, the goodness inherent in creation was worth fighting for, preserving, and augmenting. Every godly person was expected to actively fight this battle, each according to his or her abilities. While a private person would be expected to plant their fields, clean rivers and lakes, defend their bodies against demonic assaults, and kill noxious creatures (Av. xrafstra-), kings would perform such beneficent activities on a much larger scale.112 We have seen how both the Achaemenid and the Sasanian kings promoted the earth’s fecundity and saw that this was not only an important royal vocation, but an activity that would ultimately heal the earth and bring it closer to its prelapsarian order. In much the same way, ridding the world of noxious creatures and evidence of the touch of Ahreman, from insects to corpses to internal or foreign enemies, cleansed creation of a bit of the effects of Ahreman. This is especially evident in the two Persian empires ruled by the Achaemenid and Sasanian dynasties: the Lie infects Darius I’s empire and seduces his enemies to sedition and disorder just as the Sasanian kings’ internal and external rivals are corrupted by Ahreman who leads them to speak and act demonically. The dynasts of the Iranian world approached the present cosmological order of things, as well as the distant past and coming future, as tangible, powerful forces that could be actively shaped and controlled. As

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they consolidated power over their kingdoms or empires, Iranian sovereigns shaped the past, and thus their present place in history, through the built and natural environments. Epic poems and historical texts might keep the memory of the past alive and religious discourse might articulate a cosmological vision, yet these kings of kings, their court, and elements of their populace actually experienced them spatially and practically. Sites, and the architectural spaces and visual material that augment them, could support and literally substantiate new—or “newly ancient”—conceptions of the past and future.113 Changing such sites of power and memory, thus changing the environmental and practical “scaffolding,” had the potential to alter human experiences and understandings of the past or present, augmenting, defi ning, shaping, fusing, or destroying them.114 From the recreation of Achaemenid sacrifices among the satrapal dynasties of Anatolia to the Sasanians’ efforts to build new “primordial” sites of memory to emplace a new sacred cosmology, such spatial interventions and innovations provided the tangible foundations of royal discourse, sculpting, though not rigidly determining, their subjects’ subjectivities.

Understanding Ancient Minds and Bodies in the Conceptual and Living Worlds The relationship between humans and materiality, be it characterized as commodities, tools, objects, or “things,” has occupied several disciplinary subfields, which in turn made significant contributions to the study of the ancient world. Central to many of these approaches, either implicitly or explicitly stated, is the observation that human agency is bound up with the material world. Social and physical worlds alike are driven by intertwined “intra-actions” among humans and matter, or in a more anthropological sense, tools, objects, and structures.115 Likewise “taut entanglements” between humans and things, either of their own making, or colonial imposition, can constrain or direct human action and create relationships of dependency.116 These, in turn, can serve as “mediators” and “intermediaries,” or “proxies” and “delegates,” for their makers and users.117 Yet, unlike some anthropological theories of object agency or those often attributed to the so-called new materialist turn, I locate agency squarely in the human realm.118 This is especially important when dealing with royal expressions, since such ascription of agency to inanimate objects or sites is a perennial tool for obfuscating the sources of political

power and hiding the hand of those who wield it when it is advantageous. This is important to mention up front. While this book integrates a range of artistic, architectural, material, and textual evidence, the approach that governs it is an historical methodology that is deliberately humanistic and anthropocentric, though not necessarily focused on human thought, activity or environments alone.119 At the most basic level, the work of the history of art, architecture, and archaeology is interpreting the relationship between humans and their visual, spatial, and material creations, personally, transgenerationally, and transculturally. However, unlike certain sociological or anthropological approaches, valid in their own right, which tend to move from the material and ethnographic evidence toward establishing interpretive theoretical paradigms, historians are also interested in a critical analysis of both overarching patterns and the unique particularities of specific structures, sites, images, or objects, not to mention the complex interaction among patrons, ritual technicians, artists, craftsmen, builders, and viewers and users, something that is often downplayed or elided in other disciplinary approaches. We create and shape our objects, images, structures, plants, animals, environments, and so on, and afterward they may shape us, but without placing human agency or experience at its center, the interpreter either consciously or unconsciously has moved away from the realm of humanistic historical inquiry to a realm of inquiry that is detached from both historical context and humanity. “Space” and “place” are critical terms that now have a long history, and many fields of study in the social sciences and humanities have absorbed the results of their respective “spatial turns.”120 This book deals with a range of spaces and places, so it is worth offering some explanation of my use of these and related terms, such as “imperial space,” “architectonic space,” “topographies” and “topologies of power,” and “sites of memory.” These encompass and involve both the built and the natural environments, thus architectural and urban spaces and places within cities and cultural landscapes.121 I fi nd it important to maintain a distinction between space and place, though some approaches argue for the primacy of one over the other, while others use them interchangeably. I use the term “space” to capture a larger overarching conception, theoretical formulation, or experience of natural, architectonic, or even visual environments: thus, the spaces of cosmological theorizing, such as the “Sevenfold World,” “Tripar-

tite Heavens,” or “Iranian Expanse” of ancient Iranian religious traditions; the Achaemenids’, Seleucids’, or Sasanians’ discursive, monumental, and visual articulations and delimitations of the lands they held; or the conception or experience of a larger sum of natural, architectonic, or urban features. I use the term “place” to refer to discrete locations in space, relative social positions, or time and what “takes place” there. Slippage between places and spaces in the conceptual world, on the one hand, and the material world, on the other, is implicit in my usage. There are many instances where architectonic spaces, though they are discrete places in their own right, were constructed or used to represent and affect the macrocosm by shaping the perceptions of the material world and motivating or shaping behavior in relation to it. However, while conceptual and material spaces and places are implicated and affect each other, I am most interested in how they interact with “practiced” or “lived space”: where human lives unfold, with their significance continually made and remade through what humans think and do in relation to or with them, including both quotidian acts and highly structured ritual practices.122 These meaningful places were not simply carriers of meaning but the actual physical forces that shape the social, cognitive, and sensorial universe enactively and reciprocally.123 We return to this problem explicitly or implicitly several times in the course of this study. This methodological stance with its emphasis on practice builds on ideas I have developed in previous works, which have focused on the reciprocal shaping of practice and natural, architectonic, and urban environments, both improvised and quotidian movement through space and highly structured ritual activity. While landscapes, urban environments, and architectonic space all provide different experiences and afford different opportunities due to their physical properties, they formed only part of a wider, overlapping conceptual and experiential continuum because they were bound together into a meaningful whole by human practice.124 Ritual activities developed reciprocally and interdependently with their natural, architectonic, and visual contexts. Sovereigns created architectural and visual environments with the knowledge that they would provide a focus for ritual activities. These ritual activities, in turn, commented on and shaped further additions and interventions. As the ritual and artistic elements of imperial ceremony were interwoven, it is not surprising that an alteration in the fabric of one had implications for that

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of the other. A change in ritual practice could imply a new meaning for a structure or natural space, and new structures or images within a ritual environment could modify the performance and significance of a ritual.125 Highly structured ritual spaces were designed to envelop participants in a cosmologically perfected experience. Audience halls, funerary monuments, gardens, or temples could manifest a phenomenological experience of melding between earthly and supposedly divine realities, as did mountains, rivers, lakes, and trees, since at many points Iranian religious activity extended into the natural environment, which in turn called out certain natural features as material instantiations of a higher reality. Landscape and the built environment were often literally “structuring structures” that mutually sustained and shaped royal ideologies and daily human practice, with none exercising absolute control over the others.126 As quantitative methodologies have progressively dominated landscape archaeology, the field has more and more approached natural and urban environments as abstract, data-producing entities. Such contributions are certainly important in their own right; however, they do not engage the central problem of the interaction between space, culture, power, and identity. While it draws from such material as appropriate, this book approaches this problem from a different disciplinary and methodological perspective. The last decades have produced a growing debate in the history of art, archaeology, and architecture interested in understanding landscape, along with cities and structures, as not only streams of data or spatial “modernist art objects” divorced from human activity and persisting as objects of aesthetic contemplation, but vital forces shaping human lives.127 Natural, architectonic, and urban spaces afforded different possibilities of thought, experience, and activity, while constraining others. Building new cities or structures, or drawing attention to new types of landscape features, in turn, opened or foreclosed certain types of experiences. In the ancient world, where we are dealing with social relationships marked by extreme asymmetry in control of resources and political power, those in power took as their prerogative the privilege of manipulating and changing both sites and identities. Such spaces existed only as abstractions until someone interacted with them. The production of these “practiced spaces” and the individual or collective “spatial narratives” that animated them always unfolded through a dialectic process of those building them and those living in them. Even highly controlled urban,

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architectonic, or natural spaces were subject to counternarratives and subversion on the part of those who encountered or lived in them. Monumental rock reliefs and inscriptions, either carved into the living rock or on ruins, played an especially important role as royal technologies of power and memory. They could translate ephemeral ritual performance, or even a brief movement through a site, into a permanent presence in culturally significant space, or compel a relationship of continuity among vastly disparate monuments or historical actors. Inscriptions could tangibly collapse gulfs of time that might separate two patrons, as is most vividly illustrated by Shabuhr I’s great trilingual inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam, which the Sasanian king carved on the tower of the Kaʿba-ye Zardosht, built by Darius I over five hundred years before. By making subsequent sculptural, inscriptional, or visual additions to the same site, patrons, in effect, imposed new meanings and contexts on old images and inscriptions. Reliefs and inscriptions could articulate and meaningfully knit the features of natural and architectonic spaces into a larger semantically and politically powerful whole. From this point of view, rock reliefs and inscriptions, especially those carved into the living rock, intervened not only in space, but in perceptions of time. The medium was the message, and that message was permanency.128 As rock reliefs accumulated at certain sites, carving one became a powerful tool by which a sovereign could connect himself with a generalized past, or a specific line of dynastic predecessors. In the early Sasanian dynasty especially, rock reliefs were a necessary and expected physical and visual expression of a king’s legitimacy and place within a dynastic tradition. Iranian royal identity and cultural memory, which enjoyed such impressive endurance, depended on the interdependent survival of both cultural memory and praxis, on the one hand, and material and architectonic remains, on the other. When one was damaged, disrupted, or destroyed, it had to be reconstructed or reinvented, but not without reciprocal changes to the other. While often relegated to the periphery of art and archaeological studies, or simply used as a diagnostic tool, architectural ornament and sculptural styles could also play an exceptionally powerful role in defi ning royal identity and negotiating a patron or viewer’s relationship with past or contemporary traditions. Alongside its formal functions, such as framing, filling, linking, or just pleasurably embellishing, I argue that one of the most important vocations of ornament within the context of elite tastes and display was its power to com-

municate political messages and define identities. As an important subcomponent of its role in “compelling a relationship between objects or works of art and viewers and users,” ornament, and often ornament perceived as exotic (or venerable), could defi ne the patron’s, as well as the viewer’s, relationship with the structure or object with respect to their own social place or elite status. Because of its open-ended semiotic and symbolic possibilities, ornament could provide a level of allusion and flexibility that highly defined, even legislated, imperial regalia and iconographies could not.129 This is especially important to keep in mind as we consider the afterlife of Achaemenid architectural ornament. Often taken for granted or explained as representing a “native” or “regional style,” the appearance of newly carved Achaemenid-style architectural ornament in a structure should be seen as resulting from a strategy of choice on the part of the patron similar to the decision to integrate Greek architectural styles. Indeed the juxtaposition of Greek and Persian architectural styles is one of the hallmarks of Seleucid architecture across their empire and appears in the official buildings of the Greco-Bactrians, Parthians, and the postsatrapal dynasties of Anatolia and Armenia, most notably that of the Orontids of Armenia and Sophene.130 Similarly, the Sasanians deliberately translated Achaemenid door and window frames, complete with cavetto cornices, into their contemporary masonry and stucco work, and their early rock reliefs integrated Persian sculptural and compositional motifs into those drawn from contemporary Roman sculptural traditions. This rebirth of Persian ornament and sculptural style did not arise simply from “regional” tradition, but was cultivated to negotiate a

new relationship with the ancient ruins and legacy of an ancient Iranian past, however these later dynasties might have interpreted their origin and history. The material remnants of ancient structures, rock reliefs, or inscriptions (e.g., at Persepolis and Nash-e Rostam), or persistent yet malleable memories of rituals, art objects, or buildings (e.g., Mithradates VI’s or Shabuhr I’s sacrifices or Husraw II’s Kayanid Takht-e Taqdis), acted as points of spatial and temporal collapse where Iranian memory could be leveraged and shaped.131 While varying formulations of Iranian royal identity and memory crystallized under specific dynasties, these spaces and places and discourses of kingship existed before and persisted beyond their areas of control or the lifetimes of their empires. From this point of view, the landscapes, cities, structures, rock-cut images, and the epigraphic, textual, or archaeological remnants of ritual practices under study are “assemblages” not just in the term’s usage in archaeology but in the rhizomatic sense of Deleuze and Guattari. Although these theorists introduced the concepts for a very different theoretical and political purpose, this characterization could also be said of Iranian royal identity and the spaces and places that shaped and contested it. Iranian memory and royal identity arose from many disparate temporal actors and material, discursive, and practical modes of “encoding,” manipulation, and expression, occurring over innumerable historical moments of growth and rupture, and processes of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization.”132 Every renovation or rebirth of the Persian legacy marked a profound rupture with the past and required a creative reinvention of that legacy, but one that could never be the last word.

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PART ONE

ORDERING THE EARTH

Let us begin by turning directly to the natural and built environmental foundations of Iranian royal power and the means of effecting their transformation. Royal discourse, articulated in an inscription or the pictorial arts, had the potential to present the space of a kingdom or empire as a crystalline divinely conceived whole. The visual portrayal and ritual enactment of the world in microcosm at palaces such as Persepolis and Susa, or in spectacles like Antiochus IV’s massive spectacle at Daphne, offered representations of their imperial cosmology. Yet, these royal or imperial ideals were actually emplaced through a pointillated “topography of power” built or enacted at innumerable places throughout their lands under the control of the king, agents, or proxies.1 In the following chapters, I use the phrase “topography of power” to capture this interrelationship between the network of meaningful places and the activities that they encouraged, curtailed, or sustained, and the political or religious formulations that tied them together into a larger whole. These conceptual and physical topographies of power were the point of contact between imperial or religious cosmological formulations and their emplacement within the world in numerous local iterations. In speaking of topographies of power we are not just dealing with an abstract, geometrical space of imperial theorizing, but the lived and practiced spaces and places, with their rich array of sensory and emotional experience, and memories, both personal and collective. These included experiences occurring countless times over in numerous parts of an empire and the massive spectacles organized at mobile courts, palaces, and paradises, where inhabitants of the empire were gathered and from which they then returned to their daily lives or homelands impressed with emotionally laden, multisensory experiences of empire. From feasts held within paradise enclosures and banqueting halls to executions and mutilated bodies displayed at the entrance to cities, palaces, or royal tents, the imperial topography of power was animated by this complex interplay between royal shaped built and natural environments, punctiliar or iterative ritual practice, and the varieties of human experience that such multisensory and multiaffective environments

intended to shape. This constant mutual shaping of sites, activities, and architectonic or natural environments might create and maintain a loose relationship with the imperial center that was nonetheless felt in the daily lives of a regions’ inhabitants or could bring these sites into a close relationship with the imperial center that was closely watched and maintained by imperial authorities or proxies. A successful ruler must outflank his underlings and opponents, not only organizationally but symbolically.2 When a new dynasty took power, it was faced with the challenge of co-opting or effacing and replacing the topography of power of the regions it incorporated, be they the infrastructure of an overthrown empire or the living topographies of dynastic or imperial rivals. This is nowhere more pronounced than during reign of the Seleucid dynasty, which forms a pivotal point of change in the period covered in chapters 1–6. The Seleucid dynasty imposed a new topography of power that rendered highly significant Achaemenid palaces like Persepolis and Susa not only obsolete, but converted them into veritable anti-monuments, which contrasted with their own gleaming new palaces and cities. The victorious dynasty deliberately left structures or sites that previously stood at the core of a defeated regime’s royal identity to decay and fall into ruin, excised from the core of the new empire, as at Persepolis, or the living urban centers of a newly refounded city, as at Susa. Seleucid Iran provided the foundation of the resurgent Iranian kingship of the Arsacids, and the shifts in Western Asia’s center of gravity reverberated well into the fi rst centuries of Islam. While the Achaemenids established sites that tenaciously retained their significance for centuries, Iran would not experience such a dramatic reordering of the symbolic topography of power as occurred under the Seleucids until the Sasanian period. Yet even as the Seleucids’ transformation of the Achaemenid Empire was foundational, the Arsacids oversaw the emergence of a new Iranian architecture of power whose legacy was equally long-lived and powerful. Iranian sovereigns built their empires within culturally rich and ruin-filled landscapes, whose features they strategically claimed, reshaped, or effaced to support

21

their new royal visions. The vestiges of defunct or semilegendary kingdoms, both the material remnants and those preserved in local legends, could serve as moorings for a new imperial vision. A tension often existed between local traditions, memories, and interpretations of places and the new roles of those places within the new imperial topography of power. This imperial relationship did not dictate all manner of daily interaction between the sites, their cults, and the inhabitants who visited them, but cumulatively, it could reshape or even alienate land- or cityscapes from their previous significances and populations. This is evident, for example, in the successive reinterpretations of Bisotun effected through rock reliefs and cult, or the Achaemenid and

22

PART ONE

Seleucid refoundations and reorientations of Susa, or at Parthian Nippur, where the ancient sanctuary of Enlil became a new Parthian fortress, or in the reuse of Urartian, Assyrian, or Hittite ruins and monumental or cultic traditions by the Perso-Macedonian dynasties of the Caucasus and Anatolia. And despite the gulf in time and memory that separated them, the artistic and architectural relics of the Achaemenid Empire were central in shaping later Iranian royal identities, especially in Persia itself. Once rebuilt or reanimated by ritual, these sites could provide anchors for, and tangible “proof” of, the veracity of newly devised visions of the past and royal identities, such as the necropolis of the Achaemenids provided for the early Sasanians.

CHAP TER T WO

Building the First Persian Empire

The Achaemenid king portrayed himself as one of Ahura Mazda’s Good Creations. He and his empire were the means by which the Great God exerted his will (Old Pers. vašna-) on earth. As “his man” on earth, the king was called on to make the earth whole again after its primordial fracture, degradation, and confusion by the Evil Spirit and his agent: the Lie (drau ga-). The Persian ˆ kings sought nothing less than to heal the earth’s wounds and unite all peoples and lands (dahya¯va), placing each back in their proper place and returning the earth to divinely ordained order so that humans might experience once again primordial God-given happiness (šiya¯ti-).1 The Achaemenids relentlessly deployed a kaleidoscope of visual media, building projects, and ritual performances to make the Achaemenid vision a tangible reality. Evidence from across Achaemenid Western Asia suggests a remarkably consistent empire-wide repertoire.2 As we will see several times in this study, the ruins of the Achaemenids loomed large over the horizons of Persia and the ancient Iranian world long after the dynasty’s fall. Here we will consider the role of Achaemenid royal and satrapal residences in forming an empire-wide topography of power, especially those that play an important, though altered, role under the Seleucids, Arsacids, and Sasanians. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the Seleucids drastically reshaped and repurposed the major royal residences, breaking any direct continuity of use at most. Nevertheless, the ruins of these royal palaces in the core of the former empire as well as the remnants of satrapal estates in the provinces soon served different purposes as Middle Iranian kings reshaped not only the structures but the Persian royal legacy to fit new conceptions of the Iranian past and

their connection to them. Long after the sites and structures had lost any direct association with the Achaemenid dynasty itself, they remained as tangible connections to Iran’s history.

Achaemenid Royal and Satrapal Residences Persian royal and satrapal palace complexes imposed a powerful and enduring architectonic presence and imperial coding on the landscape. Providing a permanent infrastructural counterpart to more ephemeral manifestations of imperial power, such as military campaigns and royal progresses, they organized the administrative, economic, military, and ritual apparatuses through which power emanated, shaping the lives of all who lived in their shadow. They were the infrastructural and monumental counterparts to the empire’s intricate systems of extraction, redistribution, consumption, and control, which reshaped Western Asia’s economic, demographic, and social realities. While we will examine their palace architecture in greater detail below, here we consider the nature and impact of these residence cities in aggregate. By convention the Persian palaces and their associated settlements are often interchangeably called “administrative centers,” “residence cities,” or just “palaces.” These terms capture important aspects of their nature, but require certain explanations and qualifications.3 Achaemenid royal and satrapal residences combined a number of functions, serving simultaneously as administrative and economic nodal points, military strongholds, and just as importantly for this study, ceremonial stages. The Persian Empire had no single capital per se, nor was any single palace considered to be the true royal

23

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MAP 1. Important cities and sites of the Achaemenid period. Map courtesy of Anthony J. Lauricella.

seat. Power resided where the king did, including the king’s tent in his mobile court.4 The palaces and the mobile court alike served as nexus points of administrative, economic, logistical, and ritual activity, much of which migrated with the king. Indeed, treasures, furniture, and foodstuffs disbursed, displayed, and consumed in the mobile courts matched those of the royal residences. The “Table of King,” for example, was responsible for feeding thousands of courtiers, functionaries, soldiers, and priests dependent on the royal household.5 It was a major institution, which required incredibly complex accounting and prodigious logistical capacity, and was accordingly staffed by an army of administrators and overseers, as well as cooks and servants, who traveled where the king went. The arrival of the king’s mobile court redirected local and regional resources, which would be consumed in public sacrifices and banquets. The grand public feasts of the great

24

CHAP TER T WO

royal sacrifices or the richness of the king’s table presented spectacles of imperial abundance and divine favor, which found their complement in artificial famines created through scorched earth or deliberate deprivation to bring low enemies or rebellious provinces. At both their palaces and mobile courts, the Achaemenid kings inscribed their vision on the bodies of their subjects. Those whose actions or status brought them favor received gifts of clothing, jewelry, tableware, and rich foods, marking them as imperial creatures. Conversely, the bodies of individuals who rebelled would be stripped of such marks of distinction, the influences of the Lie made visually manifest through violent, disfiguring tortures.6 In their progresses, the Persian king could even mark out for special reverence superlative natural specimens, especially those that figured within Iranian cosmology and were understood to be species, such as plane trees or pomegranates, that held something of the

earth’s primordial unity, which they themselves sought to restore.7 Surviving administrative documents, such as the Persepolis Fortification Archive, and corroborating historical sources suggest that all major residence cities functioned as superregional administrative, economic, and military centers and were occupied by a satrap when the king was not present. The palaces and their surrounding installations collected and distributed commodities, foodstuffs, and monetary and symbolic resources. Economically or strategically important satrapal capitals, such as Sardis or Bactra, served these same administrative functions and enjoyed similar associated infrastructure, including archives, storehouses, paradise plantations, and military strongholds. The storehouse installations around the cities and the palace treasuries collected and redistributed an abundance of agricultural goods and natural resources extracted from the provinces, as well as the products of human industry. Among their most important functions, the treasuries of imperial centers and satrapal capitals collected and stored money and precious objects, such as gold and silver tableware, clothing, and jewelry, to be distributed to the empire’s hierarchy as marks of their inclusion within the Persian courtly hierarchy. At Susa and Persepolis immense treasuries stored and showcased the spoils of the kings’ wars of imperial expansion. The number and relative importance of the Persian royal residences shifted with the rise of Darius I. Under Cyrus the Great and his sons the ancient metropolis of Babylon, the former Median royal center at Ecbatana, and the new but yet unfi nished residence complex at Pasargadae took pride of place. Darius I modified this conformation of symbolically important royal seats, building the “wondrous” palaces of Persepolis and Susa in the Persian homelands.8 In addition to these royal residences of supreme symbolic or ceremonial importance, archival, textual, and archaeological sources attest to palaces and administrative centers that lay at nodal points connecting these major royal residences, including Gabae (Elamite Kabaš), near Esfahan and on the Persian Gulf coast, and Taoce (Elamite Tamukkan), near present-day Borazjan, on the coast in the region of Bushehr.9 Satrapal or subsatrapal residences such as Sardis or Dascylium performed this vocation in the provinces in microcosm. A network of royal roads with way stations connected the Achaemenid royal residences and satrapal seats.10 Provisioned by the imperial distribution system, they facilitated movement of those on official business, such

as messengers, soldiers, and teams of skilled laborers. The infrastructure and architecture of this circulatory system spread tendrils of Achaemenid presence throughout the empire. Aloof from these more quotidian installations, the king of kings and royal family stopped in their progress through the empire at sites of extraordinary natural or man-made beauty along the network, all provisioned with small palatial structures and often positioned within paradises or even at important sanctuaries. These were very often strategically located to take advantage of extraordinary views, as was the pavilion at Qaleh-ye Kali (Jinjun) near Nurabad, which was built within sight of the Middle Elamite rock relief and open-air sanctuary of Kurangun.11 Referred to in the literature as “pavilions,” these porticoed palaces were more substantial than a simple kiosk, and their remains are similar in both craftsmanship and design to the smaller palatial structures at Pasargadae and Persepolis.12 These pavilions made the royal presence felt throughout the most important provinces, even in the mobile court’s absence, and disseminated royal architectural styles showcased in their great palaces far and wide.

Diffuse Urbanization A cursory survey of known royal and satrapal residences and their surrounding urban and natural environments reveals a great deal of diversity as one moves from Anatolia to Central Asia. The architectural features and actual urban character of the royal residence “cities” and their palaces differed, sometimes quite radically, especially in newly established Achaemenid centers and the royal seats of conquered kingdoms that continued in use. For example, the royal palaces of Babylon and Sardis were integral to the storied cities’ urban infrastructure, surrounded by both walls and, especially in the case of Babylon, a sizable population. An equally dense urban infrastructure did not envelop Persepolis or Susa, or satrapal seats like Dascylium. At Persepolis and Susa as well as strongholds in the Iranian east, such as Balkh and Merv, the core of the Achaemenid settlement was a fortified citadel without a walled city. Although the settlements that surrounded them were surely not negligible, these were not organized into housing blocks enclosed within massive bastioned circuit walls, nor afforded an extensive, rationalized street network that integrated public urban spaces. Instead, these Persian royal and satrapal residence cities were characterized by what one might call a diffuse

BUILDING THE FIRST PERSIAN EMPIRE

25

urbanization model.13 The various constituents of the city, including palaces, storehouses, administrative areas, workshops and industrial installations, and funerary monuments sprawled over several hundred hectares, all while conforming to a larger, centrally imposed organizational logic. The environs of royal residences such as at Persepolis and Pasargadae, once thought to be isolated, have yielded considerable evidence of both industrial and domestic installations.14 Most characteristically, open spaces containing parks, gardens, orchards, and cultivated fields separated and intermingled with more architecturally dense sectors, especially those hosting royal or elite structures, which were well integrated into landscaped areas. The larger population, whose presence is well attested in the archival sources, was dispersed in smaller agrarian or pastoral settlements throughout the immediate region.15 Significant for the development of new Iranian identities after Alexander, this same type of diffuse urbanization survived in the royal residences of the postsatrapal royal dynasties of Anatolia and Armenia and formed the generative core of their nascent royal traditions. Archaeological, archival, and textual evidence from across the former empire indicate that Achaemenid provincial authorities and clients carefully modulated and adapted the visual and architectural forms of the royal court in subtly varying iterations depending on the political histories and cultural dynamics of a land and its relationship with the imperial center. The Achaemenid footprint could be light in some regions while deliberately disruptive or, more rarely, overtly oppressive in others. In some satrapies—for example, Egypt, Babylonia, and western Anatolia—the Achaemenid authorities engaged well-established urban, artistic, or architectural traditions to subtly gain control of important sacred sites or former seats of power. In regions that did not have such ancient traditions, or whose ancient traditions no longer were vibrant, the Achaemenid imprint appears stronger. Even when the Persians ruled through local dynasties, as in Lycia or Caria, the palaces, tombs, cities, and sanctuaries of local rulers were integrated with and responded to Persian royal iconographies and architecture. These Achaemenid clients adapted the iconographies and visual and ideological programs of the imperial center to local materials, styles, and contexts.16 The many subtle appropriations of Achaemenid iconographies and themes attest to the empire’s success in promulgating this message to its provincial elite and inciting others on the margins of the empire, such as the Athenians, to respond in kind.17

26

CHAP TER T WO

Whether situated in a well-established, dense urban center or a newly laid out country estate, Persian satrapal residences reconfigured the relationship of a region or province to its landscape. While their methods might vary, their goal was the same: to systematically subordinate previous sites of power, be they living cities, conquered citadels, or significant natural features. For example, in taking over such established royal capitals as Babylon and Sardis, the Persians claimed and modified existing palatial complexes and sacred sites. The Persian king of kings or his delegates engaged in an ancient monumental and ritual network and reoriented it to serve the new Persian imperial message. Any Achaemenid additions or modifications were most often integrated into preexisting palatial districts, which is very similar to the Achaemenid approach to established sanctuaries, where they also made carefully modulated additions.18 In some cases satrapal residences occupied the sites of the palaces of conquered or even long-dead empires and were intended to claim or reanimate the ruins of these ancient sites of power and memory. The Achaemenid imprint is both subtle yet profound at Babylon, where the Persians expanded the ancient Southern Citadel palace within its preexisting walls. The satrapal and subsatrapal rulers of Achaemenid Armenia skillfully manipulated its pre-Persian topography of power to meaningfully integrate the Persian imperial presence into the political landscape. As L. Khatchadourian and H. Gopnik have demonstrated, the hypostyle halls of Altıntepe and Erebuni in the satrapy of Armenia attest to this most dramatically.19 The Achaemenid structures were emplaced within the core of dilapidated Urartian strongholds. The hypostyle halls of these sites evoke or indexically refer to Achaemenid architecture, though it should be stressed, none replicates Achaemenid architecture from the imperial center outright. The palace at Tille Höyük in present-day Turkey has received less attention but is equally important, as it presents a similar strategic engagement with the pre-Achaemenid topography. Although not incorporating such dramatic ruins, the Achaemenid-era palace at Tille Höyük, located in the western portion of the satrapy of Armenia, also claimed a site that had a long history of occupation extending to the Bronze Age. 20 Located in the region of Neo-Hittite Kummuh (Hellen˘ istic Commagene), the palace claimed a site that hosted a significant Neo-Assyrian administrative and military center. Built with provincial worksmanship, the palace revealed ornamental elements, including coffered wall niches and column bases, that evoked the official archi-

NORTHERN ZONE

Sacred Building (Building QN3)

Private Houses Canal Canal FIGURE 2.1 Plan of Dahan-e

Gholayman (after Mohammadkhani 2012b).

tecture of the imperial center, as did its orthogonal layout more generally. 21 The earliest level (X.i) incorporated a simple rectangular hypostyle hall (Room 14) with two rows of columns, which generally evokes Persian architecture but in no way recreates an Achaemenid ground plan, even if its ornament more deliberately reproduces that of Achaemenid official architecture. It does find parallels more generally in the preAchaemenid architecture of the Iranian highlands, for example, Godin Tepe (II.2), possibly suggesting it developed from a “vernacular” tradition of architecture. This might suggest that it was the seat of a minor subsatrapal official, though not a major satrapal seat itself. Like the Achaemenid complexes at Altıntepe and Erebuni, Tille Höyük affiliated itself with Achaemenid imperial power architecturally, but established its regional authority by claiming this ancient regional site of power. Without a local monumental architectural tradition or recent history of a city in the region, the Achaemenid footprint was much heavier and overt at sites such as Karacˇ amirli in Media or Zranka in Drangiana, whose palatial architectural and urban organization was clearly patterned after those of the imperial center. The Achaemenid satrapal residence at Karacˇ amirli in present-day Azerbaijan was built within a 450-by-425meter garden enclosure on a plan and with materials and techniques that tied it to the Achaemenid palaces at Susa and Persepolis. Numerous subsidiary structures that belonged to the estate constellated around the palatial enclosure, with open land in between.22 The Achaemenid satrapal seat of Zranka, identified with the archaeological site of Dahan-e Gholaman, provides an important example of diffuse urbanization from the

other side of the empire. 23 Located in present-day Hamun-e Helmand province, eastern Iran, Dahan-e Gholaman’s newly laid-out residential sector extended over 100 hectares in alignment with an ancient canal. A separate sector to the east contained monumental official buildings. This complex focused on a square structure whose courtyard hosted an open-air sanctuary centered on three altars. 24 Much like Pasargadae, whose watercourses imposed subtle functional and symbolic divisions, another canal separated the official buildings from the residential sectors and sacred area. Further to the south and standing aloof from the rest of the city rose a rectangular palatial structure whose general dimensions (55 × 50 m) correspond closely to Palace S at Pasargadae and the palace at Dasht-e Ghohar (57 × 46 m).25 With four towers at the corners of a central rectangular hall, its ground plan resembles several Achaemenid palaces in Parsa, unmistakably signaling that its occupant was an Achaemenid “delegate,” in all senses of the term. 26 Reflecting the influence of and sustained contacts with the imperial center, a sizable amount of the pottery from Karacˇamirli and especially Dahan-e Gholaman reflects the styles of Parsa.27 Integrating Persian architectural ornament or programmatic motifs into local architectural traditions was a subtle tactic for satrapal and independent dynasts negotiating their identity with the imperial center. Anatolia has received substantial scholarly attention in this regard, but Achaemenid art and architectural traditions can be detected from Egypt to India. Decorative elements such as adorsed double-bull capitals, lotus bases, and sphinxes appear in a variety of regional styles and contexts at sites across the empire, such as the site of

BUILDING THE FIRST PERSIAN EMPIRE

27

Labraunda in Caria, which provides an instructive example. A creation of the satrap Mausolus, Labraunda’s Andron B presented an innovative and eclectic mixture of Greek orders and Persian iconographies that became the calling card of the Hecatomnids. 28 The humanheaded “sphinxes” that decorated Andron B render the more stylized forms of Achaemenid composite creatures seen at Susa and Persepolis in a more naturalistic sculptural style, while still retaining certain formal references in the beard, wings, and head gear that tie them directly to the Achaemenid official style. 29 Similarly, remnants of adorsed double-bull capitals discovered as far apart as Sidon in Lebanon and Iberia translate the Achaemenid royal prototype into different sculptural styles and mediums, connecting the structures they adorned to the imperial center.30 The sixth-century patrons of the Persian palatial complex at Dascylium noticeably altered the Lydian settlement’s preexisting topography. In a manner similar to Darius I’s transformation of Susa, the Persians leveled the site’s mound, extending it and augmenting it. 31 On this new artificial plateau buttressed by an impressive stone retaining wall, they built a monumental structure, whose stonework and architectural ornament drew heavily from Ionian masonry, even if its architectural design did not.32 By the fifth century the complex had grown to include paradise enclosures, a treasury, an archive building, barracks, stables, tombs, and additional official buildings and palaces that incorporated Ionian-style masonry and architectural elements.33 While it might have turned a Greek face toward the Hellenic world, the message of the fifth-century palace of Dascylium was not entirely one of accommodation. Much like Pasargadae, Dascylium was both a demonstration of and a means to extend the empire’s organizational capacity. “It reiterates in the most public way the ability of the Achaemenid authority to muster and marshal expertise and manpower from across the tremendous empire.”34 Such adaptation of “local” techniques and architectural forms dragooned into imperial service communicated a clear message: Achaemenid imperial power was the natural and inevitable destiny of the land. As permanent instantiations of the Achaemenid world order, Persian royal and satrapal residence cities offered visual, spatial, and material evidence of the power and success of the imperial project. 35 Just as importantly they served as ritual stages where Persian imperial fantasies were enacted before the eyes of king, court, and subjects.

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Remaking the Persian Homeland and Building Achaemenid Identity The Persians subjected Parsa and Elam, the provinces that lay at the heart of Persian identity, to particularly profound reorganizations. 36 The newly founded royal residences of Pasargadae, Persepolis, and Susa established awe-inspiring palatial centers that reoriented these core regions around the imperial visions of their founders, Cyrus the Great and Darius I. The constellation and relative importance of these Persian royal residences continued to change over the course of the empire as later kings completed and augmented them. The reign of Darius I marks a particularly crucial point of transition. In the course of remaking the empire according to his new dynastic and ideological vision, Darius I established Persepolis and Susa as the supreme royal residences in the Persian and Elamite heartlands. Construction started after Darius I had consolidated power, and the royal residences were the centerpiece of a larger explosion of building across the empire. These new foundations reorganized the regional topographies of power of the lands that lay at the genesis of Persian royal and imperial power. As part of his larger reorganization of the empire, Darius I aggrandized Susa, which became the empire’s major administrative, military, and ceremonial center in the southern Mesopotamian plain and a nexus point between Babylon and Persepolis. Many of the Greek historical sources assert Susa’s prominence in portraying it as “the” capital of the Persian Empire. Within Parsa, Darius I’s colossal new palace and ceremonial center on the Marv Dasht plain ultimately overshadowed Cyrus’s residence, even as Pasargadae, which Darius fi nished and put his mark on, retained its status as a ceremonial center. Collectively, they conformed the most significant political landscapes of Elam and Persia to Darius’s new dynastic vision. Both Persepolis and Susa instituted a colossal transformation of the landscape, which in some cases required literally moving and reshaping mountains to create the palaces’ great platforms. These palaces represented major shifts in the regional and, ultimately, empire-wide architectural and ideational topography of power.37 Both were embedded within and laid claim to regions that had a rich and living monumental and ritual environment marked by the architectural or rupestrian vestiges of the political and ritual regimes that had preceded them. Both also realigned and reconfigured these local traditions and integrated them into the

burgeoning Achaemenid vision of the Persian cosmos. While such disruptions are obvious to the scholarly eye, the patrons’ engagement with the preexisting cultural landscape is only covertly mentioned and at times even disavowed with their founders emphasizing that the palaces rested on bedrock and stood where no palace had existed before.38 While it does not describe the political or geographical disposition of Iran under the Parthians, who ruled Iran when he wrote it, Strabo presents a surprisingly accurate description of the relationship and relative importance of the major Persian residence cities in his description of Persia: Although they adorned the palace at Susa more than any other, they esteemed no less highly the palaces at Persepolis and Pasargadae; at any rate, the treasure and the riches and the tombs of the Persians were there, since they were on sites that were at the same time hereditary and more strongly fortified by nature. And there were also other palaces—that at Gabae, somewhere in the upper parts of Persis, and that on the coast near Taocê, as it is called. These were the palaces in the time of the empire of the Persians, but the kings of later times used others, naturally less sumptuous, since Persis had been weakened, not only by the Macedonians, but still more so by the Parthians. 39

As Wouter Henkelman has demonstrated, this description of the royal residences corresponds to the major administrative divisions of the empire as reflected in the archival material.40 It also captures Persepolis’s and Pasargadae’s special status as the location of the royal tombs. Moreover, it hints at the status of the palaces after the Achaemenids’ fall, which shifted from living palaces to powerfully evocative ruins.

Pasargadae Founded by Cyrus the Great and brought to fruition by Darius I, the palace at Pasargadae created a new monumental focal point for royal power in the Persian heartland. Situated within the midst of groves, gardens, and agricultural land, the site’s primary monuments were arranged along a northeast-southwest axis. These include Cyrus’s tomb, a palace, an ashlar masonry tower, and a citadel on a terraced mountaintop, all surrounded by natural and artificial watercourses drawn from the Polvar River.41 The dressed-stone architecture of Pasargadae showcased Lydian and Ionian craftsmanship, and its ornamental features provided empirical proof of the empire’s ability to marshal human and material resources. As P. Callieri characterized it, “Cyrus’ architecture was born with the specific role of

showing off the empire’s extension.”42 Pasargadae’s palace lay at the center of the complex and was built amid prepared gardens. About one kilometer to the southwest, Cyrus the Great’s gabled tomb stood on a stepped platform within a grove.43 To the northeast, a complex of structures clustered around a fi nely built 14-meterhigh ashlar tower, known as the Zendan-e Solayman.44 Northeast of the tower, a terraced hill revetted with rusticated masonry surveyed the entire plain. Like the palatial structure, its masonry bears the marks of Ionian craftsmanship. A citadel and storehouse eventually occupied the hill, which continued in use as a stronghold until ca. 280 BCE.45 Separated from the main palatial area and thus intended to admit a wider constituency, an open-air sanctuary with platforms enclosed a monumental stone fi re altar and plinth.46 Textual sources indicate that Pasargadae was surrounded by plantations and contained many storehouses and industrial areas and canals from the Polvar River that fed both the formal gardens and agricultural emplacements.47 While not all features are attested at every site, many provincial satrapal seats present a similar constellation of a palace, citadel, treasury, sacred area, paradises, and even tombs. Pasargadae retained its importance as an administrative and economic hub for the duration of the empire. But as the location of the palace and funeral monument of the founder of the empire, it was a particularly important royal ceremonial center. Its open-air sanctuary accommodated large-scale sacrifices with regularity, and structures within inner precincts of the palace complex hosted the royal initiation ceremonies that took place at the start of a king’s reign.48 The palace was unfinished at the time of Cyrus I’s death, and Darius I took advantage of this by completing its construction. The palaces at Ecbatana, Susa, Babylon, and especially Persepolis featured inscriptions in many prominent spaces, as well as hidden on their baked bricks and deep in their foundations.49 Architectural members such as column bases received inscriptions commemorating their patron’s work. Even luxury items like silver or gold plate used at banquets carried inscriptions. However, in the time of Cyrus, inscriptions were not yet a feature of Persian monumental architecture, nor, in fact, had the Old Persian syllabary been invented, for which Darius himself takes responsibility in his Bisotun inscription. Darius I carved patronal inscriptions that he attributed to the founder of the empire at the palace of Cyrus at Pasargadae. In these inscriptions Cyrus identifies himself as an Achaemenid.50 The newly created Achaemenid

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29

FIGURE 2.2 Plan of Pasargadae (after Gondet and Mohammadkhani 2016).

dynasty was an ideological fiction that centered on a purportedly common ancestor that Darius I’s family shared with the Teispids, the royal family of Cyrus.51 These inscriptions, in a sense, allowed Darius to provide empirical proof for his purported dynastic connection with Cyrus and portray Cyrus’s palace at Pasargadae as a monument to the newly prominent “Achaemenid” imperial dynasty.

Susa Susa was built within a region marked with the ruins of numerous Elamite cities. Mounds encasing the scattered ruins of ancient Elamite cities and temples dotted the region, such as Choga Zanbil, the hill that grew over the ziggurat of Al Untash-Napirisha, a settlement centered on a temple precinct founded 40 kilometers southeast of

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Susa in the Middle Elamite period (ca. 1400–1200 BCE).52 Unlike Choga Zanbil, whose significance appears to have been long forgotten, the depopulated mounds of Elamite Susa still carried the aura of having been an ancient seat of power, even if the Neo-Assyrian king Assurbanipal had left it in ruins after destroying the city’s temples, palaces, and tombs and sowing the land with salt. In effect this presented Darius I with a blank slate, but one whose location carried significant symbolism. At Susa Darius I obliterated the topography of the ruined ancient city, leveling and reshaping its three principal mounds and protecting them all within an enclosure of about 100 hectares.53 Darius fortified the site’s highest mound, known to scholarship as “the Acropolis,” which had been one of Elamite Susa’s sacred areas. Identified as the “High City” in Elamite inscriptions, the

FIGURE 2.3 View of Pasargadae from the Toll-e Takht (foreground), with the Zendan-e Solayman, Palace P, and garden (midground), and Tomb

of Cyrus (background).

FIGURE 2.4 Aerial photograph of Susa ca. 1935. From the OI Aerial Survey Flights (AE-128). Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

FIGURE 2.5 Plan of Susa with major

Achaemenid features (shading corresponds to the approximate extent of the Seleucid refoundation of Seleucia-on-the-Eulaeus and evidence of Hellenistic and Parthian settlement).

location had formerly hosted a ziggurat and two temples.54 The Achaemenids completely repurposed this area, converting it instead into a citadel.55 No trace of a Persianera temple has been found in it, nor is such a structure mentioned by any of the Achaemenid inscriptions from Susa. Darius I built the palace on the northern edge of a terrace, which was separated from the rest of the elevated city by a ditch. Known as the “Ville Royale” or “Royal City” in scholarship, the nearly 100-hectare expanse to the southeast of the palace was the largest, though least built-up, sector of the Achaemenid terrace.56 On the level of the plain to the east, Artaxerxes II laid out a separate paradise palace, whose irrigation fed off the Shaur River.57

Persepolis The palace of Persepolis and its associated features had a particularly profound impact on the empire’s concep-

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tualization and the experience of Achaemenid power, and imperial space as well as played an important role in the development of later, post-Achaemenid Persian identity.58 Darius I conceived the region around Persepolis to be a dynastic center whose features and importance would rival Pasargadae. Set apart from his new palace at Susa as well as the old residence cities of Ecbatana and Babylon, the region around Persepolis hosted the rock-cut tombs and associated funerary cults of Darius I and his successors. At Naqsh-e Rostam, where he carved his own tomb, Darius I replicated Pasargadae’s unique tower, the Zendan-e Solayman, suggesting that he intended this site as well as the larger region to duplicate if not entirely replace and take over the functions and significances of Cyrus the Great’s residence. Pasargadae’s open-air sanctuaries as well Cyrus’s tomb were still the site of grand public sacrifices at least until the wars of the Diadochi, but Persepolis retained a cultic

FIGURE 2.6 Aerial photograph of Persepolis looking towards Naqsh-e Rostam ca. 1936. From the OI Aerial Survey Flights (AE 477). Courtesy of

the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

significance much longer, one that was substantially renewed under the early Sasanians. Darius I laid out Persepolis against the base of a spur of the Kuh-e Rahmat mountain range, which borders the eastern edge of the Marv Dasht plain. The royal residence city consisted of an elevated fortified enclosure on the eastern face of the mountain spur, the palatial complex itself, which rose on an artificial platform, and an area that lay between the platform and an outer curtain wall that has yielded evidence of a number of domestic and support structures. A bastioned fortification wall crowned the mountain spur’s ridge, running down the slope and connected with fortifications on the north and south sides of the platform. A moat separated the platform from the fortified mountain enclosure, whose lower walls ran parallel to it. Two royal tombs were later carved within this fortified mountainside enclosure. The palace complex at Persepolis, or more correctly the elevated “citadel,” did not host domestic structures

to accommodate the entire court. Instead, it appears that the majority of the royal family and court resided in residential palaces that rose in the plain to the west and southwest of the palace platform.59 Many of these were of similar scale to those on the platform. It has even been suggested that much of the mobile court and army lived in a tent city on the plain outside the walls.60 Several important Achaemenid sites lie in a ca. 6-kilometer semicircle around Persepolis, and numerous others have been identified throughout the Marv Dasht plain, though an empty zone about 15 to 20 kilometers from Persepolis appears to mark the edge of sites related to Persepolis and the surrounding region.61 Although Persepolis was not built on the high mounds of an ancient ruined metropolis like Susa, Darius certainly did not insert it into a vacuum. Darius built his fortress-palace near an important settlement that was flourishing in the time of Cambyses and Vahyazdata, Darius’s adversary in Parsa during his rise.62 Some of the structures on the plain below

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FIGURE 2.7 View of Persepolis from the tomb attributed to Artaxerxes III.

FIGURE 2.8 View of the main audience hall (the “apada ¯ na”) looking north with details of Persian composite columns, Persepolis.

FIGURE 2.9 Gate of All Lands with guardian figures, Persepolis.

Persepolis bear a closer resemblance to the architecture at Pasargadae or even Babylon than to that at Persepolis, suggesting to some that they reflect prestige architecture built before Darius I.63 This is especially apparent in a recently excavated monumental Babylonian-style gatehouse at the site of Tol-e Ajori from the time of Cyrus decorated in glazed brick.64 In addition, the necropolis and sacred area of Naqsh-e Rostam took over an Elamite sanctuary, which focused on a spring and was adorned with rock reliefs. Darius I’s necropolis obliterated or subordinated all features of the Elamite sanctuary to make way for his new Achaemenid ceremonial center. Susa’s and Persepolis’s architectural design and ornamental and sculptural style, as well as their iconographic programs, reflected the new centrally conceived official Achaemenid style. Although the palaces’ materials and technical know-how drew from ancient precedents and harnessed the expertise and resources of the empire’s lands, they were deployed in service to the empire. Adapting aspects of the Assyrian and Babylonian sculptural repertoires of power, such as composite guardian figures, colossal royal heroes, or repeating rows of animals, Achaemenid official architecture inte-

grated them into structures with columns carrying Persian elements, such as adorsed bull capitals and Ionian and Egyptian ornamental motifs, such as volutes and lotus capitals. The official Achaemenid style communicated its uniquely Persian message of an imperial fusion in a medium that was intended to be newly “classic.”65 Reflected in numerous media from glazed brick to limestone to gold work, the official Achaemenid style and message were remarkably unified. Even the iconography and style of courtly paraphernalia used in the palaces, such as wine services, weights, jewelry, and religious vessels, are continuous with and complementary to that of the palaces themselves.

Achaemenid Babylon No longer an imperial capital in its own right, Babylon took its place among the other royal residences and capitals of the “Great Satrapies,” such as Sardis, Memphis, Ecbatana, Persepolis, and Bactra among others.66 Like these others, it functioned as a superregional administrative hub and royal residence.67 Its ancient Southern Citadel palace was maintained by the satrap but hosted kings on occasion. Achaemenid kings would stop in the

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city in their normal progress or for strategic reasons, as did Artaxerxes II and Darius III, who stayed there as they recovered from or prepared for a nearby battle.68 While not politically preeminent, the city and its palaces were still wonders, and the region was one of the richest of the empire. Still more, its population density and expansive urban context set it apart from most other satrapal seats and royal residences. The traditions of Babylonian kingship prospered as a vital regional institution that bolstered the Persian king’s rule within central Mesopotamia, though they did not lie at the core of Achaemenid royal ideology or self-presentation. Babylon’s fortunes within the Persian Empire peaked under Cyrus the Great, whom, according to the Cyrus Cylinder, Marduk, the city’s chief deity, accompanied into Babylon “like a friend and companion.”69 Cyrus foregrounded indigenous Babylonian regal traditions and titulature to an extent that later Persian kings did not, at least in the evidence that is available to us. Moreover, Cyrus and Cambyses are the only Persian kings for whom indirect evidence exists to suggest some sort of onetime, personal participation in Babylonian ritual, possibly—though not necessarily—the Babylonian New Year’s festival.70 The kings of the line of Darius continued the royal patronage that had sustained Babylonian religious and civic life, although they did not participate personally in the city’s rituals. The title “King of Babylon” occasionally reappears among the Persian king’s other titles in Babylonian evidence until at least Artaxerxes I even after Darius I’s introduction of a new royal style and overtly Mazdaean royal religious identity.71 In this regard, Babylonian traditions were not dissimilar to pharaonic political and religious institutions in Egypt, which also remained an important regional institution. With the reign of Darius, Babylonian joined Old Persian and Elamite as a language of the Achaemenid monumental inscriptions, and Persian royal edicts were adapted to Babylonian conventions, with Marduk taking the place of Ahura Mazda as divine benefactor. But like Babylonian glazed brick ornament in the palaces, the language and royal idiom were ultimately subordinate to and a vehicle for the larger Achaemenid imperial message. In many ways Darius I’s and Xerxes’s reigns represent important turning points for Babylon. The reign of Xerxes in particular has loomed large in scholarship on Achaemenid Babylon. Scholarship dependent on the Greek and Roman literary sources has Xerxes traditionally appearing as a tyrant whose hubris drove him to commit sacrilege across the empire, violating sanctuar-

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ies and mores from Athens to Babylon.72 Such interpretations took at face value assertions in Greek and Roman authors that Xerxes initiated a targeted demolition of Babylon’s sacred sites, including the Etemenanki ziggurat, where he purportedly even stole the cult statue of Marduk. Some of these tales, which Herodotus developed as literary tropes, might have originated within a disgruntled faction in Achaemenid Babylon—a theory that later Seleucid propagandists were no doubt happy to augment. No matter their origin, the archival and archaeological evidence proves their sensationalistic aspects to be largely false.73 However, the Achaemenids’ relationship with Babylon was not static, nor did Babylon and Babylonia remain unchanged by Persian rule. Along with many other satrapies, Babylon revolted when Darius I seized power; and like Egypt, Assyria, Elam, Media, and many more, it attempted to resurrect its native royal traditions. Like the others, Darius I squashed Babylon’s two revolts without mercy, concluding the second by impaling the Babylonian pretender and his followers, and leaving them publicly displayed.74 Sometime late in Darius I’s reign, or early in that of Xerxes, the Achaemenids abolished the traditional post of provincial governor. The king had appointed its incumbents from the Babylonian elite, and Cyrus had kept its office and bureaucratic structure intact, so this was a blow for the native aristocracy.75 After crushing new revolts in Babylonia in 479 BCE, Xerxes purged the old Babylonian civic elites from provincial, city, and temple administrations in Borsippa, Sippar, Kish, Uruk, and possibly Ur as well as Babylon itself.76 The Achaemenids then concentrated the landholdings of the former elites under the ownership of a smaller number of Persians and their Babylonian supporters. These new landowners and their dependents used their power as imperial agents to extract as much as possible from the region, markedly changing the Babylonian economy in the process.77 As characterized by Michael Jursa, the year “484 BCE entailed an upheaval of property rights and a shift of socio-economic power in the countryside. . . . The main implication of these changes is that they favoured a type of landownership that was less strongly based on traditional and legally sanctioned property rights and had its roots instead in the political and military power of a new rent-seeking elite.” While Xerxes certainly never destroyed the ziggurat of Babylon, absconded with the statue of Marduk, or closed the temples, from the perspective of the old Babylonian landowning families, the local political and economic dynamics of the city and the region did likely change

for the worse under his reign. In this regard, Xerxes I’s reign marked a true point of transition wherein the empire tightened its grip on Babylonian institutions and began to more fully integrate the region and its economy into the Persian imperial administrative and economic fabric. Many of Babylonia’s temples lost the relative independence they had enjoyed since Cyrus, although Babylonians continued to function as important landowners in their own right under new, more loyal administrators.78 The sanctuaries and civic traditions of Babylonia remained intact into the Seleucid period even if the Persian kings of kings no longer participated in them.79 These political changes yielded changes in the demographic and monumental profile of certain cities. To elevate an entirely new priestly class required elevating a new deity and building new temples. For example, in Uruk the rise of the local god Anu to the city’s principal deity eclipsed the cults of the northern gods Marduk and Nabû, and parallels the rise of new local priestly families and the concomitant fall of the northern Babylonian elites.80 Anu and his priesthood were provided with a new monumental temple, which was built on the remains of a smaller Assyrian-era temple.81 The Eanna temple dedicated to Ishtar, which was the temple of the old guard, was no longer repaired, and it and the surrounding district eventually succumbed to decay. In contrast, a new temple for Anu (the Reš temple) was built, which remained the principal sanctuary of the city through the Seleucid period, when it was rebuilt in grand fashion.82

Claiming Babylon’s Urban Topography Babylon’s most important architectural and cultic features lay on the left bank of the Euphrates along the city’s Processional Way, which formed its central axis. Babylon’s principal palaces clustered at the city walls to the north next to the Ishtar Gate, the city’s main ceremonial entrance. The Processional Way led south to the city’s most prominent religious monuments, the ziggurat Etemenanki and the Esagila, the temple of Marduk, which rose in the center of the city. Enough archaeological and textual evidence survives to show that the Achaemenids engaged Babylon’s urban landscape and left a distinctly Persian mark on its topography of power. Rather than temple building, however, the majority of the evidence of Achaemenid building activity comes from the city walls and palaces.83 Our archaeological picture of Achaemenid Babylon is not wholly clear, though the Achaemenid imprint on the city appears to

be much greater than previously thought.84 Cyrus the Great, Darius I, and Artaxerxes II clearly left their mark on the city, though it is not unlikely that other sovereigns also contributed. Darius I created the one distinctly Persian monument in the city’s public spaces for which we have material evidence. After bloodily subduing the city, Darius erected a black basalt stele on Babylon’s Processional Way leading to the Ishtar Gate.85 However, unlike the Achaemenid royal inscription on the Urartian citadel of Tushpa at Van, whose trilingual Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian versions import conventions from the imperial center, the linguistic, sculptural, and epigraphic conventions of the Babylonian stele as well as its placement engaged local tradition.86 Other royal steles had stood in this area, including one created by the NeoBabylonian Empire’s last king, Nabonidus (556–539 BCE), who was overthrown by Cyrus. 87 This new inscribed monument transformed the significance of the famous thoroughfare and gate by visually and spatially altering one of the major urban focal points of the rituals of the Babylonian New Year. Although only fragments survive, we know it contained both a Babylonian translation of the Bisotun inscription and a condensed version of Bisotun’s great figural rock relief that adapted the visual and textual messages of Darius I’s propaganda program to Babylonian conventions.88 While Darius I and his successors never participated in the New Year’s festival, the inscribed stele’s very existence on the Sacred Way continually reminded the viewer by its very presence that it was god’s will that Darius be king and Babylon remain subject to the Persian Empire. The stele is surely an example of continuity, but it demonstrates equally well how significant continuities in the Achaemenid (and Seleucid periods) emerged from processes of appropriation and substantial transformation of the original. And it is against these processes that we must understand the Seleucids’ engagement with the city.

Sculpting the Achaemenid Landscape The tradition of carving monumental rock reliefs enjoyed a rich history in ancient Western Asia. While their techniques and approaches often differed, the Lullubi, Hittites, Egyptians, Elamites, and Assyrians all shaped their kingdoms and empires with rock-cut sculpture or inscriptions, leaving richly marked and contested landscapes.89 Within the province of Parsa, the Elamite rupestrian heritage in particular drew the attention of the Achaemenid kings, who in certain cases added their

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FIGURE 2.10 Aerial photograph of the mountain of Bisotun ca. 1937, looking west. Main features cluster at the base of the cliffs in the center

midground, with the Tarash-e Farha¯d slightly left. The Sasanian bridge was situated to the left of the river’s curve with the retaining wall of the hunting enclosure extending south on the west bank. From the OI Aerial Survey Flights (AE-750). Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

own reliefs or prestige architecture in a manner that responded to them. Monumental rock reliefs became one of the most privileged expressions of royal power for Persian kings of kings and later Iranian dynasties, including the Seleucids, Arsacids, and Sasanians. By the early Middle Ages the many rock reliefs that marked the rugged, rocky landscape of the Iranian plateau, northern Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Hindu Kush served as a constant challenge or inspiration for succeeding and competing dynasties—Iranian or otherwise. Inscriptions too were visual actors much like the figural rock reliefs alongside which they were often carved. In fact, many inscriptions in ancient Iran were meaningful only as graphic rather than textual signifiers, especially those looming high above on cliffs or adorning nearly inaccessible architectural features in palaces. Their physical presence and visual impact as linear, rectangular, or simply textured features on the surfaces of

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walls, architectural members, rock faces, and objects continually conveyed meaning beyond their internal content. Although the significance of inscriptions’ content (if understood) was quite closely determined, their visual meanings were not, nor were those meanings closely linked to their internal features. In fact, many of the examples considered in this book were not fully visible or legible because of their physical distance from the viewer, the difficulty of their writing systems (even for the literate), and, with the passage of time, the loss of any knowledge of the inscriptions’ scripts and languages. As the first Persian king of kings to carve monumental rock reliefs and inscriptions, Darius I established forms and precedents that his dynastic successors followed. All surviving Achaemenid rock reliefs or inscriptions, despite their content, claimed and repurposed sites that had borne a pre-Persian significance, many as sacred

sites. The Achaemenid royal necropolis at Naqsh-e Rostam, to which we will return in a subsequent chapter, claimed and reoriented the lingering numinous power associated with an Elamite open-air sanctuary around the founder’s final resting place.90 Darius I’s monumental rock-cut tomb established a precedent that all his successors followed, formally as well as topographically. A sacred site also attracted Darius I’s first foray into this ancient tradition of carving rock reliefs. This occurred on a grand scale at the sacred mountain of Bisotun (Old Pers. *Bagasta¯na: “the place” or “abode of the god”). This rock formation was an important landmark on the route between the Mesopotamian lowlands and the Iranian plateau. The mountain’s natural platforms and karstic springs, which emerge from the massif’s base, drew centuries of cult activity.91 Above these natural features Darius carved a massive figural relief, 3 meters high and 5.5 meters long, accompanied by an equally monumental trilingual inscription beneath. Darius I’s inscription at Bisotun is the largest and longest rock-cut inscription of both the Achaemenid Empire and the ancient Iranian world.92 The king carved the relief and Elamite inscription in 520 BCE, followed by the Babylonian version.93 After commanding that a new writing system be created for the “Aryan” language (ariya) the king subsequently added the Old Persian version in 519 BCE.94 The content of both the sculptural relief and inscription stemmed from Darius I’s wider propaganda program aimed at presenting a coherent narrative explaining the turmoil surrounding the deaths of the sons of Cyrus and Darius I’s own rise to power.95 The relief portrays Darius trampling a defeated rival for the throne and lording over nine bound captives in different ethnic dress, each representing a defeated usurper and rebellious province. Darius I lifts his eyes and hand to salute the Great God, Ahura Mazda, who hovers above in a winged disk, and is the only human figure who is privy to this supernatural apparition. Under Darius I the monument remained dynamic. Darius I updated the relief and inscriptions with subsequent events, even effacing the Elamite inscription and recarving it in a different location to provide room for an additional sculpted figure of a newly vanquished foe. While the holy mountain speaks for Darius, all the captured pretenders are denied speech. A caption labels each in turn, marking them and their rebellion as a product of the Lie. The basic composition of the relief evokes, and was likely inspired by, much earlier royal iconographic traditions, as represented in a variety of media. While the

reliefs of the Assyrian kings were carved much more recently, six reliefs created in the region 1,500 years earlier provide the closest precedents in the sense of topography and composition. Most notable in this regard is a relief carved by the Lullubi king Annubanini at Sar-e Pol, located only 100 kilometers to the west.96 The general composition of a king binding, trampling, or smiting enemies with divine approval is widespread in ancient Western Asian royal iconography, and comparanda in portable objects and architectural reliefs abound. Darius leveraged both the composition’s long Western Asian history and the regional memory of the Lullubi relief, creating a relief that was significant and familiar both transregionally and locally. Beyond its sculptural and discursive contents, the viewer’s experience of the relief grew from its permanent association with the sacred mountain and its history and cult. Archaeological evidence indicates that the site was occupied from prehistoric times and, in addition to hosting a sacred area, may have been the site of a pre-Achaemenid fortress.97 Some have even suggested that the fortress was the very place mentioned in the inscription, where Darius I captured and killed his rival Gaumata, who is portrayed begging for mercy above.98 The relief claimed the sacred mountain while literally and symbolically inscribing the monumental presence onto the “odontic space” of the trans-Iranian route, as fame of it was spread far and wide. In gaining control of the mountain, its cult, and the compositions of regionally familiar rock reliefs, Darius communicated his triumphal message in a manner that was both locally and superregionally familiar and asserted that his reign and deeds were divinely ordained, natural, and permanent. Even after its patron and subject matter were forgotten, the relief spurred later kings and satraps to carve their own reliefs to negotiate their own royal identity with the sacred mountain and seek divine sanction for their deeds. On a smaller scale but using a similar strategy, Darius I carved a trilingual inscription at a major east-west pass through the Alvand range near a waterfall. Located about 12 kilometers southwest of the royal residence Ecbatana, the site is known today by the toponym Ganjna¯ ma.99 The relief consists of a 2-by-3-meter recessed rectangle with Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite versions of the same text. Holes in the rock indicate that some sort of covering protected it. Like Bisotun, this smaller-scale relief greets the great thoroughfare that linked together the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamian plain, and, again like Bisotun, it appears that a sacred platform and open-air sanctuary of some

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FIGURE 2.11 Trilingual inscriptions of Darius I (above) and Xerxes I (below), Ganjna¯ma, Iran.

sort stood above the relief.100 Although executed on a different scale than Bisotun, Ganjna¯ ma employed a similar strategy. Both inscribed the royal presence onto the landscape, claiming a prominent natural feature, in this case a waterfall, while engaging the road networks and the potential flow of viewers that they implied. No other Achaemenid king of kings sought to rival Bisotun, but Xerxes, son and successor of Darius I, replicated his smaller-scale relief at Ganjna¯ma, creating an inscription of similar size and content underneath. The only major rock inscription that the dynasty carved outside of Iran consists of a panel on the towering cliffs of the Citadel of Van in what was ancient Tushpa (presentday Turkey), which had been a locus of political power in the region. The citadel, which lay in the satrapy of Armenia, had lain at the core of the Urartian Empire, and its cliffs contained rock-cut Urartian tombs. Darius started the inscription, carving away its recessed rectangular niche, and his son, Xerxes, finished it, adding the inscription itself.101 In the inscription Xerxes states: “King Darius, who was my father, by the will of Ahura

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Mazda, made much that was good (nai̯ bam), and he ordered that this place be dug out. Whereas he did not carve an inscription, thereafter, I gave orders to shape this inscription.”102 Claiming and subordinating this ancient site of royal power and memory, the inscription makes no concession to local languages or traditions and proclaims its message only in the three Persian inscriptional idioms.103 Xerxes repeatedly celebrates completing his father’s building projects in palace inscriptions, offering tangible proof of the legitimacy of his reign and the unshakable stability of the royal house. The Van and Ganjna¯ma inscriptions extend this theme into the very landscape, where the empire is now the building project started by his father and fi nished by the son. Xerxes’s Van inscription portrays the empire (xšaçam) as such a building project, and concludes by asking Ahura Mazda to protect it in an analogous manner: “May Ahura Mazda, together with all the gods, protect me, and my kingdom, and this the empire, and what was made (kr· tam or “built”) by me.”104 Like the Bisotun inscription, the reliefs claim odontic space and offer a permanent reminder of the inevitability of Achaemenid power. Most rock-cut inscriptions would have been illegible to the literate and illiterate alike because of their locations on towering cliff faces. The relief’s inscriptions were carved at such a great height on the rock face that it could not be read from below. They could be understood only through some process of mediation even at the time of their creation. Yet their visual presence could still call to mind their contents, which were promulgated locally and circulated in other media to judge from evidence of the multiple copies of Darius I’s Bisotun inscription. An Aramaic version of the Bisotun inscription, which emerged in Elephantine, Egypt, and was seemingly copied as a school exercise, corroborates Darius I’s claim that its contents were circulated in widely read languages and were possibly read out loud in public settings.105 Indeed, the king mentions that after the Old Persian version was inscribed at Bisotun the inscription was read out loud to him in its entirety, a public performance that likely occurred for the inscription on his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam too.106 This ritualized act linked the visual impact of row upon row of inscriptions spreading across the rock face with their intended meaning and with the royal presence. Present as they were on everything from palace walls to gold bowls to clay letter orders, the simple graphic effect of the inscriptions would have signaled that they participated in a wider visuality of power emanating from the

court. Although such singular royal efforts to communicate and fi x the cultural understanding of the visual experience of an inscription were rare, ephemeral courtly discourse, such as acclamations, epic poetry, and royal proclamations, continually enlivened and reinvigorated the significance of inscriptions in the mind of viewers (though not necessarily “readers”). Their indelible visual presence, if not the entire content of the inscription, was continually indexed to the royal presence, marking both the landscape and viewers’ minds.

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In this chapter we have surveyed the primary methods that the Achaemenids utilized to craft the conceptual and environmental foundations of their empire. We have explored how the Persian kings reshaped the natural environment around their royal residences, seeding Western Asia with way stations, paradise depots, and estates, and inscribing their presence into the landscape. This chapter also introduced the empire’s loci of power, including Susa, Persepolis, Ecbatana, and Babylon, and the different impacts that the Persian satrapal presence made on the provinces. We will return to many of these techniques and sites several times over the course of this study. However, the story that they tell is, more often than not, one of change and reinvention rather than stability. Our challenge will be to understand these dynamic processes of change rather than to trace continuities. The decades of war following Alexander’s initial invasion ravaged many parts of Western Asia and left the symbolic and practical infrastructure of the empire in precarious shape if not outright ruins. The important imperial centers of Ecbatana, Babylon, and Susa indeed continued to flourish. But even such cities, which the Achaemenids had so thoroughly imprinted, soon lost their connection to the dynasty. As we will see, Susa gained a completely new urban organization that reduced its Achaemenid palace to an antimonument, but the memory of the Achaemenids was soon exorcised

even from Babylon and Ecbatana, whose urban fabric remained initially unchanged, while Persepolis’s environs hosted a few grand prebattle rallies and triumphal celebrations connected with the wars of the Successors. These even included a colossal sacrifice and feast recalling the Achaemenid protocols that called on the Achaemenid logistical distribution system. This, the grandest of these celebrations, most likely took place at one of the nearby paradises on the plain rather than on the palatial grounds, whose damaged structures begin to fade from view in the literary sources, paralleled by archaeological evidence of subsequent dilapidation. The celebration was orchestrated by the Macedonian ruler of Parsa, who was uniquely adept at the Persian language and Persian traditions, but whose faction eventually was defeated. Subsequent Macedonian rulers were not interested in or able to establish a permanent relationship with the site or the Persian royal tradition. Even the Achaemenids’ monumental tombs and their relief at Bisotun eventually were unmoored from the memory of the Achaemenid dynasty altogether. Despite this loss in memory these sites continued to loom large on Iran’s physical and ideological horizons for centuries thereafter. The very presence of the Achaemenid reliefs and the lore that surrounded them compelled subsequent rulers to add their own to negotiate a relationship with the sites and the royal legends they inspired. At Persepolis, local rulers cultivated the ruins of the palace for centuries after the fall of the dynasty, and it eventually served as raw material for new regional and imperial visions, but it was never rebuilt in its entirety. In effect, the Achaemenids bequeathed a patrimony of glorious ruins and royal ideals to Iran that survived the turbulence of the wars of the Successors, even if the memory of the dynasty itself faded. Ultimately, however, it was not the devastation of the wars of the Successors that effaced the memory of the Achaemenids, but the colossal and creative efforts of the Seleucid dynasty to reshape the remains of Achaemenid Persia into a new Iranian empire.

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The Destruction of Achaemenid Persia and the Creation of Seleucid Iran

In its official dynastic history, the Xwada¯y-na¯mag (Book of Lords), the Sasanian dynasty characterized the centuries of Iranian history that separated them from the Achaemenids as a period of chaos, fragmentation, and illegitimacy. The Sasanians downplayed the role of the Arsacids, yet some of their kings at least are present in the national history and appear here and there within the Zoroastrian religious literature. Parthian epic traditions survived independently of the official Sasanian narrative, and the great Parthian families themselves continued to play an important role in the administration of the Sasanian Empire.1 The Seleucids, in contrast, are completely cut out of the Xwada¯ y-na¯ mag’s late antique memory of Iranian kings, not even appearing as enemies. Paradoxically, just a cursory survey of some of the basic features of Sasanian kingship, including their method of reckoning time (counted from Seleucus I’s reconquest of Babylon), their palatial architecture (characterized by monumental courtyards leading to grand axial entranceways), their preeminent symbol of kingship (the diadem), and the location of the Sasanian royal conurbation on the Tigris, Seleucia-Ctesiphon, shows a profound, yet unacknowledged, Seleucid role in the formation of Iranian culture, persisting beyond the Arab invasions. The perspective of the Sasanians in many ways parallels traditions of classical studies scholarship from the last century, which understood Seleucid control of Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau as a period of superficial foreign domination. This approach characterized the Seleucids as culturally aloof colonial hegemons who strove to preserve their own Greco-Macedonian culture in purity, and whose influence on Western Asia was

42

quickly sloughed off after the dynasty had been ejected from Iran and Mesopotamia in a series of “nationalist” revolts.2 New archaeological discoveries in the lands of the Seleucid East played a pivotal role in overturning this paradigm, ultimately revolutionizing the study of Seleucid history.3 The late twentieth-century excavations of Seleucid sites in Central Asia, such as Ai Khanum and Takht-e Sangin, and in Mesopotamia, such as the agora of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, brought to light evidence of what had previously been known only through a fragmentary Western historical tradition. In addition, a more critical understanding of the Achaemenid Empire has enabled a clearer view of the continuities and changes that occurred over the centuries that separated these two dynasties.4 New approaches to the Babylonian textual sources also yielded important advances, providing an important corrective to earlier classical studies scholarship that had downplayed or ignored the importance of the Seleucids’ Mesopotamian power base. Continuities in the cuneiform scribal traditions and survivals of archives provide a detailed view of Seleucid engagement with local traditions, which is unparalleled elsewhere in the empire.5 These sources afford us a view of the important role of the Babylonian religion and traditions of kingship in Seleucid royal practice, which, in a general sense, paralleled the Achaemenids’ policies within this very important city and region. Within Babylon the Seleucids left many Achaemenid fiscal and administrative institutions in place and adopted practices inspired by Persian precedents.6 Like the Achaemenids, they governed the satrapy by co-opting local elites, leaving many indigenous institutions intact.7 The

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MAP 2. Important cities and sites of the Seleucid period. Map courtesy of Anthony J. Lauricella.

Seleucid kings initially used the same royal palaces in Babylon as the Achaemenids and supported privileged local cults.8 Such parallels in the Babylonian evidence even inspired some to characterize the institutions, topographies, and style of kingship of the Seleucid Empire as almost entirely continuous with Achaemenid Empire, not only within Babylon, but throughout their Western Asian empire.9 While they made an important contribution toward reorienting the Seleucid Empire to Western Asia, such arguments were almost immediately criticized, especially among archaeologists of Iran and Central Asia, for replacing the previous “Hellenocentric” view with an equally unbalanced “Babylonocentric” view of the Seleucid Empire. Such arguments on the basis of Babylonian continuities quickly break down when one turns directly to the problems of Seleucid royal self-definition and representation, urbanism, and

the new architectural and ritual forms that the dynasty introduced. Indeed, as recent scholarship has demonstrated, the Seleucids’ renewed emphasis on Babylonian traditions and rhetoric of renewal represent a central strategy by which the dynasty differentiated themselves from the Achaemenids in this region.10 While they were important regionally, Babylon and its traditions were neither contiguous with those of the Achaemenids nor could they influence the Iranianspeaking demographic core of the early Seleucid Empire.11 The Seleucid kings deliberately and enthusiastically presented themselves as heritor and protector of Babylonian royal and religious traditions within Babylonia, yet they did not promote the traditions of Babylonian kingship outside the region and certainly not in Iran, as this would have portrayed them in a locally bounded idiom, rather than one whose power and prestige extended cross-continentally. In other words,

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claiming to be a successor of Nebuchadnezzar would not impress many on the Iranian plateau. For a related reason, the Seleucid kings never circulated images of themselves in Persian royal regalia. Achaemenid official artistic modes of representation would have portrayed them in the idiom of the defeated dynasty. The visual culture of Macedonian charismatic kingship communicated the dynasty’s power and claims beyond the frontiers of their empire and presented themselves as kings who laid claim to Alexander’s legacy from Macedonia to India. Similarly, the Seleucids’ new urban topography of power deliberately disrupted and reoriented Iran away from the old Persian poles of power in Parsa and Susa, shifting the focus to the north and east. In contrast to these rather stark ruptures, the Seleucids strategically blended aspects of Persian, Babylonian, and Greek architecture. Here they capitalized on the allusive qualities of architecture and ornament to embody the Seleucid imperial ideal, which subsumed all these traditions, without fi xing it in any one exclusively. Scholarship is still in the process of assessing and integrating these streams of evidence and the scholarly points of view that they have inspired; however, this emphasis on the non-Mediterranean and nonliterary sources has decisively moved the interpretive center of gravity away from the Mediterranean and placed it firmly in Western Asia.12 While a more nuanced understanding of the Seleucids’ relationship with Babylonia has emerged, their relationship with the royal traditions of Persia and the Iranian world has received less attention. Along with recent scholarship, I offer a new approach to the evidence that takes into account not just continuities with Persian practice, but also the Seleucid Empire’s breaks with Achaemenid traditions. I argue that the Seleucid Empire strategically introduced stark and deliberately instituted changes in the Iranian world’s topography of power, architecture, and religious traditions to create a new vision of Iranian, though not necessarily Persian, kingship. The Seleucids’ new topography of power and visual and ritual expressions of Irano-Macedonian charismatic kingship subsumed and transcended the traditions of Persia and Babylon alike. Ultimately, they laid the groundwork for new Iranian kingship.

The Seleucid Transformation of the Persian Empire After the years of bloody battle that won it, the Seleucids forged their empire in earnest through a more

44

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methodical process of city foundation, population transfers, and massive building projects. Seleucus I and his son Antiochus I embarked on a campaign to disrupt the Achaemenid conceptual and physical topographies of power. This period wherein the conquerors digested the former Achaemenid Empire was no doubt nearly as painful as the years of warfare that preceded it. To fill or feed these new settlements thousands were deported or displaced, and communities were transformed demographically or infrastructurally beyond recognition or rendered completely obsolete. The farmland of many was seized and redistributed to the Seleucid military and settler elite. While many Persian monuments and traditions endured after the Achaemenids’ fall, few survived without the marks of Seleucid appropriation, disruption, or strategic ruination and neglect. No matter if it retained a role within the new imperial system or was excluded from it, no region of major royal or satrapal importance remained unchanged by the Seleucids. Between his invasion of Babylon in 312 BCE and his final defeat of Antigonus Monophthalmus in 301 BCE, Seleucus I utilized many of the old Achaemenid royal residences and administrative centers.13 While early approaches identified any sort of reuse of a city as evidence for complete continuity with the Achaemenid residence system, the evidence calls for a more nuanced approach.14 The Seleucids continued to use a select few of the Achaemenid royal residences as well as certain Persian architectural features in their palaces, yet they neither maintained this residence system nor replicated Achaemenid architecture in their new building projects unchanged. Rather, the overall arc of the evidence suggests that Seleucus I and his successors strategically integrated Persian forms into “avant-garde” Hellenistic ideas of architecture and urbanism. They did so not to show simple continuity, but to create an imperial and urban topography that could transcend and encompass all previous traditions. The Seleucids did indeed continue the tradition of the ancient Western Asian “builder king,” but they also took the ancient royal prerogative to realign the landscape to fit what was a substantially new imperial vision. The early Seleucids created a new metropolitan and provincial topography of power that integrated yet ultimately superseded that of the Achaemenids. Moreover, even if later Iranian kings elided or were ignorant of their role, Seleucid urban, monumental, and ritual forms affected the development of new, post-Hellenistic Middle Iranian empires, in some ways much more profoundly than any lingering Achaemenid traditions. In

some instances, the Seleucids’ modifications marked only a change in emphasis or scale of investment, though not a drastic break with the state of affairs under the Achaemenids. This is most notable in those royal residence cities that fit their new imperial vision, such as Babylon or (as far as we can tell) Ecbatana. However, in the most of the empire the Seleucids’ massive program of city and fortress foundation profoundly disrupted and reconfigured patterns of settlement, agricultural production, trade, and communication. Even if they were parallel foundations or refoundations, as many cities were, they imposed new architectural and urban regimes that offered new possibilities or new constraints, most notably the formation of dense population centers with rationalized urban plans and grand public buildings. The Seleucids’ incredible campaign of city foundation transformed the lands of the former Achaemenid Empire. The Seleucid urban network was a cornerstone of Seleucid empire-building and was the primary means by which the Seleucids imposed a new organizational, social, and symbolic regime on the former Achaemenid Empire. The Seleucids focused their main colonization efforts on the Syrian coast, the lower and middle Tigris, the Persian Gulf, and the northern Iranian plateau, from Media to Margiana.15 Seleucus I and Antiochus I founded the majority of these settlements in the late fourth century and early third century, though several others were added or, in the case of Dura-Europus, expanded in subsequent decades.16 These newly founded Seleucid settlements ranged from full-fledged cities organized as a Greek polis, such as Antiocheia-in-Persis or Laodicea-in-Media, to smaller-scale villages (katoikiai) or fortified strongholds (phrouria). In addition to newly built sites, the Seleucids reconfigured and recoded ancient settlements through a process of parallel or refoundation. In addition to smaller settlements, three of the major Achaemenid royal residence cities, Susa, Ecbatana, and Babylon, received this treatment as well. Seleucid cities projected military power throughout the empire and were the main collection and conversion points of agrarian resources as well as sites of trade. If their location served a strategic purpose, a city or fortress could host a king in his progress through the empire in the course of prosecuting a war or simply to make the royal presence felt.17 Over the course of years, these cities facilitated contact, exchange, and eventual cultural and familial blending among local populations and settlers.18 Through these multifarious and locally unfolding processes of cross-cultural interaction, the

Seleucid cities wrought deep and lasting changes on the religious and visual cultures of Western, Central, and South Asia. But from the imperial perspective, their true purpose was in aggregate, as part of a larger systemic whole to project military power over and extract resources from the lands they controlled. At their core, most Seleucid colonies were military garrisons sited along land or water routes to control movement across the empire or check incursions into it. Many of these settlements, such as Jebel Khalid or the fortress of Mt. Karasis in Cilicia, only made sense within the imperial dynamics of the Seleucid Empire and fell out of use once they themselves fell out of the empire’s control, and new imperial frontiers and logics encompassed them.19 However, many more, such as DuraEuropus or Antioch-on-the Orontes, flourished for centuries or even millennia. Their Greek and Macedonian colonists remained loyal to the royal family, and as long as the Seleucid king could successfully campaign and reassert power through military means and personal presence, and even after settlements such as Dura or Seleucia-on-the-Tigris had been incorporated into the Roman and Arsacid Empires, strong Macedonian identity and pride in being part of one of the original colonial families persisted.20 Seleucus I established what became the empire’s two main power centers, each hosting complex urban cores. Babylon was the seat of Seleucus I’s original governorship and his fi rst royal residence. However, despite its continued regional importance, Babylon did not long lie at the heart of the Seleucid Empire, administratively or ideologically.21 Within a decade the city lost its preeminent status to Seleucus I’s ambitious new royal foundations. Supplanting Babylon as the royal city, Seleuciaon-the-Tigris in Mesopotamia was founded by Seleucus ca. 305, and, about five years later, the four cities of the Tetrapolis were established in the northeastern Mediterranean: Seleucia-Pieria, Antioch-on-the-Orontes (known as Antioch-by-Daphne), Laodicea-by-the-Sea, and Apamea.22 During his regency of the Upper Satrapies (294– 281 BCE), Antiochus I founded or refounded many more cities across the Iranian plateau and Central Asia, including Antioch-in-Margiana (Merv, formerly an Alexandria), Ai Khanum, Antioch-Tharmita (Termez, formerly Alexandria-on-the-Oxus), Antioch-in-Scythia (formerly an Alexandria), and Laodicea-in-Media 23 As this list illustrates, Seleucid dynastic names eclipsed many if not all Alexandrias under Antiochus I, especially on the Iranian plateau. It seems the dynasty was just as eager to ensure they gained control of the

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FIGURE 3.1 Aerial photograph of Dura-Europus ca. 1932 taken by the Royal Air Force looking southwest (with the remains

of the Citadel Palace, far left; the Strategeion and Temple of Zeus Megistos, center left, southeast of ravine; Agora with archives, center). Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europus Collection (z-1).

conqueror’s symbolic topography of power as they were that of the Achaemenids. Just as importantly, the Seleucid Empire successfully shifted Iran’s center of gravity northward to Media and Bactria, pushing Parsa and Elam into the background. The new urban topography of power that the Seleucids established, and the demographic and cultural shifts they effected, shaped the later development of Parthian and even Sasanian urbanism and administration. Although both the Arsacids and the Sasanians initially founded new royal cities in their home provinces of Parthia and Pars, the conurbation surrounding Seleucia retained its importance as the main administrative capital and population center of the two empires, growing constantly under both succeeding dynasties. At the same time as they invested in these large metropolitan cities, the Seleucids raised numerous phrouria (fortresses) to control movement by land, river, and sea. Founded by Seleucus I’s general Nicanor at the end of the fourth century, Dura-Europus began life as a fortress with a scale and purpose similar to those of other strong-

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holds meant to protect movement along the Euphrates.24 The original stronghold was built on an outcrop overlooking the Euphrates. Like the metropolitan centers, these interstitial phrouria could grow and change with the life of the empire. Responding to the Parthian advance, the Seleucids transformed Dura-Europus from a simple fortress to an expansive city sometime in the mid-second century BCE. The second-century Seleucid planners laid out a grid of streets and an agora on the plain to the west of Nicanor’s original fortress overlooking the Euphrates. The original phrourion was demolished to make way for an expansive high-status palace, which now occupied the space of the former citadel. A smaller palace, the so-called Strategeion, was built on the level of the new city and expanded several times.25 Much like Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, the city’s Greco-Macedonian elite population remained intact and appears to have been responsible for the later development of the city, with the apparent approval of their distant Arsacid overlords. The first evidence of documents in the city’s archive (chreophylakeion) does not appear before

ca. 129/8 BCE, and it was only under the Parthians that its Greco-Macedonian citizens were granted the right to assemble in a bouleˉ.26 Much like the massive archive of Seleucia-on-the Tigris, Dura-Europus’s archive made a statement that the Seleucids were here to stay, even if that promise was not fulfilled at Dura. The early history of the phrourion of Jebel Khalid parallels that of Dura-Europus, and it is likely that one of Seleucus I’s agents founded it a little after 300 BCE. Jebel Khalid was continuously occupied from its foundation in the fi rst decades of the Seleucid Empire until it was abandoned in the early fi rst century BCE.27 The site is especially important because it is one of the few excavated Seleucid settlements that did not experience intensive occupation after it fell out of Seleucid control. It thus provides important evidence of Seleucid architecture without later Roman, Parthian, or GrecoBactrian overlays or disruptions. Much like Dura-Europus, Jebel Khalid underwent a burst of rebuilding and expansion of its population in the mid-second century to strengthen the fortress in the face of the Parthian advance, though it was not expanded into a city but rather grew within its preexisting walls.28 Seleucid metropolises manifested an urban plan that was at once rational and, to those within the Seleucid settler elite, familiar and easy to navigate, and for their administrators and military commanders, easy to control. They were laid out on enormous grid plans, whose “grandiose scale, visual regimentation, orderly proportions, extended vistas, framed squares, and insistent uniformity, were intended as manifestations of the kings’ awesome power and aesthetic expressions of legitimate authority.”29 These new Seleucid cities presented a stark contrast to the “diffuse urbanization” of the Achaemenid royal or satrapal residence cities, which did not fit this urban or administrative model. Seleucid urban design imposed order on the populace, who were administered and organized according to city block (kata plintheia). The sixth-century Syriac Acts of the city’s martyrs relates a surprisingly familiar pattern at Kirkuk (Syriac, Karka¯ d_ e Beˉt_ Seloˉk_, “the Citadel of Seleucus”), a Seleucid refoundation.30 Seleucus I reportedly fortified it, built a palace, and settled five prominent families from the region around Persepolis, giving them lands. Twelve of the streets were named after a prominent family, and the rest after their crafts. This design also facilitated suppressing rebellions, since it presented nowhere to hide nor a warren of small streets to barricade.31 Citadels loomed at the edge of all Seleucid cities, while Seleucia-on-the-Tigris and Antioch-on-the-

Orontes contained fortified palace districts that took on the character of a city within a city. These presented an ominous reminder of latent military power certainly, but they also contained spaces of elite display, such as the gymnasium or banqueting hall, not to mention the wages and food stores on which many more depended. In larger cities the palatial districts also controlled access to larger temples and prestigious cultural and civic monuments. In a process that is repeated in the evidence, the king (or his agent, like Kineas at Ai Khanum) imposes a new, gridded city plan, much larger than any previous settlement, raises fortification walls, builds a palace, and settles a ruling elite who control the agricultural resources of the countryside. The often-gargantuan scale of Seleucid cities reflects the ambitious vision of all generations of Seleucid city founders. Many, including Ai Khanum and Dura-Europus, were filled in only once they fell out of Seleucid control.32

The New Royal City Seleucus I founded Seleucia-on-the-Tigris in 305 as his new royal residence city, thus permanently shifting Mesopotamia’s preeminent city away from the Euphrates. With its integration of Western Asian and Hellenic traditions, it provided a template for the Tetrapolis and important satrapal capitals like Ai Khanum in Bactria, presentday Afghanistan.33 Seleucia-on-the-Tigris grew to be the most important and populous city of the early Seleucid Empire, with a population rivaling almost any other city in the Hellenistic world, including Alexandria. 34 In designing the city, Seleucus drew from the urban traditions of Babylon, his own original power base, awarded to him at the partition of Triparadeisos, and from his memory of Ptolemy I’s Alexandria, which he experienced as a guest of Ptolemy while in exile as a result of Antigonus’s invasion. Although we have only a rough idea of its character, all streams of evidence overwhelmingly indicate that the city’s architectural innovations, urban planning, and palatial features integrated Western Asian and Greek urban, artistic, and architectural ideas. This deliberate mixture of a variety of Mediterranean and Western Asian urban and architectural traditions emerges as a hallmark of Seleucid official architecture and is reflected in palace design and temples from Syria to Bactria.35 Seleucia, like Babylon, was shaped like a long rectangle, and like Alexandria, the city was laid out on a grid, with a wide, central east-west street running through its center. North-south streets divided the urban space into rectangular blocks, the largest known in a Hellenistic

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Tigris Theater and Temple (Tell Umar)

Canals

PALATIAL DISTRICT Inner Palace? So-called “Heroön” Site of “Temple B” ( Agora?)

Main Agora with Site of Archives and Stoa “Temple A” (Garden?)

Canal City Expansion

Harbor (Conjectured) 0 100

500

1,000 Meters

The Nahr Malka Canal

FIGURE 3.2 Plan of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris during the Seleucid period.

city, measuring 144.7 by 72.35 meters.36 Although over 500 kilometers from the Persian Gulf, Seleucia’s canals linked it to the Tigris, making it a nexus point for both land routes across Western Asia and the Indian Ocean sea trade. The city was located at the northern limit of heavy shipping on the Tigris, which now terminated in its harbors.37 Canals also surrounded the city and ran through the main east-west artery, dividing the city into functional sections. 38 Newly founded fortresses like Dura-Europus, Jebel Khalid, and Antiocheia-Charax protected traffic on the Tigris and Euphrates both above and below Seleucia, and those founded within the Persian Gulf region, like Ikaros (Failaka) and Tylos (Bahrain), maintained the empire’s hold on Indian Ocean trade.39 Like its counterparts in Alexandria and Babylon, Seleucia’s royal district likely occupied a separate, walled portion of the city. Alexandria’s royal district, which lay on the Mediterranean, had its own harbor. In contrast, in the case of landlocked Seleucia, this district occupied the northeastern quadrant of the city, with access to the Tigris via canals. Canals and walls defended the royal district’s northern, eastern, and southern boundaries, with a western canal likely separating it from the rest of the city, effectively making it an island. The city’s most important public spaces and structures occupied this northeastern district of Seleucia. An agora occupied the center of the district, flanked by a colossal archive building and a stoa on the east and west, respectively.40 The urban plan of Antioch-on-the Orontes, major satrapal capitals such as Antioch-in-Margiana (Merv) and Ai

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Theater (Tell Umar)

Temple

Archive Building

Agora

Stoa

FIGURE 3.3 Detail of the main agora of Seleucia-on-theTigris in the Seleucid period, with archives, stoa, theater, and temple.

Khanum, and important provincial cities such as DuraEuropus in its later expansion present a variation on the theme established by the urban organization of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris.41 Characteristic of the integration of Mesopotamian and Mediterranean styles in the city,

FIGURE 3.4 View of the excavations of the theater of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris (Tell Umar) ca. 1966. Courtesy Centro Scavi Torino.

this space juxtaposed architectural forms that stem from different cultural origins. The seat of the fiscal archives (chreophylakeion) was built on a Babylonian plan, and the monumental stoa came from part of the growing repertoire of Hellenistic monumental public architecture.42 The commercial area to the south of Tell Umar yielded many fi nds of terra-cotta theater masks and figurines.43 Architectural ornament recovered from this district was Greek, though modeled in the preferred local material rather than carved in stone.44 The dimensions of the complex’s features were colossal. The massive size of the archive in particular, able to accommodate seemingly countless years of documents, made a monumental promise that the Seleucid dynasty would last in perpetuity. To the north of the agora-stoaarchive complex rose a colossal mound constructed of baked bricks, known by its Arabic place-name, Tell Umar. Early interpreters of the site originally understood it to be some sort of sacred structure.45 Antonio Invernizzi later argued that it was a theater, the interpretation accepted

by most scholars and later confirmed by subsequent excavations.46 As was the case in theaters across the ancient world, the theater complex was also involved with cult activity, and a temple was later built abutting its western flank. Although it was remodeled in the Parthian period, the temple’s original ground plan was still discernible, and consisted of an open-air court to the north leading to some sort of subdivided interior.47 This Mesopotamian-style ground plan evokes other Seleucidera temples to the east and west and confirms this was a phenomenon that stemmed from the imperial center. While the Seleucids’ continued support of Babylon and Uruk established their legitimacy for the region’s native population and dual-identity elite, Seleucia-onthe-Tigris provided a colossal venue that celebrated the dynasty in terms that had a much wider currency, powerful not only within Babylonia, but across the new expanse of Hellenistic Asia. Seleucid official historiography overtly portrayed Seleucia-on-the-Tigris as a colonial stronghold (epiteichisma) in a conquered land whose

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FIGURE 3.5 Reconstruction of the agora of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris (view from the upper level of the theater looking southwest).

foundation terrified the Babylonian and Iranian elites.48 Eventually Seleucia-on-the-Tigris eclipsed Babylon as Mesopotamia’s true seat of power. In accord with the classical sources, the Babylonian archival texts routinely recognize the city’s preeminence as “Seleucia, the royal city which is on the Tigris.”49

Ai Khanum Founded by Antiochus I to be an important provincial center, Ai Khanum holds special significance for the study of the Hellenistic Far East, both under the Seleucids and later independent dynasties. The city was founded at the confluence of the Oxus (Amu Darya) and Kokcha Rivers, now on the Afghan side of the border with Tajikistan. It was laid out on a flat region between the rivers and an outcrop that eventually hosted an upper city and citadel. Like many Seleucid colonies, Ai Khanum was laid out at a site of underexploited strategic importance to control regional movement and harness the surrounding region’s resources, in this case mineral wealth and agriculture.50 And similar again to many Seleucid cities, its foundation rendered redundant a nearby Achaemenid fortress, which stood at the site of Khona Qalʿa, 1.5 kilometers north of the new satrapal seat.51 The site was excavated between 1965 and 1978 by the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan, whose close attention to the site’s stratigraphy was exemplary for the period, even if that stratigraphy and the site’s chronology were not understood until later.52

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Only a small portion of the site was explored before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan put an end to the excavations. What is more, the excavators were not able to excavate down to the earliest Seleucid levels in many sectors.53 Sadly, decades of looting following the rise of the Taliban all but destroyed Ai Khanum as an archaeological site, and most parts of the city not excavated in the 1970s have been permanently lost to scholarship. Many questions will never be answered with full confidence or precision, including the chronology of several major structures that were never excavated down to their earliest levels. Nevertheless, Ai Khanum remains to this day the best-preserved and most thoroughly excavated city originating from a Seleucid foundation in the Hellenistic Far East, even if we can speak only generally about its earliest Seleucid phase. While it is possible that a garrison established by Seleucus I, or even Alexander, occupied its citadel for a time, the weight of the evidence now indicates that construction of the city proper began in earnest under Antiochus I, who likely was the royal founder.54 The reign of Antiochus I commences the city’s fi rst architectural phase and ceramic phase (periods I–III).55 This fi rst phase laid out the foundational elements of Ai Khanum’s expansive city plan and basic infrastructure including the city’s fi rst fortifications, its main street, which was paralleled by a canal, and terracing on the slope of the acropolis. Antiochus I’s efforts also established many of the city’s most important public buildings. These include the city’s two most important cult

Aristocratic Residence (No. 2) Extramural Temple

Ca na l

Northern Ramparts

Main Street*

0

400 Meters

Necropolis

Fountain

Gymnasium Western Ramparts

Vineyard

Theater Propylaeum

Habitations

Intermediate Terrace

Pool

PALATIAL Panj River (Tributary of the Oxus)

100 200

Niched Temple*

ACROPOLIS*

DISTRICT*

Arsenal

Citadel*

Sacred Platform

Residential District Habitations

Aristocratic Residence (Kokcha Palace)

Kokcha River

FIGURE 3.6 Plan of Ai Khanum (features with Seleucid layers labeled with an asterisk).

sites, the temenos of the city’s founder Kineas and the city’s main intra muros temple. The archaeological evidence does not support assertions that Antiochus I’s foundation persisted simply as a garrison looking out over a city entirely devoid of inhabitants.56 The volume and refi nement of the pottery from this earlier stage speak to a much larger population than simply a garrison, and although the excavations did not reach the lower levels in all sectors, enough vestiges of construc-

tion survive from this early period to suggest a more expansive infrastructure.57 In addition Antiochus I struck a large volume of coins in Ai Khanum’s mint, and it has been suggested that this was done in part to pay for its construction.58 Because the excavators did not reach the third-century level in most parts of the city, we do not know which additional public building might have been brought to some level of completion during this first phase. Given the prodigious output of its mint,

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FIGURE 3.7 Reconstruction of Ai Khanum in its fi nal, Greco-Bactrian phase. View from theater toward the Palatial District and Niched Temple. Courtesy Guy Lecuyot (© NHK TAISEI, O. Ishizawa and Guy Lecuyot).

it is certain that Ai Khanum was provisioned with the public administrative buildings to house, protect, and staff it.59 While it did not reach completion, the city’s fi rst phase established an ambitious and expansive urban plan that was not fundamentally altered in later decades, but rather filled in. The city fell from Seleucid control with the rest of Bactria ca. 246 BCE. The city’s infrastructure as well as its pottery remained largely unchanged until its great expansion in the late third and early second century.60 The second major architectural phase began in the late second century, corresponding to Antiochus III’s invasion of Bactria, and extended into the fi rst century.61 Antiochus III struck coins from Ai Khanum’s mint providing evidence that the king held the city ca. 208– 206.62 While it did not permanently reintegrate Bactria into the empire, Antiochus III’s anabasis and nearly two-year occupation ushered in a “great Mediterranean revival” in Ai Khanum’s pottery (periods IV–V). A renewed burst of construction followed his invasion, bringing trends in sacred and palatial architecture from

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the heart of the Seleucid Empire.63 This is especially noticeable in the Babylonian-style niched treatment added to the temple during its reconstruction and, quite possibly, the ground plan of the first phase of the palace. Whether Antiochus III started or oversaw any of these renovations or new constructions is unclear, but the newly independent Greco-Bactrian kings were certainly driven to build a new royal identity to compete with the Seleucids (and eventually the Arsacids as well), integrating contemporary architectural currents that Antiochus III introduced, at least in part. The temenos of Kineas was rebuilt, and the palace was either built or rebuilt, and a large extramural house appears along with other houses inside the walls. The expansive area around the palace begins to take on the character of a basileia, with a gatehouse built to control access to it from the street.64 The western side of the acropolis was shaped into a terrace that rose 5 meters above the surface of the city.65 The third building phase (ceramic periods VII–VIII) corresponds to the city’s growth as a royal capital under Eucratides until Ai Khanum’s violent

destruction sometime between 145 and 140 BCE.66 During this phase the palace was expanded, the gymnasium was constructed, and many of the earlier monuments were renovated. The mud-brick theater was in place at this point as well. Ai Khanum is crucially important for understanding Seleucid royal urbanism and architecture, as well as Hellenistic Iran and South Asia in general. Because it is so unique, studies of the city often implicitly or explicitly attempt to “claim it” in its entirety for a single time period, or ascribe its features to a discretely Greek, Iranian, Babylonian, or “local” Bactrian origin. Such atomization does not do justice to the artistic, cultural, and political dynamics at play, which affected the city’s development and its inhabitants’ experience and understanding of it and, at worse, effectively elides the role and even existence of the Seleucid Empire from Western Asian history in search of regional, even “protonational,” traditions. In focusing on the royal dimension, I admittedly emphasize this maximalist aspect over others.67 The standard and stereotyped methods for creating royal cities could indeed be adapted to local requirements. Nevertheless, comparisons with the archaeological and textual evidence from the other residences indicate that Ai Khanum reflects Seleucid ideas of palatial, sacred, and urban planning that formed the empire’s metropolis of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris. The city was not at all isolated culturally from the rest of the Seleucid Empire or Hellenistic world, or its more proximate rivals in Parthia. In fact, the period of its greatest expansion corresponds to the ascendancy of the Arsacids, whose own monumental architectural participated in the same network of agonistic exchange with the Seleucids as that of the Greco-Bactrians.68

Reordering and Ruining the Former Achaemenid Topography of Power The Seleucids’ new foundations and the urban network that governed them brought many formerly marginal regions into new prominence and rendered long important regions irrelevant.69 In a key component in this process, the Seleucids deliberately rendered redundant, derelict, or irrelevant those Achaemenid settlements whose location or prior symbolic significance within the Persian Empire did not cohere with their new imperial vision. Even when the Seleucids retained a major Achaemenid palace as a nodal point in their new system, in almost every case they reshaped it to serve a new purpose or status. If an Achaemenid location was meant

to play a role in the new Seleucid Empire, the dynasty inscribed it with a new Seleucid grid plan and spatial organization appropriate to its status, often radically reconfiguring it and enlarging it in the process. Just as importantly, if the Seleucids deemed a city or region no longer worthy of its former royal status, the Seleucids neutralized its topography of power and in some cases even displayed the remnants as antimonuments. Nowhere are the effects of such strategic ruination more evident and evocative than at Susa and Persepolis, the two major Achaemenid royal residences in the homeland of the Achaemenids.70

Claiming Former Achaemenid Satrapal Capitals At the great eastern Iranian settlements of Balkh and Merv the Seleucids laid out expansive gridded cities below the former Achaemenid citadels, which they retained as fortified “upper cities.” The Seleucids’ combination of an elevated fortress with a sprawling walled city below created an urban conformation that would persist in eastern Iran and Central Asia for millennia. While the Achaemenid citadels retained their role as military strongholds, in the most important cities, the Seleucids imposed a new architectural and political focal point that superseded the old Persian locus of power. This is especially apparent at Balkh, where a new palatial district was built within the new Seleucid lower city. The French excavations at Balkh brought to light numerous architectural members of a monumental size, including Corinthian and Ionic capitals and bases as well as large foundation blocks. Although they were reused in later structures, the concentration of architectural members in the sector of the city called Tepe Zargaran suggests that it was the location of the city’s new Hellenistic basileia.71 Tepe Zargaran was located in the eastern part of the city by the fortification walls. Significantly, Tepe Zargaran is in an entirely different part of the ancient city than the Achaemenid citadel and the satrapal seat, Bala Hissar (the “Chantier Achéménide”). Bala Hissar also revealed evidence of Hellenistic occupation, but no remains of monumental Hellenistic structures like those discovered at Tepe Zargaran.72 As far as we can tell, this suggests a strategy of spatial reorganization and dislocation analogous to what we witnessed elsewhere in the empire, both regionally, as at Ai Khanum, and within the same urban context, as at Seleucid Susa. While the citadel still functioned as a citadel, this new monumental complex rearranged the topography

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Bala Hissar (Achaemenid Citadel)

TO KELIF

ROUTE TO TERMEZ

TO MAZAR-E SHARIF

(Seleucid Expansion) (Medieval Walls) Tepe Zargaran (Hellenistic Palatial District)

“New Balkh”

TO AKCHA Charh-e Falak Baba Kuh Gate Takht-e Rostam FIGURE 3.8 Plan of Balkh, Afghani-

Top-e Rostam

stan, and its associated archaeological features (after Besenval and Marquis 2008).

of power of the ancient city and reoriented it toward a new architectural and political focal point, in effect creating an urban system not dissimilar to Ai Khanum. These structures were no doubt completed after the city fell out of Seleucid control, though as in Ai Khanum, it is likely that the Seleucids initiated the urban reorganization that their Greco-Bactrian successors completed, augmented by new ideas introduced by Antiochus III’s anabasis. Antioch I’s foundation of Antioch-in-Margiana (Merv) presents an analogous pattern. Its massive new Seleucid fortification walls enclosed an area of around 340 hectares, whose organization likely gave rise to the grid plan detected in later levels. The Seleucid city enveloped Gyaur Kala, the Achaemenid-era administrative and trading center, which was transformed into the Seleucid city’s elevated citadel.73 Merv’s ceramic forms also display noticeable changes during this period, when Hellenistic styles appear in locally produced pottery.74 While a sectional cut through Merv’s fortification walls has revealed their Hellenistic core, progressively augmented by the Arsacids and Sasanians, the Hellenistic layers of Merv are largely buried under the later layers.75 Much like the later expansion of Dura-Europus, it is possible that this massive enclosure was fully filled in only under later empires. Classical authors like Strabo remark

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Hellenistic Fortifications

TO INDIA

on Merv’s agricultural fertility, which Strabo understood Antiochus I to have brought into full production through the development of extensive irrigation systems.76 As a defense for the fields against sandstorms and wild beasts rather than nomads, Antiochus I raised a second circuit wall, known as the Gliakin-Chilburj wall, which encircled ca. 55–60 square meters of the city’s agricultural hinterland.77 At Sardis and Babylon the Seleucids did not effect a parallel foundation or an expansion but rather retrofitted the old one, implanting the infrastructure of a Seleucid polis inside the old city walls, most notably a theater and gymnasium. Sardis, for example, resumed its function as the stronghold of an Iranian empire in western Anatolia, but, as George Hanfmann characterized it, “unlike Antioch, Sardis was not a ‘paradeprestige’ commercial capital, but fortress.”78 Instead, the internal focal points of the preexisting city were shifted toward new public buildings that the Seleucids implanted into its rather “old-fashioned” urban plan. Reflecting the urban focus of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, a theater as well as a gymnasium was constructed against the slope below the former satrapal palace in an area that had been unoccupied during Achaemenid rule.79 When Sardis fell out of Seleucid control and no longer served as a satrapal capital, the Attalids built a new

FIGURE 3.9 Satellite image of Merv

with fortifications based on the Seleucid expansion (© DigitalGlobe/ Google Earth).

theater in a different location that did not emphasize the old Seleucid connection with the acropolis.

The Fate of the Achaemenid Royal Residences Among all Achaemenid settlements, the major Persian royal residences presented special challenges and opportunities for the new Seleucid dynasty. This was especially the case at Persepolis, Pasargadae, and Susa, where the Achaemenid kings had received tribute from their empire, underwent the royal initiation, and revered their ancestors’ memory at their tombs. As the creations of the Achaemenid dynasty in the Elamite and Persian homelands, these cities were tied to Persian royal identity in a way that Babylon and Ecbatana were not. The Seleucids’ treatment of these palaces sent a carefully calibrated message to their empire, and for this reason their fate provides us with key evidence for understanding the Seleucids’ relationship with the legacy of the Achaemenid Empire. If the Seleucids had set out to present themselves as successors and heritors of the Achaemenids, they could have simply rebuilt and reoccupied the Achaemenid palaces, and incorporated them into their new urban network, where they would have served as an instantiation of dynastic continuity. Instead, they chose to do something quite different, something that con-

veyed a much more ambitious and aggressive message. The Seleucid kings never used the palaces of Susa, Persepolis, or Pasargadae, but instead allowed them to fall into ruin to be deployed as antimonuments.80

Seleucid Babylon The Seleucids left a deep imprint on Mesopotamia. The social, economic, and cultural changes Seleucid rule catalyzed are noticeable in everything from settlement patterns to architecture to pottery shapes.81 Following upon Alexander’s short-lived precedent, Seleucus I initiated and sustained a rebirth and reinvention of Babylon and its royal traditions.82 The ancient Babylonian sacred sites, as before with each new conqueror, lost all connection to the defeated regime and attached themselves to the new Macedonian imperial overlords, who now occupied the place of the righteous Babylonian sovereign. Even accounting for royal rhetoric of “restoration,” Seleucus I’s early preference for Babylon and Mesopotamia at the expense of Persepolis and Susa represents a clear departure from the traditions of the Achaemenids and marks the beginning of a new strategy of royal legitimation.83 The archaeological evidence is clear that Babylon eventually experienced a decline in both its population and its urban fabric even as the Seleucid kings supported

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FIGURE 3.10 Plan of Babylon.

certain temples and occasionally participated in ceremonies, though with less and less frequency. While Seleucia-on-the-Tigris grew at Babylon’s expense, the Seleucid kings made sporadic efforts to rejuvenate the city, although such investment resulted from the efforts of individual kings, most notably Antiochus I, Antiochus III, and Antiochus IV, and was not a sustained policy.84 Without regular investment, the city’s character changed markedly. After Antiochus I cleared the debris from the Etemenanki ziggurat, its location remained a flat expanse, never to be rebuilt.85 The palace became chiefly a fortified citadel, and its temple fell out of use, as did many more in the city. The Processional Way no longer led continuously from the palace to the Esagila complex, but had been cut by a digression of the Tigris.86 Flooding of the Tigris caused a shift in population to the east, to the region of Homera, which was higher ground and where the city’s new Greek monuments were built, most notably its theater.87 Babylon gained a culturally Greco-Macedonian population along with a garrison after Alexander’s invasion and Seleucus I’s reconquest. This population grew and received special status under Antiochus IV, who is identified as “Savior of Asia and Founder of the City” in a Greek inscription associated with the city.88 The politai of Babylon considered themselves to be culturally distinct and associated with royal power. They appear as such in a Babylonian source that remarks on their gymnasium activities and overtly associates them culturally and politically with the royal city of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris.89 While the Greek citizens (Greek politai, Babylonian puliteˉ) enjoyed special status, and we hear rumors of discord with the Babylonian population, this was by no means a closed social or ethnic enclave. This population not only lived side by side with the Babylonian population, but eventually overlapped substantially with it. Membership in this group was just as much a function of elite status as culture.90 The Babylonian elites, or at the very least the Babylonian cities’ Seleucid officials (Greek epistateˉs, Babylonian šatammu or kiništu), navigated regularly between Greek and Babylonian identities, cultural practices, and urban spaces.91 In Babylon as well as Uruk, elites with dual Babylonian-Greek names, such as Anu-uballit.-Nikarchos, or Anu-uballit.-Kephalon, operated in both cultural spheres.92 These high officials with dual identities were creatures of the king, even showcasing the fact that the Seleucid king himself bestowed the Greek name.93 The officials were the conduit through which Seleucid kings communicated with the Greco-Macedonian politai.

Even as they cultivated their Babylonian lineages, these high officials took wives from Macedonian families and could move seamlessly in Seleucid court society. For example, Anu-uballit.-Kephalon’s wife bore a distinctly Macedonian name, Antiochis, and Macedonian names reappear regularly throughout these Babylonian family trees in a tradition of “maternal-line papponymy,” where sons received the names of their maternal grandfathers.94 The mother’s cultural background was important to family and public identity, and in Hellenistic Babylonia, “maternal-line naming practices gave equal prominence to the woman’s identity and past, honoring both her and her familial line.”95 Instead of signs of assimilatory “Hellenization,” as often portrayed in older scholarship, these names are evidence that complex cultural identities and proficiencies became the hallmark of such elite families, and were often cultivated through maternal lineages just as much as the male members’ initial relationship with Seleucid royal power. As in Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, the city’s Greek theater served as a central, monumental, and spectacular focus of Greek cultural and political identity. It was where Babylon’s politai gathered to watch musical and dramatic performances, and to hear the letters of the king or his representatives, which connected the city’s Greek citizens to the larger imperial world, as this diary entry from the reign of Antiochus I indicates: [. . .] the satrap of Babylonia and the appointees of the king, who had gone before the king to Sardis [. . .], returned to Seleucia, the royal city which is on the Tigris. Their message (written on a) leather (scroll) came to the citizens of Babylon.96

Besides its theater, Babylon’s Greek institutions also included a gymnasium, athletic games, and a Stoic school of philosophy, all of which flourished into the Parthian era. The Seleucid dual-identity officials read out royal decrees in the city’s Greek theater, a practice that continued under the Arsacids, at the same time as they rebuilt or undertook major restorations of Babylonian temples.97 The selective construction and deployment of cultural and political identities were not limited to urban elites and high officials. Fluid and strategic movement between cultural identities was a way of life for the most ambitious in Seleucid Babylon and across Hellenistic Western Asia.98 Adoption and selective display of elements of Greek culture and Greek identity were “a means by which elite members from different communities expressed their allegiance to, and structured their relations with, the imperial center, while at the same

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FIGURE 3.11 The Greek theater of Babylon during excavations. View from the south (top) and north (bottom). Courtesy Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft.

time distancing themselves from their rivals and inferiors at home.”99 For the local elites, Greek cultural identity plugged them into a larger empire-wide privileged network, the members of which similarly adopted elements of Hellenistic court culture to connect with the king and his court society and periodically mingled while sojourning wherever the king and court resided.100 While a Greek in Alexandria-Arachosia might have shared the same Homeric literary education as a contemporary in the old Greek world, and politai from Ai Khanum, Babylonia, and Jerusalem alike might have trained in a gymnasium, many aspects of the Greek identities and cultural practices of these elites often bore little resemblance to what a contemporary Athenian or modern classical philologist might hold to be truly Greek. Yet they were Greek within the local cultural context insofar as they adhered to a set of cultural practices that tied them to Seleucid civic elite across the empire and distinguished them from disenfranchised local populations, in both their own and those populations’ eyes. While nothing like a colonial apartheid prevailed, neither the empire nor the city was a harmonious multicultural society. As in Jerusalem, armed conflicts often erupted between the local population, entrenched elites, and the politai, though more often than not those involved were agitating for or defending privileges and rights within the preexisting royal economy of power rather than engaging in “ethnic revolts.”101

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Following upon Alexander”s short-lived precedent, Seleucus I initiated and sustained a rebirth and reinvention of Babylon and its royal traditions.102 The fact that we know many major temples in Babylonia archaeologically primarily from their Seleucid iteration demonstrates the volume of Seleucid patronage. Within Babylon the Seleucid kings enthusiastically offered sacrifices to the region’s traditional gods, rebuilt temples, recorded their deeds, and engaged with sites in a manner that deliberately presented themselves as successors and protectors of the Babylonian tradition, cutting out the Achaemenids, who now were presented as overseeing an embarrassing period of misrule.103 Even if it retained a religious significance into the next generation, Babylon itself eventually experienced a relative loss in stature to Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, which became “the royal city.” Given the Seleucids’ rhetoric of continuity, it is perhaps ironic that Babylon’s urban fabric experienced much more decline and change under the Seleucids than the Achaemenids. This was not all decay, however, and much of this change resulted from Seleucid investment in new Greek institutions. Here too, the new Seleucid urban topography of power was not built on the Persian one, but on its dismembered and scattered carcass.

The Transformation of Susa Bestowing it with a Seleucid dynastic name, the Seleucids refounded Susa as Seleucia-on-the-Eulaeus.104 This

vibrant new Greek city flourished up to the early Sasanian period despite many major political upheavals.105 In addition to gaining a permanent urban infrastructure and a significant population, the Seleucid city effected a radical reorganization of Susa’s symbolic and monumental environment, reorienting it away from the Achaemenid palace-citadel toward a new civic center to the south.106 The city’s designers inscribed a grand new grid onto the empty expanse of the Royal City, which had been largely devoid of permanent monumental construction in the Achaemenid period. (See fig. 2.5.) In addition to more common habitation in the newly founded Seleucid city, excavations in the Royal City discovered several large (ca. 20-m-long), aristocratic houses of the Seleucid era, decorated with Greek architectural ornament made of terra-cotta and yielding numerous Hellenistic-style terra-cotta figures.107 Seleucia-on-the-Eulaeus was a city of regional economic and political importance; however, in its Seleucid incarnation, it no longer enjoyed the status of a major seat of royal power like Seleucia-on-the Tigris.108 Marking its reduced status spatially, the new Seleucid urban design deliberately excluded the monumental remnants of the Achaemenid Empire, most notably the apada¯na and acropolis. On the mound of the Ville Royale, the “Propylaeum” to the Achaemenid palace, whose dilapidated ruins stood at the northern edge of the Seleucid city, was the only sector to remain free of new buildings in the early Seleucid period.109 Burials found here and nearby indicate that the area was excluded from the city proper.110 In marked contrast to Babylon and Ecbatana, the archaeological evidence from the Achaemenid palace at Susa shows no official reoccupation.111 What is more, not only was the Achaemenid palace no longer used as a royal residence or administrative center, it was allowed to decay and collapse.112 The palace of Darius I still functioned when Alexander returned to Susa from his eastern campaigns in 325, but fell out of use after his death in 323.113 Some of its walls likely remained standing for several decades, during which time it was occupied by squatters, before eventually “dying a natural death,” due to neglect and spoliation.114 Rather than simple neglect, the decline and fall of the Achaemenid palace of Susa resulted from a strategic choice on the part of the Seleucids. Deteriorating and occupied by squatters, this heap of broken architectural members with mounds of disintegrating bricks still made an important political statement: with a flourishing Greek polis nearby, it persisted as a massive, ruinous antimonument. Its significance was quite different from

the aura that grew around Persepolis, cultivated by the Fratarakids and honored by later dynasties as a primordial locus of Persian identity.115 A better analogue to Susa can perhaps be found near Ai Khanum at the site of Khona Qalʿa, the Achaemenid fortress that Ai Khanum sidelined.116 Both the derelict fortress at Khona Qalʿa and the palace of Susa presented monumental statements that the old regime had been eclipsed and superseded, the very walls of each counting time from the Achaemenids’ fall as they decayed.117 Susa briefly hosted a Seleucid mint, treasury, and garrison, and textual evidence implies that a few Seleucid kings stopped at the city every so often.118 If they did so at all, it is likely that they lodged at a new, more modest satrapal residence, perhaps located in the region of the so-called Donjon.119 While no monumental structures were discovered here, the sector yielded the largest concentration of Greek inscriptions from both the Seleucid and Parthian periods. These included both votive and manumission stelae of the type normally set up near sanctuaries in Greek cities, as well as, later, a plinth that once supported a bronze statue of a Parthian satrap.120 The region was clearly “the most visible place” (epiphanestatos topos) where such stelae were erected, though one can only speculate whether the area combined a sanctuary and a palace into a single district, as was often the case at other Seleucid cities.121 The relationship between Seleucia-on-the-Eulaeus and its hinterland differed from that of Achaemenid Susa. In the Seleucid period, the average size of settlements in the hinterland shrank, while the occupation density around Susa itself drastically increased as the city asserted its organizational and demographic primacy.122 R. Wenke hypothesized that the smaller rural settlements were dependent economically and organizationally on the city in a manner that contrasts with the relatively self-sufficient Achaemenid estates that developed on the diffuse urbanization model. Population and commercial activity shifted to the city proper in a way that neither had in the Achaemenid period. This change persists through the Parthian period, indicating that the Seleucid reorientation had a deep and lasting effect.

The Reduction of Parsa In marked contrast to Mesopotamia and northern Iran, the Seleucids never chose to heavily engage the symbolic center of the Persian Empire nor to create a large population center there. After entering Parsa in 331 BCE, Alexander held victory games and a banquet at Persepolis, a celebration that culminated in the destruction of the

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palace.123 While, in this instance, Persepolis served as a monument to Hellenic vengeance, other Achaemenid structures retained their original significance. Alexander made a show of caring for the Tomb of Cyrus to associate himself with the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty.124 The fact that the general content, at least in paraphrase, seems to have been known to Alexander’s companions demonstrates that even the rock inscriptions high up on Darius I’s tomb were not mute or entirely alien monuments.125 Persepolis’s significance as an aggressive, Macedonian victory monument did not endure long after Alexander’s death. Despite the damaged state of Persepolis, the multivalent symbolic potential of the site attracted Alexander’s successors quickly thereafter for different goals. In 316, before the showdown between Eumenes and Antigonus Monophthalmus, Alexander’s companion Peucestas, whom Alexander had appointed governor of Parsa, staged an elaborate banquet for his army at Persepolis, where he conducted lavish sacrifices to Alexander and Philip.126 The banquet hosted both Macedonian and Iranian contingents, and its seating arrangements and sacrifices evoked Persian protocol.127 This suggests that Peucestas, popular and trusted among the Persian nobility, intended to capitalize on Persepolis as an open-ended symbol that could speak to the event’s different constituencies.128 Ernst Herzfeld discovered five inscribed stone slabs in the vicinity of the platform of Persepolis, likely originally connected with cult furniture.129 These slabs bear Greek dedications to Zeus Megistos, Athena Basileia, Apollo, Artemis, and Helios as discrete deities, with no overt suggestion of assimilation to Iranian deities.130 While the Macedonians could have created them in a calculated act of triumphal imperialism after the initial sack of Persepolis, Peucestas’s banquet provides their likeliest original context.131 Whatever the slabs’ origin or purpose, their installation provides archaeological evidence of an important shift in Persepolis’s significance away from its original function as palace and ceremonial center of the Achaemenid Empire to one that capitalized on a more generalized symbolism deriving from its new, more malleable status as a ruin. This also marks the beginning of centuries of Middle Iranian ritual and artistic activity focused on recovering, reanimating, and eventually reinventing the site’s power. While Alexander and his immediate successors staged ritual performances in the Persian heartland, we have no evidence that the Seleucid kings found these Achaemenid sites of power politically or symbolically useful. The Seleucids founded numerous settlements on the

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Persian Gulf, with Antiochus III even using AntiochPersis as a royal residence for a time.132 Up until the second century BCE, when the province began to slip out of their control, if the Seleucids wished to reside in the palaces of Persepolis or Pasargadae for either ideological or strategic reasons, they could have done so if they deemed it worth their effort to do so.133 Instead, the evidence of Seleucid occupation in the region relates to logistics and defense. The Seleucids rebuilt and held Pasargadae’s elevated Toll-e Takht as a fortress.134 Milestones from the regions around Pasargadae and Persepolis, now only fragmentary, reused the stepped crenulations that marked the edge of the Persepolis platform.135 Like other official inscriptions meant for wide consumption, the inscriptions on the milestones were bilingual, with Greek on the top and Aramaic on the bottom. They imposed a royal imprint on the organization of space with the spoliated remains of the old empire. Pasargadae and Persepolis never functioned again as imperial residences or, as far as we know, stages for royal rituals on the order of those celebrated by Alexander or Peucestas.136 The afterlife and transformation of these sites under the frataraka¯ and Sasanians are part of a separate story.137

Ecbatana Unique among the former Achaemenid royal residences, Ecbatana remained a royal residence through the Parthian period.138 The former Achaemenid residence city accommodated a Seleucid mint and played an important and sustained role in controlling commerce between northern Mesopotamia, the Iranian plateau, and Bactria. In addition to connecting lower Mesopotamia to the main routes to Bactria, Ecbatana controlled access to the southern Iranian plateau and Persia and fit the Seleucids’ new emphasis on northern and eastern Iran. Attesting to the continued strategic importance of Ecbatana in the waning days of Seleucid control of the Iranian plateau, Antiochus IV refounded the city as an “Epiphaneia.”139 The palace of Ecbatana is portrayed as a wonder in the literary sources. We hear of the Seleucids restoring it once or twice, although evidently it was not held in such reverence that it prevented the Seleucid kings from looting its precious metal decorations when they needed the cash.140 Polybius preserves our most detailed description of the palace, and his portrayal of it strongly suggests that the dynasty continued to use a preexisting Persian palace:

[Ecbatana] lies on the skirts of Mount Orontes; it does not have any walls, though it contains a citadel built by hand, and fortified in such a way as to give it astonishing strength. Beneath this lies the royal palace, which presents a difficulty whether one wishes to say something about it or pass it over in silence. To those writers who aim at sensation in their accounts and make a habit of indulging in rhetorical exaggeration this city provides the perfect material; but to those who proceed with caution when dealing with anything out of the ordinary it is a source of difficulty and embarrassment. Be that as it may, the palace is nearly seven stades (1,200 m) in circumference and the lavishness of the separate buildings gives an eloquent idea of the wealth of its original founders. All its woodwork was of cedar wood or cypress, and not a single plank was left uncovered, as the beams, the compartments of the ceilings, and the columns in the arcades and peristyles were all plated with silver and gold. The tiles were all of silver. Most of these were stripped off during the invasion of Alexander and the Macedonians, and the rest at the time of Antigonus and Seleucus [I].141

In contrast to Strabo’s antiquarian account of Persepolis, Polybius portrays the palace of Ecbatana in its postconquest state, bearing the marks of Macedonian use and abuse. Nevertheless Polybius’s narrative does describe an intact palace, even if it no longer shone with the same luster as it did under the Achaemenids. Even if it functioned as a mint and administrative center the fact that we hear that Antiochus III despoiled it might suggest that it did not occupy a place of supreme importance in the Seleucid topography of power, which is not surprising, considering how seldom we hear of kings visiting it. Early modern European travelers and more recent archaeological explorations have encountered scattered architectural members in secondary contexts throughout the city, as well as treasure troves. The majority of these have appeared on Tappa-ye Hegmatana, an 870-by-490-meter hill in the northeast of the city, and none of these in context.142 Significantly the Achaemenid architectural members were found mixed in with those from the Seleucid and Arsacid periods, suggesting that a great deal of later building activity took place in the city after the Achaemenids.143 Unfortunately, as the palace itself has not been localized, we have no direct archaeological evidence to attest to how the Seleucids engaged the Achaemenid remains at Ecbatana. Intimately connected with the main route between Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, Ecbatana, and the northern Iranian plateau, Bisotun’s royal rock reliefs and inscriptions attest to its importance in the Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian eras.144 On the level of the plain at the southern entrance to the precinct, where the wall met the cliff, a Seleucid official carved in high relief a reclining Heracles in honor of a satrap. This is the only Seleu-

cid rock sculpture surviving from the period of Seleucid control over the Iranian plateau (ca. 312–ca. 140/39 BCE).145 The god reclines on his left side, propping himself up on his elbow and holding a drinking bowl with his left hand. His club is carved in relief as if propped up behind him, as is a pedimented stele that hovers behind his head. The shape of the stele evokes the form of stelae that bore Seleucid official inscriptions in the region, most notably the stele from Laodicia-in-Media on which a local official carved Antiochus III’s edict expanding the Seleucid royal cult.146 The relief stele at Bisotun bears the following inscription: In the year 164, in the month Paneˉmos Hyakinthos, son of Pantauchos [created this] Victorious Herakles For the protection of Kleomenes, Of the Upper Satrapies147

Quite a bit lighter than the Greek version, an Aramaic version of the inscription was carved below, indicating that the sponsor intended to situate this message, both visually and linguistically, within the idiom of Seleucid imperial epigraphy.148 While they did not attempt to rival or supersede Darius I’s relief, the Seleucids and their agents succeeded in disassociating the prestige of the site from the Achaemenids and reorienting it to the Seleucid dynasty. In Diodorus Siculus’s account of the site Darius I was forgotten as his relief’s patron. Instead Darius was understood to be Semiramis, the legendary Assyrian queen, and his vanquished enemies, her soldiers.149 The relief was detached from the Achaemenids and attributed to Semiramis along with other major works of the Persian kings, like Ecbatana and the walls of Babylon.150 Because Diodorus mentions Ctesias at the beginning of this larger section, this specific legend has often been ascribed to him; however, Diodorus also mentions he drew from other, postconquest historians for his overview.151 More telling is that other Seleucid agents, like Berossus, routinely used Semiramis to obscure Achaemenid patronage.152 Even if the stories of Semiramis stemmed from an earlier historiographical tradition or even local legends, this strongly suggests the Seleucids would have been happy to promote her patronage to defuse the threat of a lingering Achaemenid legacy in such monuments. To those who viewed the relief through the filter of this legend, the robed figure of Darius I was not a Great King, but a queen, and the other figures not captive kings, but, possibly, the soldiers whom the legend recounts Semiramus laid with while whiling away the hours in the site’s paradise.

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Building a New Seleucid Dynastic Mythology and Ritual Landscape The Seleucid kings developed a rich dynastic mythology and involved themselves in a wide variety of cults across the expanse of their empire.153 The Seleucids and their image-makers carefully engineered the images of the king to engage multiple cultural traditions and act as a unifying force. The Seleucid numismatic pantheon is diverse and provides the most abundant and varied record of the Seleucid iconography and visuality of power. Indeed, coins promulgated these images and ideas throughout the ancient world. The numismatic images that inhabitants of the empire held in their hands reinforced and disseminated the experience of divine power that their cities cultivated. Even in their unfi nished and developing states, the lived spaces of Seleucid cities functioned as magnificent stages for the celebration of the Seleucid dynasty. These image-rich and architecturally complex urban environments, which reinforced this dynastic mythology, shaped the practice of Western Asian kingship for centuries to come and set the ritual, spatial, and visual terms of debate for later Iranian sovereigns. The urban topography and surrounding hinterland of major Seleucid cities were interlaced with monuments, statue groups, and ritual centers that celebrated the Seleucid dynasty. The Seleucids insinuated themselves into the ritual life and lived experience of the inhabitants of these cities by building temples, shrines, and monumental statuary. Colossal bronze sculpture groups within the city presented tableaux vivants of these dynastic visions, while sanctuaries at sites of exceptional natural beauty hosted oracles where the Seleucids’ dynastic progenitor, Apollo, would speak to mortals.154 These were the points of practical, spatial interface between the grand ideologies of empire and the spaces in which its inhabitants’ lives unfolded.

Dynastic Gods In the battle for control of Alexander’s legacy and power over his former empire—heˉ toˉn holoˉn heˉ gemonia— ascendancy depended not merely on a relationship with the conqueror or support of local populations, nor even simply skill as a general, as Perdiccas, Eumenes, and Peucestas discovered. Military might was the foundation of Hellenistic kingship, yet those Successors and their descendants who established enduring kingdoms were the ones who cultivated a dynastic mythology and per-

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sonal divine charisma as well. The Ptolemids, Antigonids, and Seleucids each formulated a new personal mythology of divine origin, even if Seleucus I’s capture of Demetrius Poliorcetes cut short the development of that of the Antigonids.155 These self-made kings circulated narratives that portrayed themselves not only as effective military leaders, but as sons of a god, and even gods manifest in their own right. Their newly concocted legends of divine origin often followed a story arc similar to Alexander’s own improvised and personal mythology, though in no way dependent on or subordinate to it. One of the first “gods” that the Seleucids assimilated was Alexander. Seleucus I’s nascent royal image and dynastic iconography claimed those of Alexander and spliced them with his own. Soon Seleucus included his name instead of Alexander’s on coins, and around 311, after he retook Babylon, he began introducing his newly forged dynastic symbols into the fields of Alexandrine coins, marking the first evidence of a Seleucid iconography of power. The reverses of several issues of the Heracles-Zeus types contain an anchor under the outstretched right arm of Zeus.156 The anchor referred to Seleucus’s personal legend, which was a symbol of his divine parentage and fortune. Like his name in the genitive, the anchor claimed the coins’ iconography and legacy for Seleucus. The Seleucid dynasty claimed Apollo as their divine progenitor. On the model of the tryst between Olympia, Alexander’s mother, and Zeus, the Seleucid narrative held that Apollo secretly impregnated Laodicia, the mother of Seleucus, giving her a signet ring with an anchor as a token.157 She awoke in the morning with this signet, later giving it to her son. Seleucus was born with an anchor-shaped birthmark on his thigh, as, supposedly, were all subsequent Seleucids. As a portent of his future success in the region, he was said to have discovered a buried anchor on his way to Babylon in 311 or lost a ring his mother gave him bearing an engraved anchor in Babylon.158 The Seleucid anchor appears later in narratives about Seleucus I’s life and fortune, some of which appear to be elaborations in the popular imagination.159 Seleucus used this device on his royal seals and occasionally on smaller-denomination coinage. The anchor became the symbol of the dynasty, and the anchor’s prestige continued in Iran even after their fall.160 Like all of his Successors, Alexander played an important role in the formation of Seleucus I’s royal image and dynastic mythology, but, unlike the Ptolemids, the Seleucids did not fi nd direct appeals to Alexander’s

image and legacy useful after the early days of the empire. In order to build a new Iranian empire, the Seleucids found it expedient to downplay or even disavow their relationship with Alexander in the Iranian plateau, and it is indeed telling that the Seleucids refounded all Alexandrias that they controlled. While the Ptolemids made Alexander part of their dynasty and indeed placed his body at the center of their dynastic cult, the Seleucids appropriated Alexander’s image and legacy and collapsed these into those of Seleucus I.

The Horned King and Horned God The second great innovation in Seleucid royal imagery and mythology occurred around 305/4 when Seleucus began to portray himself with bull horns in a series of new coin types. Horns appear as attributes on other Hellenistic sovereigns, yet the motif of bull horns is especially prominent among the Seleucids of all other dynasties.161 Moreover, images of the horned king and horned animals soon become ubiquitous across the larger expanse of Seleucid Western Asia in a mutually reinforcing body of numismatic images and monuments. Numerous explanations have arisen for these images, and most reflect the interpretations of those working from a Mediterranean perspective. Debate has focused primarily on the numismatic evidence. If viewed alone and divorced from their Seleucid context, these images can appear as isolated plays on Alexandrine or Antigonid motifs. Yet when put into dialogue with a wider range of evidence, it becomes clear that this body of imagery played a much larger and culturally complex role in Seleucid royal visual culture. Through this imagery Seleucus did not simply portray Alexander or claim his numismatic types or image, but actively appropriated and assimilated key elements of his history to Seleucus I’s own image. The goal, in effect, was to permanently fuse and subordinate Alexander’s image and legacy to that of Seleucus. More importantly, the Seleucids engaged and claimed the deep-seated symbolism of bull horns as a marker for divinity in ancient Western Asian visual cultures. Two coin types, both minted ca. 305/4 after he had secured the Upper Satrapies and India but before he defeated Antigonus at Ispos in 301, present Seleucus I’s initial development of this new unifying royal symbol.162 The most common type, minted at Susa, portrays a youthful Seleucus I wearing a panther-patterned helmet with bull horns and ears and a panther skin

FIGURE 3.12 Tetradrachm of Seleucus I minted at Ecbatana ca. 295 BCE. Courtesy Nomos AG: ex Nomos 1, 6 May 2009.

wrapped around his neck.163 With the legend “of Seleukos,” the reverse portrays a Victory crowning a trophy. The profi le of the obverse figure evokes surviving portraits of Seleucus, yet the bull and panther symbols imply a slippage between this image of Seleucus, Alexander, and Alexander’s Dionysian emulation, collapsing all three of these “conquerers” of India, yet subordinating them all to the new king.164 A rare coin issue from Ecbatana portrays a rider on the obverse with this same horned helmet, as does a rarer type minted only at Ecbatana in gold double darics and bronze denominations.165 Seleucus, in effect, claimed the lingering Alexandrine symbolism of the horns, forging deliberate iconographic and narrative conflations between Alexander and Seleucus. Just as importantly for contemporary politics, Seleucus also wrested this iconography away from Demetrius Poliorcetes (336–283 BCE). Demetrius, who ended his life a Seleucid captive, had portrayed himself with bull horns on his coins, though in his case associating himself with Poseidon. This early numismatic imagery eventually became a permanent part of the urban environment of the Seleucid Empire, appearing in a variety of bronze statues raised in cities across Western Asia. Textual evidence attests to a bronze statue of Seleucus bearing bull horns that stood in Antioch until the Roman period. If such a statue was present in this Mediterranean metropolis, it is likely that similar statues also graced other major

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FIGURE 3.13 Tetradrachm of Seleucus I minted at Seleucia-on-the-Tigris ca. 296/5 BCE (Houghton and Lorber 2002, 1.1:60, no. 130.40). Courtesy Nomos AG: ex Hess-Divo 317, 27 October 2010, 279.

Seleucid cities in Mesopotamia and Iran.166 Like the fused Alexander-Seleucus, the horned horse celebrated the horse on which Seleucus escaped from Antigonus in 315 through the iconographic vehicle of Alexander’s horse Bucephalus. Like the numismatic image of the cornate Seleucus, this numismatic image also participated in a larger multimedia program. Seleucus I’s horned horse was commemorated in a statue group outside the city of Antioch, which consisted of the head of a horned horse accompanied by a gilded helmet, also possibly horned, and an inscription, whose contents leaves no doubt that the group referred to Seleucus not Alexander. The inscription commemorated Seleucus I’s fl ight from Antigonus and his eventual victory: “On this Seleucus fled Antigonus, and was saved; and returning and conquering him, he destroyed him.”167 This visual expression of Seleucus’s personal mythology fi nds an especially vivid portrayal in the special issue from the mint of Ecbatana ca. 295, which coincided with the end of the trophy series. The reverse of these coins, which are the first from Ecbatana to include the name of Seleucus, displays a full-length portrait of the helmeted hero, mounted on a horned horse. Depending on the generation or cultural literacy of the viewer, it is possible observers could interpret the image as Alexander mounted on his horse Bucephalus, or as Seleucus Nicator himself.168 But at this point Alexander had been dead for nearly a quarter century, and the majority of viewers within the Seleucid Empire encountered the imagery primarily as the personal iconography of Seleucus. Coin types with bulls, horned horses, and even horned elephants complemented the image of the horned and helmeted hero, creating a rich variety of

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Seleucid cornate images, including some taken over from rival kings.169 It is noteworthy that when the Seleucids appropriated types from their Hellenistic competitors, they were “made Seleucid” not simply through the addition of an anchor, but through the addition of horns, now fi rmly associated with Seleucid identity within their empire. Around 295 a series of bronze coins from the mints of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris and Susa claimed the Ptolemaic motif of an elephant-dawn chariot for the Seleucid iconographic arsenal.170 On the Seleucid reverses, an armed Athena drives the chariot and the elephants are horned, which stamp the motif with a specifically Seleucid symbolism. Like Ptolemaic prototypes, the reverses portray an elephant-drawn quadriga, which, in its original context and to nonSeleucid viewers, might have alluded to Alexander’s eastern campaigns and Ptolemy’s pretense that he laid claim to the conqueror’s full empire.171 However, at this point in the early third century Seleucus and Seleucus alone could command an elephant corps, and these elephants as well as those on other coins referred directly to his literal, not pretended, power over Asia and ability to marshal these supremely royal war machines. Also in 295, Seleucus issued coin types that portrayed a charging or standing bull, alluding to another Seleucid foundation legend that claimed that Seleucus saved Alexander from a loose sacrificial bull by overpowering the beast with his bare hands.172 These types appear in mints as far apart as Asia Minor and Bactria. In addition, rivers across Seleucid Asia were now represented with the standard iconography for river gods, portrayed as bulls or human-headed bulls. The type appears in abundance, cloaking important local rivers, like the Oxus in Bactria, with this empire-wide iconography.173

Long after Seleucus I’s horned warriors, later Seleucid kings, such as Seleucus II and Antiochus III, portrayed themselves with horns on select obverse portraits to promote their claims to divinity, often in connection with specific victories.174 The cities of Cilicia commissioned a statue group in honor of Antiochus IV that portrayed the king wrestling a bull in thanks for subduing bandits in the Taurus Mountains.175 In addition to portraying the king enacting one of the legends of his forebear, Seleucus I, it has been argued that the motif of the king subduing mountains, here embodied by the bull, alludes to an ancient Mesopotamian royal trope.176 This gets to the ultimate significance of these taurine numismatic images and urban statuary. While their visual forms might have originated in Greek art, this body of Seleucid images spoke to a much wider constituency than just the inhabitants of the old Greek city-states in the Aegean or the empire’s Greco-Macedonian veterans and settlers. In foregrounding this particular divine motif, the Seleucid court skillfully created a multivalent royal symbol that engaged the deep history of the visual cultures of power of ancient Western Asia.177 These horned kings and beasts engaged ancient Western Asia’s deep history of divine and royal iconography and claimed them all for the Seleucid king.178 It is important to underscore that the horns did not engage any one royal tradition in particular, nor was such specificity necessarily desirable.179 In fact, the bull horns were effective primarily as a general marker of power and divinity, which made it possible for the dynasty to recruit any number of royal and religious traditions and capitalize on their subjects’ experience of anything from the horned headdresses of gods visible in cult statues or votive figurines to the “winged geniuses” and lamassus guarding the doors of palaces, either in use or in ruins, to the horned headdresses of kings in lingering royal stelae or rock reliefs. Not only are bull horns especially prominent among the Seleucids, but these coin types appear overwhelmingly in their eastern mints, which indicates that the Seleucids considered this body of images to speak to and be especially important for the lands of their vast Western Asian Empire.180 The image of the horned ruler enabled the Seleucids to craft an open-ended image of divinely inspired royal power. The Seleucids’ taurine imagery was broadly relevant on the Iranian plateau, and in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia; however, the image of a horned king or horned god had no place in Persian visual culture. Neither the Persian king nor his god, Ahura Mazda, are ever portrayed wearing a horned headdress in any official

image, big or small. The Persians engaged this iconographic motif only lightly and as part of their larger program of visual and architectural imperial hybridity. The Persian palaces featured bull capitals, and their palaces’ decorative programs incorporated composite creatures with horned headdresses, such as Xerxes’s Gate of All Lands, which incorporated Assyrian-style composite creatures with horned headdresses, or the bearded sphinxes that appear at both Susa and Persepolis. In their royal images, as in their urban design, the Seleucids preferred to emphasize a broader cadre of Western Asian royal traditions than that of Persia.

Building the Dynastic Mythology After the foundation of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris and the Tetrapolis, the Seleucids created new dynastic images focusing on their dynastic progenitor, Apollo, and the goddess of fortune, Tyche. Apollonian imagery appears in the numismatic output of both Seleucus I and, after he was raised to co-regency in 292, Antiochus I. Both kings issued bronzes with Apollo and Artemis, and in areas under Antiochus I’s control, gold staters.181 Antiochus I elaborated this divine mythology and ultimately created the Seleucids’ most powerful and enduring numismatic types. With great importance for the history of Western Asian numismatics and royal imagery, after becoming sole ruler, Antiochus I introduced a reverse type of Apollo seated on the omphalos with bow and arrow.182 Antiochus I’s type became the most common reverse in later Seleucid coinage, with a direct impact on the formation of the coinage of the early Arsacids. The image of a striding, royal bowman had been the most common numismatic motif in Achaemenid coins, and western satrapal coin types regularly feature a Persian archer as well.183 However, the Seleucid Apollo cannot be seen simply as a statement of continuity with Persian kingship and royal visual culture. Rather it was a new competitive statement that challenged and supplanted the defeated dynasty in this field of battle as well. Seleucid patronage and religious politics actively reshaped Mediterranean and Babylonian religious landscapes around the new Seleucid dynastic vision. Within Babylonia, the Seleucids associated Apollo with the Babylonian god Nabû, who was prominent not only in Babylonia, but also into eastern Syria. On Antiochus I’s initiative, the Seleucids forged meaningful dynastic connections with Nabû and his cult sites.184 Seleucid religious ideology made this connection between the two gods widespread and engrained it in the religious

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FIGURE 3.14 Tetradrachm of Antiochus I. Courtesy Yale Art Gallery. FIGURE 3.15 Tetradrachm of Demetrius I. Courtesy Yale Art Gallery.

culture of ancient Western Asia, imprinting Western Asian religiosity, in both Mesopotamia and Syria.185 Antiochus I rebuilt the temple of Nabû at Borsippa, as well as clearing and rebuilding the Esagila complex, the site of the New Year’s (Akı¯tu) festival, and the Etemenanki ziggurat.186 Several important cuneiform documents attest to Seleucid engagement with Ezida, the temple of Nabû at Borsippa, and Antiochus I was responsible for rebuilding Ezida.187 In the Mediterranean, the Seleucids wove their divine filiation into the urban fabric of their cities and founded or patronized sanctuaries of Apollo in Syria and the old Greek world in the Balkans as well as western Asia Minor. The temple of Apollo at Didyma stands as a particularly illuminating example.188 The dynasty began the Hellenistic temple, which was purposely built for its oracular function. It remained a focal point for Seleucid patronage and eventually became one of the grandest and most complex structures of the era, although it was not completed until long after Didyma had fallen out of Seleucid control.189 The Seleucids’ devotion to Apollo of Didyma was not simply a local concern. Once Seleucus I gained control of Ecbatana, according to Pausanius he

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returned Didyma’s original cult statue, which the Persians had looted and deposited in Ecbatana’s treasury.190 Apollo Didymaios also guarded the far eastern reaches of the Seleucid Empire. In the course of exploring Seleucid Central Asia for the king, Demodamas of Miletus founded altars dedicated to Apollo of Didyma on the Iaxartes River.191 Much like Alexander’s altars in Punjab, these altars monumentally circumscribed Seleucid imperial possessions, though with a distinctly Seleucid dynastic statement. Much like the many Alexandrias rechristened Seleucia or Antioch, these altars effaced Alexander’s role in creating the empire. Tyche, the goddess of fortune, became a popular focus of royal and common devotion throughout the Mediterranean and Western Asia with the dawn of the Hellenistic age and, under the Seleucids, became particularly prominent in Iran.192 Tyche plays an important role in several Seleucid legends. The Seleucid foundation myth of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris portrays the magi fearfully pronouncing that Seleucus I has brought the great city into the world “with fortune” (gegone syn tycheˉi).193 Tycheˉ even emerges as a theme in the comical antics of Antiochus IV as he roams the streets and bath-

houses of Antioch bestowing coins or gifts on shocked passersby. While his behavior might be taken as an inverted image of kingship, which is certainly how the citizens of Antioch react in our sources, such themes reappear often enough to suggest that royal performances portraying the king as an agent of Tyche were deeply intertwined with Seleucid ideology and ritual self-representation.194 The image of Tyche appeared in a variety of Seleucid coin types and monumental sculptures, and many important Seleucid cities had shrines to Tyche.195 The goddess was particularly venerated in Antioch, and it appears that the city originally hosted multiple statues and perhaps even shrines of Tyche.196 Other cities of Seleucid Syria had a tychaion, or temple dedicated to the city’s gad, the Semitic equivalent, suggesting that most major cities of the empire integrated this aspect of the Seleucid dynasty vision.197 When Tyche appears on Seleucid coins, she appears not as a city personification, but as the supreme goddess Fortune herself, identifiable by the rudder and cornucopia. Antiochus III fi rst depicted a standing Tyche, then, in the mid-second century, Demetrius I introduced the more enduring image of the seated Tyche with cornucopia and rudder, and this iconography was disseminated as a royal symbol widely throughout Iran and India.198 Responding to Seleucid precedents, the Arsacids later experimented with this iconography to portray the Iranian concept (though not necessarily always the male god) of the Iranian Divine Fortune/Glory (xvarənah-) as the IndoGreeks, Kushans, and Guptas adapted the iconography of the goddess of fortune to portray the other divinities of fortune in Iran and northern India, including such goddesses as Ardoxsho, Hariti, and Shri Lakshmi.199

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The great campaign of city foundation spearheaded by Seleucus Nicator and Antiochus I had permanently transformed the former Persian Empire’s urban and natural topography of power. The Seleucids had successfully shifted Iran’s loci of power northward, and, within the context of the western part of the empire, the Syrian Tetrapolis and Seleucia-on-the-Tigris were fully estab-

lished as the royal cities eclipsing any former Achaemenid royal residence. Of the main Achaemenid residence cities in Iran, only Ecbatana retained its role as a major royal residence and mint into the Parthian period. Moreover, the Seleucids neutralized the ability of those palaces considered to be “in Persis,” that is, Susa and Persepolis, to serve as royal centers anew.200 Susa’s transformation into a new Seleucid city had involved amputating its palace complex and leaving it to rot as an antimonument to the Achaemenids’ defeat. Persepolis was left to decline under local governors who lacked the resources or will to rebuild and repair what remained of the colossal complex. Pasargadae’s citadel was garrisoned, until it too was left to decline. Even the Achaemenid tombs, broken into and looted, were now rendered mute and eventually semialien monuments, reminding Persia of increasingly mythologized past glories and the time elapsed since them. Just as importantly, the Seleucids had cleansed the memory of the Achaemenids from Babylon, whose urban and religious traditions now presented the Seleucids as the natural heirs of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and the Persians as interlopers. The population transfers, colonization, rise of expansive new cities, and just as importantly, the Achaemenid sites of power and memory the Seleucids strategically left to decay and decline radically remade the lived experience of the landscape. The Iranian world now experienced Persian royal rituals, like grand open-air banquet sacrifices, and architectural forms, like axial palaces with hypostyle halls, as living traditions only through the Seleucids’ newly raised palaces and recently enacted “Persian Festivals.”201 Even the landscape had been permanently altered. Achaemenid vestiges at sites like Bisotun, if they were even remembered to be from an ancient Persian dynasty at all, would be experienced through their Seleucid reconfiguration. In other words, the Seleucids had permanently altered the infrastructural, economic, demographic, and symbolic resources for rebuilding a new Persian empire. They successfully shifted the center of gravity of the Iranian world to the north and east, building, in effect, a new Iranian empire.

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The Rise of the Arsacids and a New Iranian Topography of Power

We have explored in the preceding chapter how the Seleucids reshaped the former Achaemenid Empire. Even if the seeds of the decline of their Iranian empire were sown just a half century after the foundation of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, the Seleucids had fi rmly established themselves as the preeminent Iranian dynasty and imperial power ruling over the Western Asia world. When Arsaces I consolidated his hold over Parthia, Seleucid kingship had been the dominant royal idiom in Iran for decades. Moreover, by the mid-second century most Iranian dynasties had intermarried with the Seleucids, and the Seleucids themselves were just as “Iranian” as they were Macedonian. In the late second century the Seleucids labored to consolidate their dynastic claims through ties to the old Persian satrapal dynasties to respond to new geopolitical realities. In fact, Mithradates I’s early Seleucid rival, Antiochus IV (175–164 BCE), was himself originally named “Mithradates” to accentuate the Seleucids’ newly acquired Pontic lineage and claims before taking Antiochus as his throne name.1 Tempering any claims of an unambiguous “Persian revival,” the Arsacids were drawn only to those Achaemenid sites that were important to the Seleucids. The Arsacids allowed the Achaemenid palaces in the Persian homeland that the Seleucids had strategically ruined or ignored—that is Susa, Pasargadae, and Persepolis—to persist in ruin or obscurity. They played no part in the construction of the Arsacids’ new royal identity. Of those that the Seleucids had maintained and integrated into their new imperial constellation, only Ecbatana continued in service as a major royal residence through

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the course of the empire, retaining its mint. Similarly the Arsacids initially encountered Persian palatial architecture through the mediation of the Seleucid Empire. Babylon received new urban infrastructure in the Parthian period, yet tellingly the Arsacids invested in Greek structures and institutions rather than those associated with the ancient Babylonian heritage. No longer deemed worthy of royal support, Babylon’s temples soon fell into ruin, as did its palaces. In other words, it was more important for the Arsacids to gain control of Western Asia’s Seleucid topography of power than resurrect the old Achaemenid one. Much like post-Achaemenid usage of Persian titles like “Great King” and “King of Kings,” any topographical and architectural continuities arose not from an intact yet latent Persian royal culture, but from a complex contemporary climate of competition with the Seleucids and, later, the Perso-Macedonian dynasties of Anatolia and Armenia.2 Even in those former satrapies that remained relatively unscathed, such as Armenia and Cappadocia, a dynast was compelled to augment these local satrapal traditions with those of Seleucid kingship if they wished to be a player on the global stage. Those sovereigns who pursued strategies of conscious archaism built their neoconservative visions on a foundation that the Seleucids had prepared. There was no turning back the clock. While the Arsacids and postsatrapal dynasts in Anatolia might experiment with presenting themselves as neoPersian kings, none could reanimate the corpse of the Persian Empire. Those that were successful were the ones who succeeded in creating something substantially new.

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Araxes Khalchayan Nisa Lake Van Zab Merv t a Atrek re Arbela (Erbil) Asaak G Surkh Kotal Hatra Hecatompylus Begram Arsakia (Ray) Bisotun Assur d # Ecbatana Dura-Europus n Taxila a Seleucia-Ctesiphon elm Babylon Gabae (Esfahan) H Nippur Lake Hamun Vologasias Phraates-in-Susiana (Susa) Kuh-e Khwaja Vologescerta Uruk Staxr Spasinou Charax (Meshan) s du In

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MAP 3. Important cities and sites of the Parthian period. Map courtesy of Anthony J. Lauricella.

Early Parthian Cities and the Iranian East The early Arsacids initially did not have the advantage of a preexistent, imperial topography in their home province, at least not one as grand as the ambitions of their new empire. Nor did their kingdom grow with the ruins of Achaemenid palaces looming over them, like the Sasanians. The province of Parthia boasted satrapal residences and estates like any other province, but under the Achaemenids and Seleucids the province of Parthia did not host a major imperial residence on the order of Susa, Ecbatana, or Seleucia-on the-Tigris. Only later, as the Parthian Empire expanded from its eastern core, did the Arsacids meet the rich and varied imperial topography of the western Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia. Parthian urbanism was thus born from that of the Seleucid east. Early Arsacid urbanism and prestige archi-

tecture owed much to Seleucid models, which the new dynasty appropriated and quickly deployed in new and innovative ways. Literary sources provide the only evidence for the character, urban features, and even existence of the majority of major Parthian cities and royal residences. This is even the case for late empire’s most important administrative center and royal residence, Ctesiphon, which we know only through a few scattered mentions in classical sources. With the important exception of Nisa and Ecbatana, most major Parthian cities preserve little more than sherd fields, and in a few rare cases, strata in the remains of mud-brick fortifications. While they do not offer the level of detail available for Achaemenid, Seleucid, or Sasanian cities, the extensive sherd fields around cities like Hecatompylos attest to their great extent, which would appear as a literary mirage otherwise. Similarly, the

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remnants of Parthian fortifications nested under the Sasanian fortifications at Merv and Ray attest to the level of infrastructural investment that the Parthians bestowed on these important eastern cities as well as their debt to Seleucid urbanism in their design.3 This fragmentary literary evidence attests to what, at first glance, appears to be an almost bewildering array of Arsacid “capitals.” Such wide variation in the eastern “capitals” in the literary sources arises because the Greek and Roman historians or chroniclers often simply documented the location of the itinerant Arsacid court and generalized from it. These sites were often chosen for short-term strategic purposes and not all hosted mints, administrative archives, and ritual centers. The literary sources are largely in agreement that the Arsacids moved their court according to the season, spending winters on the Mesopotamian plain and summers in the highlands of the Iranian plateau, in either Media or Gorgan. Athenaeus states they spent the spring in Rhagai, the winter in Babylon, and the rest of the year in Hecatompylos, while Strabo says the court spent the winter in Ctesiphon and the summer in both Ecbatana and Hyrcania, an itinerary that Josephus and Curtius Rufus also reflect.4 A strand of twentieth-century scholarship argued that this arose because of a persistent nomadic cultural element in the Arsacid court, an idea that was especially popular in Soviet scholarship.5 In truth, while the early Arsacids and the Parthian elite cultivated certain military techniques and perhaps a mystique drawn from Central Asia, namely, the use of mounted archers and prowess as horsemen, Arsacid court culture was not a fossilized nomadic culture. Fundamentally, an itinerant court was an integral dynamic of the Achaemenid and Seleucid Empires and a crucial technique for projecting power over such a diverse empire, for which reason the Arsacids continued to use it.6 In order to continually extract resources from provinces and maintain the loyalty of elites, the king and a concomitant threat of military retribution had always to be imminent. Although the center of administrative gravity of the empire eventually shifted westward, the Parthian Empire invested considerable resources to control eastern Iran. Between the reigns of Mithradates I and Mithradates II, the Parthians attacked the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and then confronted several waves of nomadic invasions to maintain their hold on these regions.7 The empire eventually incorporated the cities of Antioch-in-Margiana (Merv) and Alexandria-Aria (Herat), which hosted important mints, while attempting to hold the line

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against nomadic incursions.8 The Parthians then integrated these cities into a chain of fortress cities, which they built or refounded across northern Iran. The northeastern Arsacid cities of Ray, Nisa, Herat, and Merv shared several features in their urban design, including a reliance on mud brick, the division of the city into a fortress and a large walled sector for habitation, and the use of Hellenistic fortification techniques such as proteichismata in front of gates.9 These architectural forms were in many ways continuous with, or responded to, the same Hellenistic Central Asian traditions seen in Bactria and Chorasmia, which also combined the traditions of Greek and Achaemenid fortification. The most impressive monument to Parthian Merv is indeed the walls themselves, which the Arsacids raised and repaired. The most important of these early royal residences was Hecatompylos, which has been associated with the archaeological site of Shahr-e Qumes, ca. 35 kilometers from Damaghan, which has revealed evidence of both Seleucid and Parthian settlements.10 Likely another of Seleucus I’s refoundations, Hecatompylos served as an important administrative capital for the Parthians and even gave Strabo the impression that it was the capital of the empire.11 During the empire’s early expansion, it served as the Arsacids’ forward operating base and drew the attention of Antiochus III in 209 BCE as he marched east to reconquer the lost Seleucid provinces.12 Largely built of mud brick, the site has not yielded extensive evidence of Parthian urban or palatial design, at least not yet. Nevertheless, the site preserves a building that may have been a palace and a fortified complex with towers, and another that shows an enigmatic mixture of what might be cultic and funerary activity.13 The sheer extent of the site at least attests to its original size and importance. Known largely from textual sources mentioning Antiochus III’s march east to assert control over the Upper Satrapies, other cities in Hyrcania, including SyrinxTapeˉ and Tambrax, possessed royal palaces or fortresses, though this does not mean that they served as capitals per se any more than the numerous royal residences and kiosks of the Achaemenids and Seleucids.14 While they were not in continuous use, some sites or regions that were important in the Achaemenid era may have periodically served similar purposes in the Seleucid or Parthian eras simply because of their strategic location. Syrinx-Tapeˉ, which was likely near or one and the same as the Achaemenid “basileia” of Zadrakarta, was important for the Seleucids and struck some of Mithradates I’s early coinage.15

Strabo indicates that, following a similar pattern to Hekatompylos, Seleucus I refounded Rhaga (Ray) as an “Europos,” one of the Macedonian toponyms applied to many Seleucid foundations. The Arsacids refounded it as an “Arsakeia.” Neither name evidently stuck.16 Athenaeus mentions the city in his version of the Parthian kings’ seasonal itinerary, but it does not play a prominent role in other sources.17 Unlike Hecatompylos, no trace of the Seleucid city has yet been discovered, if it indeed existed at the site of Parthian and Sasanian Ray.18 What is clear, however, is that the city represented a major Parthian investment. Parthian Ray was founded in the early Parthian period and was already in use by the reign of Mithradates I.19 At Ray the citadel took advantage of a rocky mountain spur, which the city ramparts partially incorporated. The city adhered to an urban plan that resembled the Seleucid cities of the Iranian east, consisting of a citadel in an “upper city” connected to a walled lower city.20 In fact its construction techniques and brick sizes correspond to those from sectors of Balkh.21

A New Parthian Ceremonial Center Of the handful of Arsacid royal capitals that have been localized the most important to scholarship is undoubtedly the fortress of Nisa, located in the heart of the Arsacids’ Parthian homeland.22 “Old Nisa” refers to the fortified hilltop complex that hosted several monumental structures with palatial and sacral functions.23 It was the first imperial capital of the Arsacid dynasty and the only royal capital whose official buildings have yielded multifaceted archaeological evidence.24 Built in several different phases, Old Nisa likely began as a fortress and, after the expansion of the Arsacid Empire under Mithradates I, the Arsacid king of kings converted the site into a ceremonial, administrative, and archival center.25 The complex was in use by 150 BCE, and evidence of occupation continues through the fi rst century BCE. With the exception of a few improvised and small-scale dwellings, Old Nisa was not rebuilt or occupied in the Sasanian period.26 Nisa preserves evidence of an especially crucial point of development in Arsacid art and architecture. 27 It reflects the dynasty’s engagement with and transformation of Seleucid art and architecture as it forged architectural forms to serve a new conception of kingship. Correspondences with numismatic art, the only other extant evidence we have from this period, suggests a unified imperial image governed its design and decora-

tion.28 Its founder intended the complex and associated figural art to express a new, imperial ideology of kingship that subsumed both Macedonian and Persian traditions. Seleucid royal art, architecture, and court practices offered a departure point, and the Arsacid court showcased art objects whose materials, and possibly workmanship, were imported from further west in the Hellenistic world.29 At the same time, the material from Nisa suggests that the Arsacid court employed artists and architects adept in the evolving traditions of Bactrian and Central Asian Hellenism, which, through their patronage, they directed toward new purposes. The complex did not contain extensive domestic architecture, but rather consisted of audience halls, treasuries, and spaces dedicated to royal ritual and, possibly, dynastic cult. In addition, Nisa accommodated numerous storehouses for stockpiling and recording incoming and outgoing foodstuffs.30 They provide an archaeological testament to what lay behind the extensive archival records associated with the site.31 Much like the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, the early Parthians directly engaged the contemporary currents of Seleucid prestige architecture and their integration of Greek and Persian forms as they forged their new empire. The “Central Complex” of Old Nisa preserves structures that grow from the Seleucid architectural tradition, integrating Persian ground plans with Greek architectural ornament and, in some cases, Babylonian niche treatments. While we do not yet understand the purpose of all structures, the Parthian royal residence of Nisa presents the greatest concentration of Parthian structures that attests to the development, elaboration, and experimentation of Arsacid prestige architecture. They defy easy categorization, in terms of both architectural typology and function. For this reason, we consider the roots and development of the architecture of these structures in this chapter and return to their functions in subsequent chapters dealing with dynastic cult and palaces. Built in an earlier phase, the “Red Building,” belongs to the initial stages of the development of Arsacid architecture, which departed from the Seleucid Perso-Macedonian synthesis. I stress the Seleucid and GrecoBactrian impact on early Parthian architecture’s development to emphasize that it did not result from an unbroken and unchanged tradition of Persian architecture, which simply awakened from dormancy once the Arsacids took power. Its façade measures 41 meters wide, opens onto a large court, which, in turn, leads to a central 17.20-by-15.8-meter room reached through a

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four-columned portico. Evoking the features and partial ground plan of a grand reception hall, its monumental design parallels immediately preceding and contemporary Seleucid architecture in Western and Central Asia.32 Reddish-purple plaster distinguished both its interiors and exterior façade under the portico as well as its metopes. 33 Remnants of the plaster from its interiors indicate that its floors and walls were tinted a reddishpurple color. 34 The rich glow of this unique interior leaves no doubt that this structure served an especially royal purpose and, just as important, adapts Persian and Hellenistic conventions of spatially “color-coding” palaces and sacred spaces.35 Similar to the Hellenistic train-

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FIGURE 4.1 Plan of Parthian Nisa (after Invernizzi and Lippolis 2008, fig. 2).

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ing implied by Nisa’s naturalistically rendered clay sculptural, the Red Building’s builders utilized a technique of laying the red surface plaster that follows Hellenistic techniques.36 A similar porticoed entranceway opened to the east of the Red Building, leading to the “Tower Building.” At the core of the Tower Building lay a huge square foundation, which supported a high masonry platform surrounded by an ambulatory. The “Square Building,” a structure with a niched exterior and an interior dominated by four lobed composite columns, formed the eastern flank of an open square. The buildings that enclosed this space presented façades and profi les that

FIGURE 4.2 View of the inner hall of theRed Building with the remains of the drum of the Round Hall behind to the left. Parthian Nisa

(Turkmenistan). Courtesy Centro Scavi Torino.

were as diverse as they were magnificent, underscoring that strategic eclecticism, not uniformity, was a primary mode of expressing royal power at this site. The plans of some of the structures, as well as several of the design and decorative features, depart from Seleucid transformations of Persian architecture. The Red Building’s dominant features—a porticoed entranceway leading to a square hall—recall those same succession of forms found at the palace of Ai Khanum and the Temple of the Oxus. Contrasting with these and other similar structures, the entrance to the Red Building does not directly pass into the interior hall, but into a transverse corridor that leads one to the left to the interior hall’s portal, which is offset from the main entrance.37 Palatial architecture, both pre- and postdating the structure, provides the closest and most abundant parallels. The ground plans of the Arsacid palaces at Assur and Nippur employ a similar succession of an entranceway, transverse corridor, and offset entranceway. However, unlike most comparable royal or satrapal residences, the Red Building does not integrate private domestic chambers, but rather communicates only with the complex’s main court and other

monumental or cultic structures, a fact that holds true as well for the Square Building, constructed in a later phase. This suggests that the structure served ceremonial purposes, either courtly, cultic, or both, but not as a continuously occupied royal residence. While not as revolutionary as the Round Hall, the Tower Building presents an innovative departure from Persian and Seleucid structures.38 The broad entrance portico of composite brick columns recalls the ground plan of Takht-e Sangı¯n and leads to a rectangular chamber vestibule with four columns. This, however, communicates with a square corridor that surrounds the central square mass of brick, whose size suggests that it supported a high superstructure. The original excavator reported that the top of the tower preserved the remains of a small structure with columns, though nothing of this was thoroughly documented or survives. Two stairways have been reconstructed flanking the interior of the portico, suggesting that this structure had two stories, though how this related to the tower structure is not clear. The ambulatory corridor communicates with the rooms’ corridor system of the Red Building and “Round

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Hall,” as well as a narrow smaller entrance, whose opening was supported by two closely placed pillars on the opposite side of the structure from the main entrance. To judge from the abundance of fragmentary remains, wall paintings richly decorated the Tower Building. Although the entire composition cannot be reconstructed, the subject of the painting, in part or in whole, was an equestrian battle between mounted archers.39 While the figures are in Iranian dress, consistent with the cultural and artistic nature of the other material at Nisa, the painting’s formal elements are drawn from Hellenistic painting, and it even preserves part of an inscription in Greek. The Round Hall, to the southeast of the Red Building, belonged to a later phase, and was linked to the Red Building by corridors and three passages.40 Built as an adjunct to the Red Building, the Round Hall marks an important departure point from the angular, frontal Persian and Perso-Macedonian traditions of the site’s earlier phase.41 It was a grand, domed mud-brick structure added to the south of the Red Building. Its ground plan presented a square, roughly 30 by 30 meters, inscribed with a circle with a 17.14-meter diameter. Working in multiple phases, the Parthian builders first constructed an inner, annular ring of mud bricks and then encased it in a thick block of rectolinear mud-brick masonry, which buttressed the interior circular chamber. These massive foundations, along with its lower walls, display a very slight inclination toward the center, indicating that it carried a dome.42 The structure provides scholarship with the only example of Parthian domed architecture, which, representations in Roman art and early Sasanian architecture suggest, become a prominent feature of later Parthian prestige architecture. It does not, however, employ the standard Sasanian method of construction using squinches. Instead, in an ostentatious display of engineering and innovation, its dome rose continuously from a circular drum. The walls of the drum inclined as they rose, indicating that they carried a lofty, elliptical dome, whose reconstructed height is estimated at around 17 meters.43 The walls of the drum were white, while the expanse of the dome was likely covered in purple-red plaster, with a simple cornice separating the two zones.44 Its decoration was created by sculptors who were clearly trained in contemporary Greek sculptural style, and created clay statues that adapted Hellenistic sculptural forms, stylistic conventions, and iconography to portray the Arsacid court, including Mithradates I.45 The Red Building, the Tower Building, and the Round Hall form one linked complex that created the southwestern façade of a large courtyard. The citadel’s exterior

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defensive walls enclosed the northwestern side of the court. The southeastern side of this court was formed by the façade of another structure built in the site’s later phase, the Square Hall.46 It stood at a right angle to the Tower Building, and the line of its face was continued by the exterior wall of an adjacent complex, the Northeast Palace, whose rooms are much less regular and contain several interior courts. While the Square Hall’s central defining feature—a square interior hall with four columns—echoes that of the Red Building, its interior and exterior design and ornamental features present a much different character. Instead of a porch, in its final phase the façade of the Square Hall presented a mass of niched brickwork. Originally, three centrally located entrances opened into narrow passageways leading to the interior. The northern two entrances were filled in during the later phase. Directly across from the entrances, one narrow passage that led to the exterior of the structure and communicated with two small chambers was built into the walls to the left and right. To the northeast, a larger passage led to a long rectangular room that paralleled the northeast side of the central room, with a smaller square antechamber on its southwest leading to an interior court of the Northeast Palace complex. In its final phase, four composite quatrilobed brick pilasters supported its roof, and the interior walls gained engaged semicolumns. The walls of the structure were very thick, and could have supported an elaborate timber ceiling as featured in the Soviet reconstruction. Square vertical niches holding engaged columns articulated the lower section of the Square Hall’s interior walls. The upper portion has been reconstructed as carrying niches that accommodated a series of clay statues of male and female figures, whose fragments were discovered stored in the long rectangular room to the northeast. Sculptural and ornamental material from the Red Building and other structures at Old Nisa reflects a similar continuity with, and departure from, Seleucid ornamental and iconographic themes. The bases that supported the four interior columns of the Red Building recall the Achaemenid-style plinth-and-torus column bases found in the gatehouse of the palace of Ai Khanum.47 Given the preponderance of fragmentary, modeled clay acanthus leaves found throughout the site, the wooden columns these bases supported ended in Corinthian capitals, recalling the persistently and deliberately hybrid character of Seleucid and later Greco-Bactrian architecture.48 Engaging the wider world of Hellenistic divine and royal iconography, metope plaques decorated the exterior façade and carried symbols of the god Hera-

FIGURE 4.3 Metope with lion from the façade of the Red Building, Nisa. Courtesy Centro Scavi Torino and William Keeping.

cles, which in this context carried the additional valence of the Iranian god Wahra¯m, including a club and a lion’s head. The bow and quiver, also Greek symbols of Heracles, potentially held multiple divine and royal connotations in the Iranian visual cultural realm, from the god Mihr to the hero Arash, to the Arsacids’ own military might.49 Associated likewise with the façade of the Red House, a stucco rampant eagle presents a similar range of sacred meanings, from Zeus to the Iranian Xwarrah.50 Other metopes appear to evoke the Seleucid anchor, and possibly their claims through Demetrius II to their royal legacy. Carved stone revetments from the façade present a repeating series of vertical elements evocative of a deconstructed metope. Decorative plaques from the Square Building and the Round Hall carry palmettes that resemble terra-cotta antefixes recovered from the stoa of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris.51 The niches in the façade of the Square Building engage the niched façades of Seleucidera Babylonian temples and relate to such features on the

exterior of the Temple with Niches at Ai Khanum. Similarly, stepped merlons of baked brick associated with the exteriors of the Square Building and Round Hall suggest a similar continuous development from Seleucid to Arsacid architecture in Mesopotamia, Iran, and Central Asia.52 Most tellingly, the fragments of high-relief sculptures of male and female figures that decorated the upper story of the Red Building were undoubtedly modeled by a workshop whose sculptural style was fully conversant with contemporary Hellenistic sculptural trends, which were adapted to the tastes and programmatic requirements of their patrons. The figures likely formed part of a larger group. Although their remains are too damaged to allow us to posit a narrative or thematic program, many of the fragments of the male figures wear armor. Among the best-preserved fragments from this sculpture group is a head of a warrior whose cheekpiece bears the thunderbolt of Zeus. The sensitively modeled beard and facial features communicate a dynamism that rivals the finest contemporary sculpture being produced in the western reaches of the Hellenistic world. The Square House, which was part of a separate complex of structures to the north of the Central Complex, enclosed a large central courtyard originally surrounded by a narrow wooden colonnade.53 A series of elongated rectangular rooms, each provisioned with a deep bench along the walls and a roof supported by a central row of wooden columns, lined all four sides. The Soviet excavators maintained that the rooms and the structure were designed to serve as some sort of compartmentalized banqueting or assembly hall, though this hypothesis has rightly been discarded.54 With its internal peristyle and radiating corridors, the architectural form of the structure finds its closest parallel in the treasury of the Greco-Bactrian extension of the palace of Ai Khanum. The remains of a rich array of precious objects and bureaucratic documents match its architectural forms. It held exactly what a treasury would be expected to contain: precious objects, coins, weapons, valuable artworks, and closed archives. While not discovered in their original cultic context, marble statues of the Greek gods Aphrodite, Artemis, and Dionysus, executed in contemporary Hellenistic style, were found in excavations of the Square Hall.55 The statues were kept in a room specially added at a later date, the White Annex, indicating that they were too precious to discard, despite the fact that they had suffered irreparable damage at a date subsequent to their initial installation. Along the walls, the excavators discovered painted clay statues as well. At this point, scholarship can offer only

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FIGURE 4.4 Metope with club from the façade of the Red

Building, Nisa. Courtesy Centro Scavi Torino. FIGURE 4.5 Metope with bow and quiver from the façade of

the Red Building, Nisa. Courtesy Centro Scavi Torino.

general hypotheses on the original function and context of these statues within Old Nisa; however, it is clear that the Arsacids not only appreciated Greek art, but deemed it worthy to serve as a medium for representing gods that they venerated, be they Greek or Iranian.56 The Arsacids’ engagement with Seleucid and GrecoBactrian art and architectural currents at Nisa was not isolated. The Arsacids communicated and competed with contemporary western kings, both Macedonian

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and Iranian, as well as their Greek cities, using the visual, architectural, and literary idioms of Hellenistic Asia.57 Older scholarship often assumed this was simply superficial, but substantial textual as well as archaeological evidence illustrate that the Greek language, literature, and art lay at the heart of the Arsacid court, as Crassus’s cameo in the wedding performance of the Bacchae for Orodes II most famously attests.58 As in the Seleucid Empire, Greek and Aramaic both flourished as

FIGURE 4.6 Metope with the Seleucid anchor from the

façade of the Red Building, Nisa. Courtesy Centro Scavi Torino and William Keeping.

idioms of official communication and record keeping across the Arsacid Empire, with Greek initially retained in prestige contexts such as coins and inscriptions.59 The Arsacid kings continued Seleucid epistolary practices in communicating with Greek cities and, to a limited degree, sponsored monumental inscriptions in Greek while new writing systems for Iranian languages emerged from Aramaic scribal conventions.60 Yet while they successfully accommodated the Greek populations politically, the “philhellenic” Parthians did not attempt to assimilate themselves to Greek culture— to become, in fact, “Hellenized.” The opposite process could be said to have taken place. The Parthians transformed the idioms of Greek art, architecture, and literature in the process of using them. Greek culture, or, more specifically, Western Asian Hellenism, was not a foreign commodity; rather, it continued its role as the dominant aristocratic common culture of the Iranian world. However, at this point, it was an idiom of power that the Iranian elites themselves not only participated in but actively shaped and promoted alongside a new, developing Iranian repertoire. This underscores the central problem dealt with in this and the following chapters. In the face of profound disruptions and even irremediable ruptures, the new generation of Iranian sovereigns who prevailed, regionally or imperially, as Seleucid rivals or even as heritors, were the ones who succeeded in building something substantially new.

Continuity and Change at Parthian Ecbatana Ecbatana is the only Achaemenid royal residence to remain in continuous use through the Parthian period.61

FIGURE 4.7 Clay head of a warrior from the Square Hall, Nisa. Courtesy Centro Scavi Torino and William Keeping.

Once Mithradates I took it sometime after 148 BCE, it served as one of the principal Parthian royal residences.62 Indicative of its unique status, the city hosted a royal

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mint, which, along with Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, was one of only two mints to strike coins from the first century through the end of the dynasty.63 In marked contrast to most major, multiperiod archaeological sites in Iran, the Parthian contribution to the Ecbatana is not only clear, but overshadows those of all other periods. Although the city was the short-lived imperial capital of the Medes, it has yielded virtually nothing from the Median period and only scattered architectural members from the Achaemenid and Seleucid periods.64 The majority of contextualized archaeological features excavated at Ecbatana date to the Arsacid era and show that the dynasty substantially rebuilt and reorganized it, although unfortunately without the Achaemenid palace we cannot speak directly to the Arsacids’ treatment of the site’s Achaemenid and Seleucid remains.65 While no palatial structures have been excavated, the sheer amount of Arsacid construction in Ecbatana suggests an exceptionally heavy investment in the city. In many instances the Arsacid installations are built on virgin soil or obliterated all earlier levels. We can only speculate whether this was because the city and palatial infrastructure had declined and needed to be replaced, or the substantial building was simply an expansion and augmentation. A series of late twentieth-century explorations discerned a city plan on what was Ecbatana’s major mound and a likely candidate site for the Achaemenid palace: Tappa-ye Hegmatana.66 While many have searched for Median and Achaemenid Ecbatana in vain, the Arsacid imprint is much more conspicuous. This urban sector was built in the Arsacid period and consisted of regular housing units measuring 17.5 by 17.5 meters, laid out on parallel streets (some provisioned with water channels) in a regular hippodamian-style grid.67 The excavations revealed a plan that extended over an area of more than 300 by 199 meters in the northern part of the hill.68 A similar block of housing on the same orientation excavated on the southern part of the hill suggests that the plan could have extended over half a kilometer.69 No earlier structures were discovered underneath, only some monochrome Iron Age pottery, though some fragments of Achaemenid column bases were found in a secondary context.70 As often occurred in ancient Western Asia, new cities were created alongside older, occupied areas. The preplanned housing blocks reflect an Arsacid “new-city,” possibly built as a permanent military base.71 Significantly, Seleucid urban planning appears to have influenced the design of the new Arsacid Ecbatana, with the city of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris providing an important template.72 Ecbatana’s continu-

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ous status as a royal residence suggests exceptional potential for elucidating processes of continuity and change in palatial architecture and urbanism, of which such evidence provides but a glimpse. Located on a steep 80-meter-high natural rock outcrop in the southeastern quarter of the city, Ecbatana’s citadel (Mos· alla¯ hill) preserves the remains of a rectangular stone and mud-brick fortress flanked by towers.73 Mos· alla¯ hill was long understood to be one of the likely candidate sites for the Median citadel, palace, and treasury described by Herodotus.74 However, after digging down to virgin soil, a series of early twenty-first-century excavations finally determined that the citadel bore no evidence of occupation earlier than the late Seleucid or early Arsacid period.75 In addition, earlier excavations cleared an extensive Parthian cemetery and produced fragments of Seleucid or Parthian stone columns and figural sculpture.76 This suggests that if the Parthians did not completely raze and build over earlier buildings before raising their own structures, they most likely laid out and constructed the citadel themselves. The preponderance of the Arsacid remains lends some credence to understandings that the city’s only surviving ancient monument, a large, worn stone lion, was repurposed if not originally set up in the Parthian period, next to the western city gate (the “Gate of the Lion”).77 Connected with the route to Ecbatana, Bisotun remained an important site of power and memory through the Parthian period. A significant Arsacid settlement grew at the site and occupied the area to the north of the rock reliefs. It extended ca. 1,000 meters to the north and ca. 500 meters to the south. Several unpublished Iranian soundings in the area have produced a great quantity of Parthian ceramics, architectural fragments, figurines, beads, seals, coins, and burials.78 This settlement and the sanctuary flourished under the Arsacids and formed part of a larger Median topography of power along with Ecbatana. In fact, the majority of extant Arsacid royal rock reliefs cluster at Bisotun, attesting to its significance as well as that of the larger region to the dynasty.79 They represent the physical traces of generations of Arsacid princes who worshipped at the site and linked themselves to a longer history of divine and royal power carried by the landscape. The huge relief of Darius I floating above the Seleucid Heracles remained a striking monument even if the Seleucids had done their best to elide the Achaemenid presence. It is entirely possible that a new Arsacid reinterpretation of the relief grew after the fall of the Seleucids to replace the Seleucids’ malicious gender-bending ascription to

FIGURE 4.8 Line drawing by Guillaume Joseph Grélot of the relief of Mithradates II at Bisotun made ca. 1673 before it was defaced by the inscription of the Safavid vizier Sheikh Ali Khan Zangeneh in 1684. Commissioned for the travelogue of the Venetian nobleman, Ambrosio Bembo. Sole manuscript held in the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (1676 fBe, fol. 260x).

Semiramis, but the site’s sanctity and general perception of antiquity were likely what attracted the Arsacids to modify it visually, spatially, and (by implication) ritually to convert it to an Arsacid site of memory. The site’s sanctuary to Heracles-Wahram provided the most compelling attraction for its patrons, and the reliefs’ most vital ritual context. In fact the textual evidence for this cult comes from the Parthian period.80 Like the Seleucid Heracles, which itself might have been honored as one of the site’s cultic focal points, the Arsacid reliefs were located closer to the original ground level, stressing accessibility and legibility. They engaged the entranceway into the colossal, rough stone fortification walls and, likely, the entrance into the sanctuary. Mithradates II (ca. 124/3–88/87 BCE) carved a relief on the ground level to the west of the high cliff supporting Darius I’s relief and to the east of the Seleucid-era Heracles.81 The composition of the relief, which portrays the king of kings receiving satraps, adapts the composition of Darius I’s relief overhead and portrays a series of figures in profi le standing one after the other before the king. Although the relief’s visual compositional correspondences affiliate it with regional collective memories and the immediate individual phenomenological impact of Darius I’s relief, its inscription appropriates the prestige of Seleucid monumental inscriptions. Evok-

ing an entablature, Greek monumental capitals run across the upper edge of the relief, identifying the king and significance of the sculptural tableau. A very abraded relief portraying a scene of equestrian combat was carved to the east of this relief, possibly even obliterating a section of it.82 Although very damaged, the relief’s composition is very different from the relief of Mithradates II and reflects a newly developing Parthian iconography of triumph. The protagonist is identified in a crude Greek inscription as “Gotarses” under which in smaller letters was added “Geopothros,” which some have identified as a reference to Go ˉ darz and Geˉw, names associated with a line of heroes in Iranian epic understood to be Arsacids.83 Two historical kings named Gotarzes have some connection to Bisotun. The fi rst Gotarzes (r. 91/90–81/80 BCE) appears among the dignitaries portrayed in Mithradates II’s relief to the west, where he is identified in his earlier role as a “satrap of satraps.”84 Decades later, Tacitus relates that Gotarzes II (r. ca. 38–51) stopped at Bisotun “to offer vows to the gods of the place,” while on campaign against the pretender Meherdates, whom the king subsequently defeated and maimed to disqualify him from the throne.85 In one of our earliest examples of an enduring Iranian iconographic tradition of triumph, Gotarzes’s relief portrays the king riding among other armored

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FIGURE 4.9 Relief of Mithradates II, Bisotun. Detail of 4.8.

cavalrymen. The king and companions all unhorse their rivals while a winged victory crowns the king, likely commemorating the king’s victory over a pretender. Given their orientation running along the lower rock face and their proximity to the Heracles relief at the sanctuary’s entrance, both of these reliefs likely lined the entrance to the sanctuary. If Gotarzes II was its patron, the relief would present a vivid ex voto monument of thanks and demonstration of divine favor.

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While the reliefs of Gotarzes took control of the sanctuary through their proximity to the entrance, the sloped field to the north of the sanctuary precinct contains a freestanding boulder, which “petrifies” a ritual act and thus the piety of its Arsacid patron. Known in scholarship as the “Parthian Stone,” the boulder carries a relief on two of its faces, depicting scenes of a male figure offering incense at an altar. A faint inscription identifies one of the sacrificing figures as Walaxš (Vologases), the name

FIGURE 4.11 The “Parthian Stone,” Bisotun.

FIGURE 4.10 Tetradrachm of Gotarzes II. Courtesy Yale Art

Gallery.

of five Arsacid kings.86 Given his keen interest in reasserting power over the empire, it is not unlikely that this could be Vologases I. Beyond providing the king’s likeness, they also insert his presence into the ritual environment. The reliefs are both oriented toward the sanctuary, implying a spatial connection between the act of sacrifice portrayed and the sanctuary to the south.

Reshaping Parthian Mesopotamia As the Arsacids consolidated their hold over Mesopotamia, they catalyzed three contrasting developments. “Greek” cities that retained or gained a strategic or economic purpose, such as Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, Babylon,

Susa, or Dura-Europus, enjoyed substantial urban development and expansion. Babylon remained an important regional city into the second century CE, Dura expanded exponentially under the Parthians, and Seleucia flourished until the second century when Ctesiphon became dominant. All these cities gained new urban features, even as parts of their urban fabric, such as the Esagila temple complex in Babylon or the agora in Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, lost their original functions or fell out of use entirely as the cultural or political basis of their original significance dissipated. When Mithradates I led the Parthians in their rapid conquest of the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia, the empire encountered not only the topography of power of the Seleucids, but the remnants of several long-dead empires. As the Arsacids integrated Mesopotamia more fully into the empire, they reinvigorated several ancient yet dead cities whose sites had not played a great role in either Seleucid or Achaemenid imperial space. The ruined mounds of such venerable yet abandoned sites as

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Assur and Nippur became newly important for strategic purposes. The new Arsacid imperial imprint completely repurposed major topographical features, like the artificial mounds of derelict ziggurats. Even in rare instances, like Assur, when their new investments allowed an ancient temple to take on new monumental life, they radically reinterpreted the landscape. A second group of cities, most noticeably Uruk, declined from the reinvigorated grandeur they achieved in the Seleucid era into small, fortified settlements. The cities contracted to villages within repurposed and fortified structures. Their old sacred centers fell out of use or were built over. The economic disruptions and, in some cases, physical destruction caused by the invasions of Trajan and Septimius Severus catalyzed the final and permanent decline of these ancient cult sites and transformation of the ancient cities. By the end of the first century CE, the great sanctuaries of Uruk were left to ruin or totally repurposed. Babylon survived longer as an urban center, but the late Parthian period oversaw the final decline and eventual obsolescence of its great temple complexes. Scholars of Babylonian culture and the cuneiform world have emphasized the incredible longevity of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform culture in Mesopotamia.87 It is indeed likely that the last remnants of cuneiform literacy and those ancient religious and intellectual traditions tied to it only finally died out with the cataclysms that accompanied the rise of the Sasanian Empire.88 And while it is remarkable that certain Babylonian sanctuaries and associated temple or family archives survived the coming of the Parthians, by the late Parthian period they were all but defunct. By the late Parthian period Babylonia’s great sanctuaries had largely fallen out of use, either abandoned or repurposed, and their architectural traditions replaced by new, contemporary idioms. The changes the Arsacids oversaw or introduced themselves brought about the ultimate eclipse of these millennia-long Mesopotamian cultural traditions and an epoch-making point of transition in Mesopotamia’s sacred topography.

The Transformation of Mesopotamia’s Greek Cities As the Arsacids gained control over Seleucid cities that had been founded or refounded as poleis, such as Seleuciaon-the Tigris, Susa, Dura-Europus, and Babylon, their urban fabric began to change. Some institutions, most notably the theater and a culture of honorific epigraphy and statuary, had a long afterlife and were appropriated by the Parthian authorities. Other features of the urban

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fabric were completely repurposed, such as Seleucia-onthe-Tigris’s large open agora. At Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, the Parthians began the process of expanding the city into a sprawling conurbation of multiple linked cities, a process that continued through the Sasanian period. Once the Arsacids took Seleucia-on-the-Tigris (141 BCE), the empire’s administrative center of gravity shifted toward Mesopotamia, and the city grew in ritual importance as the site of a major royal residence. While the Roman sources continue to refer to several other settlements as “royal residences” or “capitals,” they mention Seleucia-Ctesiphon most often, indicating its growing dominance and, soon, its centrality.89 Exactly when Seleucia-Ctesiphon assumed this role is unknown, though the Arsacids first began to put their imprint on the conurbation when they established a fort across from Seleucia where they billeted their troops, which grew into a major metropolis in its own right, and founded several smaller trading cities in the region.90 Seleucia-on-the-Tigris remained Mesopotamia’s most important and populous urban center, and its character and institutions changed only gradually after the Arsacid conquest. It retained the mint, which produced both royal and civic coinage and was the only mint that struck tetradrachms from around the fi rst century through the end of the dynasty.91 Its theater was maintained into the early second century CE, although a fire destroyed the stoa and archives that lay in front of it sometime before 129 BCE.92 With these official buildings gone, private dwellings and artisans’ workshops soon grew over the Seleucid monumental structures and filled in the grand urban space.93 Despite this, the sacred area on the west flank of the theater continued in use and was elaborated several times. With its agora built over in the Parthian period, a parallel shift in urban space occurred at Dura-Europus. Theaters played a prominent role in Parthian cities. Like that of Babylon, Seleucia’s theater remained one of the city’s most enduring institutions. Exhibiting a very complex stratigraphy attesting to its continued importance, the theater survived at least through the second century, indicating its continued functional and symbolic importance for the city, culturally and politically, despite changes in civic government and the growing control of the crown. As a focal point fi rst for Greek identity and, later, the exercise of royal power over the city, it was renovated sometime before 121 CE.94 This Parthian renovation rebuilt the skeˉ neˉ and elaborated the sacred area abutting the west of the theater, both of which retained their original Seleucid function.95

FIGURE 4.12 Reconstruction evoking the theater-temple complex during the Parthian period with the agora fi lled in, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris.

In the Parthian renovation, the sacred area associated with the theater was kept in continuous use. The temple’s courtyard was fi lled in with more rooms, and the interior space was subdivided. This created a temple with an open-air court and cella whose form derives from the tradition of Seleucid-Babylonian temple architecture that the Arsacids inherited and replicated elsewhere.96 Much like the temple of Zeus Megistos and possibly that of Artemis at Dura-Europus, the temple next to the theater was built on the same general form of earlier Seleucid temples, if not always on their foundations, but with an interior space modified over centuries of reuse and rebuilding. In this space, the Italian excavations discovered the remains of small altars or plinths. Clearly indicating its sacred function, one of the walls was deliberately built over the remains of a specially sacrificed animal.97 This type of practice, while not relating to Greek religion, corresponds with evidence found in the cult sites of Mesopotamian gods specifically connected to renovations and refoundations of temples. Sometime at the end of the first or beginning of the second century CE, the Tigris changed course, shifting eastward, leaving only the Nahr Malka canal to serve the city.98 A rectangular structure dating to the late first century BCE or early first century CE was built 1 kilometer from Seleucia’s eastern corner, about the span of the Tigris and its banks.99 This structure likely served as a bridgehead or eastern watchtower. After the Tigris changed course, and it was abandoned, it duly lost its purpose and became a burial site. Across the river, approximately 4.5 kilometers from Seleucia, Parthian Ctesiphon grew in importance and soon hosted a royal palace, which served as the ceremonial center and coronation site of the later Arsacid

kings.100 The area of Parthian, and later Sasanian, Ctesiphon centered on the area the Arabic literary sources refer to as Madı¯na al-ʾAtı¯qa.101 While its mounds appeared extensive in old aerial photos, the region remains largely unexplored. In fact, it has received the least amount of attention of all of the Seleucia-Ctesiphon cities, and we have virtually no archaeological evidence of the Arsacid city other than a few graves. A few shreds of evidence illuminate the growth, topography, and urban features of the city, though these details are meager compared to the Sasanian and even Seleucid periods. Nevertheless, put in dialogue with the literary evidence, comparisons with archaeological evidence of late Arsacid metropolitan urbanism from later foundations in Mesopotamia, such as Assur and Nippur, provide a general picture.102 Strabo characterizes Ctesiphon as an urbanized area hosting impressive royal structures, but not a city (polis) in the sense that Seleucia-on-the-Tigris was.103 This nuanced designation of a polis should not necessarily be taken in its original meaning as a strictly defined selfgoverning, culturally Greek settlement, but rather a marker of scale and importance. With comparison to Sasanian installations around the city, Pliny’s mention of “a wooded district containing not only palm groves but also olives and orchards” near Ctesiphon suggests that the city was truly a royal city, complete with estates cultivated by the Arsacid kings.104 Several Arsacid kings expanded Ctesiphon and founded new settlements in the immediate vicinity.105 With this new prominence Ctesiphon became the ultimate target of Roman campaigns. Trajan captured the city in 116 CE, and reportedly captured the golden throne of the Arsacid king and one of his daughters.106 While not expansive, these mentions of a royal residence and throne imply an audience hall and court ceremonial, and the mention of a daughter suggests

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a semipermanent residential sector or separate private palace. These features—public audience hall, residence, “paradise enclosures”—present a pattern that presages Sasanian Ctesiphon. Factions of the Greek elite of Seleucia rebelled against the Arsacid king several times, and the city lost population to the other settlements in the conurbation, yet Seleucia maintained itself as a major Greek city and a center of trade until Gaius Avidius Cassius’s raid in 165 CE. The Roman general razed the royal palace of Vologases in Ctesiphon and burned Seleucia, which led to its final decline.107 Indicative of this decline, in the third century, Seleucia’s theater became thoroughly derelict and had begun to accumulate burials and small-scale structures.108 This was the beginning of the final transformation of the theater from an architectural to a landscape feature. By the Sasanian period, it had lost all original shape and gained a fortified military watchtower, whose foundations were sunk down to what had been the theater’s orchestra.109 Indeed by the time Septimius Severus invaded, Seleucia was desolate, and the Romans concentrated all of their efforts on Ctesiphon.110 Unfortunately, no Arsacid royal construction survives at SeleuciaCtesiphon. While tertiary, one of the attic panels of the Arch of Septimius Severus provides a unique portrayal of Ctesiphon. It appears as a walled city with a skyline characterized by a centralized, domed structure and a monumental structure fronted by two barrel-vaulted ayva¯ns.

Phraata ta en Sousois Susa provides a more detailed view of the possibilities for engagement and integration of well-established Seleucid foundations into the Arsacid Empire. Susa/ Seleucia-Eulaios continued to flourish under the Arsacids as an important trading city, regional economic center, and, occasionally, mint.111 The city was renamed Phraata ta en Sousois, though in inscriptions the king of kings refers to its Seleucid name as well. The site has yielded a great quantity of inscriptions from the Parthian era, the majority of which are in Greek. These not only provide dramatic testimony of the vibrancy of the city, but show that Susa’s Seleucid urban traditions continued to develop unabated.112 Moreover, they provide dramatic testimony to the ways in which the Arsacid imperial authorities skillfully appropriated the city’s traditions, and how the city’s elite reciprocally engaged and integrated themselves into Arsacid imperial ideology and space, even as the Arsacid king consolidated power through local oligarchs and satraps in

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a manner roughly parallel to Seleucia-on-the-Tigris. As a letter from Artabanes II to the archon of Phraata/ Seleucia-Eulaios illustrates, the Arsacids appropriated the modes of communication established by the Seleucids in a way that parallels the Roman takeover of these traditions in the Mediterranean.113 The city’s Greek-speaking elite continued to celebrate Susa’s civic institutions, such as the gymnasium, and commemorate offices connected to them.114 Joining these, however, are inscriptions and statues that honor service in the Arsacid imperial court. Eventually the inscriptions, honorific statues, and stelae honoring Parthian satraps or service in the Parthian court joined and, very likely, overshadowed the old civic monuments. Some honored the deeds of Arsacid officials, such as the multiple inscriptions and statue honoring the satrap Zamasp (ca. 2/3 CE) or the stele portraying Artabanus V investing Husak as satrap of Susa (215 CE).115 While the early inscriptions follow the general form of the Greek epigraphy, they also show a careful adaptation of Arsacid royal concepts. For example, one of the stelae honoring Zamasp commands the viewer to do as follows: Behold the bronze statue, oh stranger, of the stratiarch of Susa, Zamasp, and learn about his public benefactions of this great man, with the foresight of the immortals and the daimon of the god, [King] Phraates [IV], the ruler of all. Seeing in him a patriotic and honorable comrade, he appointed him satrap.116

All power and legitimacy flows from the king and is exercised through this “divine spirit,” which may refer to the king’s xwarrah. Other stelae communicated the judgments of the king of kings or his appointment of minor officials, accompanied, in one case, by a relief of the king investing the official.117 These inscriptions allude to a change in the material culture and visual character of the city even as these honorific statues continue past practices. These monuments honoring the Parthian officials were found in the same sector as the votive and manumission stelae. Whether this sector hosted a sanctuary, a palace, or both, we can only speculate, though it clearly continued to be the most prominent place in Susa, suggesting that the Seleucid city’s urban landscape remained stable. While they were located in the same place, these images and inscriptions of Parthian satraps and dynasts soon overshadowed those of the city elite. The Arsacid imprint on Susa is prominent, testifying to the city’s importance, its prosperity, and the scale of investment in it; however, after the Seleucids’ changes to its urban character, it did not regain the status of a

major royal residence like Ecbatana.118 Susa suffered no violent destruction with the coming of Arsacid rule, and its Greek city and population continued to develop up through the Parthian period.119 Indeed, the city was the last stronghold of the Arsacids against the Sasanians. While the urban core of the city remained largely in the same location as the Seleucid city and shows a great deal of continuity, in the Arsacid era new types of aristocratic residences appear in the city and its periphery. These indicate that its elite participated not only in the civic traditions but in the wider culture of the Iranian world. Two structures are especially important in ¯ yadana,” which was conthis regard. The so-called “A structed on a hill 4 kilometers from Susa and dated by comparison with the Bactrian sites to the second century BCE, was most likely constructed in the Arsacid era.120 An aristocratic residence was built in the northern section of the Royal City of Susa and dated to the second century CE.121 The ground plan appears to be an evolution of aristocratic architecture as seen in earlier levels of the city and in Seleucia-on-the-Tigris and retained evidence of a Greek inscription in mosaic.122 Notably, the Parthians made no effort to foreground or architecturally rehabilitate what little remained of the Achaemenid palaces nearby. Terra-cotta architectural ornaments evoking the shape of the Achaemenid bull capitals suggest that some remnant of the Achaemenid capitals remained exposed and contributed to local visual culture, though at a remove.123 The remnants of the Achaemenid Propylaeum, which originally lead to the gatehouse of the palace, was still visible when the aristocratic residence was built nearby in the Parthian period, though the structure was in ruins, as its bricks were used in the construction of the residence and other Parthian-era houses.124 Similarly, the surviving statue of Darius I, which stood exposed, attracted child burials, suggesting it might have become involved in some sort of folk religiosity, but certainly did not play a role in Arsacid royal identity.125

The Transformation of Parthian Babylonia The Seleucids’ loss of Babylonia ushered in major changes for religious and urban traditions that had seemed to be eternal. In the early years of Parthian control, the internal activities of the temples of Uruk and Babylon continued largely unchanged, with the Parthians providing financial support for the temple of Marduk at Babylon, if not those at Uruk.126 The priests of Babylon and Uruk dated their documents according to the Arsacid and

Seleucid eras and occasionally mention prayers and sacrifices for the Arsacid kings, until at least 77 BCE, although unlike the Seleucids, the kings themselves never visited.127 Even after the administrative archives disappear, the cults of Nabû and Nanaia at Borsippa evidently still functioned in the early first century CE.128 The temples of Parthian Babylon initially experienced no deliberate disruptions or major breaks in activity; however, subtle, yet ultimately profound cultural changes were under way that spelled their eventual demise. Temples as an institution became less and less important for the Parthian imperial authorities, and by the close of the first century BCE they were no longer a cornerstone of royal legitimation and control as they had been under the Achaemenid and Seleucid Empires. By the late Parthian period, they had fallen out of use entirely. While the ancient Babylonian temples lost their royal patronage and closed, in the cities that reflect the new, late Parthian reorientation, the cults of these gods survived and continued to flourish, albeit detached from the old sanctuaries and priesthoods.129 Zeus-Bel, Artemis-Nanaia, and Apollo-Nabû were worshipped in Parthian and Roman cities like Hatra, Susa, DuraEuropus, and Palmyra, though their temples were now dominated by features drawn from Roman and Parthian prestige architecture instead of traditional Babylonian traditions and, like the temples at Assur, Nineveh, and Nisibis, aspects of their cult iconography linked them into the wider visual and religious culture of post-Hellenistic Western and Central Asia.130 Parts of the Esagila complex likely remained in use through the first century BCE, as attested by astronomical texts, and diaries record repairs in 106 BCE and ca. 93 BCE.131 Tellingly, records from the administrative archives that attest to the repairs of Babylonian temples from this period make no clear mention of royal gifts from either the Arsacid king of kings Mithradates II or a regional rival, as was customary.132 Given the expense involved to fully maintain the sanctuaries, the temples and local communities funded these repairs themselves as long as they could; however, there was no “Parthian Anu-Ubalit-Kephalon” to direct large-scale royally sponsored building programs, nor was there imperial interest in such patronage.133 We do not know exactly when all structures within Babylon’s sacred districts began to fall out of use, but after losing royal patronage there was a limit to what local patronage could accomplish. By the late Parthian period, domestic and industrial structures covered both the Etemenanki and Esagila districts, attesting to a long period of disuse.134

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In Uruk, the Resh and Eshgal temples hosted cult activities through the second century BCE.135 The period of usurpations and turmoil that began near the end of Mithradates II’s reign ushered in a fairly rapid end of even nonroyal temple building in Babylonia, especially in Uruk. After a devastating fire ca. 87 BCE the Resh and Eshgal temples, which functioned as late as 108 CE, were not rebuilt as temples.136 After the destruction of the central temple complex, Uruk contracted within its walls, and a materially poor settlement grew within and over the temple precincts, its walls patched together to provide a makeshift defense.137 While temples in ancient Western Asia were often fortified, steps were not taken to rebuild the sanctuary as a fortified temple in the traditional Babylonian sense, but rather, simply to salvage the ruin and repurpose it as a fortified village. By the beginning of the second century CE, the ancient temples of Uruk had long since been abandoned and were built over. Despite the city’s contraction and loss of importance, new sacred structures appear in Uruk albeit on a smaller scale. The cultural and architectural currents they reflect stem not from the old traditions of Babylonia, but from the newer Seleucid developments. A small temple was built sometime after 100 CE near the ruins of the Bit Resh sanctuary. The temple, which was dedicated to a new god, Gareus, was not related to the cults of the ancient sanctuary, and its design owed more to Seleucid architecture than to the traditional Babylonian temples. The temple of Gareus was built using baked bricks and then covered in stucco, with an interior cella of 10.50 by 13.70 meters.138 Placed in the center of a walled precinct, the temple was freestanding and symmetrical, with Hellenistic architectural decoration on the exterior and a ground plan similar to Seleucid-era temples, though with greatly reduced sacristies. Engaged columns with Ionic capitals articulated its exterior and framed blind arcades. The temple shows a fusion of Babylonian surface decoration and Hellenistic traditions with new influences coming from the Roman world, as occurs elsewhere in Mesopotamia at places such as Hatra. A Greek dedicatory inscription found nearby preserves evidence not only of the god worshipped in the temple, but of the continuation of a Greek honorific custom similar to those still practiced in other Arsacid Greek cities such as Susa.139 The inscription records the erection of an honorific statue to thank an individual for adding to the endowment of the temple, a statue that, according to custom, would be crowned on the honorand’s birthday.140 Providing a poignant example of cultural memory in the face of decline, a small tem-

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ple with an interior space of 4.60 by 4.35 meters was constructed in the Arsacid era against the southeast wall of the central building of the Anu-Antum temple after the Seleucid temple of Anu-Antum had fallen into disuse following a devastating fire.141 It was constructed of baked brick with gypsum mortar, and, like the Gareus temple, it stemmed from the new Seleucid temple style, combining a Babylonian-inspired ground plan with now Greco-Roman architectural ornament. Like Uruk, Nineveh contracted from its ancient extent in the Seleucid and early Parthian periods, though it continued to thrive on a smaller scale.142 A village grew on its acropolis (Tell Kuyundjik) in the third to second century BCE. Greek cultural and civic elements predominated into the Parthian period, and the epigraphic remains indicate that it retained aspects of Greek civic institutions and self-consciously defined itself as a polis. At the same time, Assyro-Babylonian religious traditions thrived, expressed in contemporary Greek artistic forms alongside religious traditions stemming from the wider world of Hellenized Asia. Residential structures grew over the site of the palace and temples of the ancient Assyrian kings, changing the character of the space. The city traded hands between the Parthians and the Romans ca. 50 BCE, at which point religious elements from the Roman Mediterranean, such as Egyptian gods, became popular. Some continuities prevailed, and the temple of Apollo-Nabû was restored in 32/1 BCE.143 An individual named Apollophanes carved a Greek dedicatory inscription on one of the temple’s columns dedicating it to the theoi epekooi for the strategos and epistates of the city, Apollonios.144 The throne room of the southwest palace of Sennacherib was converted into a temple and incorporated spoliated and recarved architectural members.145 These include an Assyrian doorway lintel, on which had been carved two griffins approaching a vase, a common Parthian motif.146 Shrines in the structure yielded the two most significant pieces of sculpture found in the Parthian-era building. The fi rst was a fragment of a foot of what would have been a large limestone statue. To judge from the style of footwear, the statue likely portrayed a figure wearing Parthian aristocratic clothing. The second was a statue of Heracles Epitrapezos. To the west, in the lower city, rose a small temple of Hermes whose interior cultic design evoked the Assyrian tradition. A small side chamber or “sacristy” was enclosed by a door.147 This structure, which was in use from the second to third century CE, conserved aspects of Assyrian sacred architecture. Its cella, where a statue of Hermes was

discovered, contained a raised platform preceded by steps from the antecella. Although they were living through a period of great change, local aristocrats with their own personal interest in the past waged localized campaigns to reenliven or, more accurately in some cases, imaginatively forge a connection between themselves and the remnants of ancient sites, objects, and traditions. The remarkable palace of Adad-nadin-ahhes (Adad-na¯din-ah h eˉs), a second-cen˘˘ tury BCE grandee living in the independent kingdom of Mesene, is most notable in this regard.148 This local aristocrat built a palace on the foundations of the Eninnu, ancient Girsu’s temple of Ningursu, which itself had been rebuilt ca. 2102–2122 BCE by Gudea of Lagash.149 The second-century patron reanimated this long-ruined temple not as a sacred structure but as a palace, building with bricks bearing stamps in the ancient fashion, albeit with bilingual Aramaic-Greek brick inscriptions. Within the palace’s reception court, he carefully arranged statues of Gudea recovered from the ruins of the Ningursu temple and other temples in the region. While he also reinterpreted an ancient site and rendered his patronage “legible” and relevant by incorporating contemporary Hellenistic idioms, he marks an instructive contrast with the activities of the Seleucid dual-identity aristocrats.150 Anu-Uballit.-Kephalon employed bilingual Greek-Aramaic stamps as well, but this was in addition to cuneiform inscriptions. Adad-nadin-ahhes used only the vernaculars, and unlike the Seleucids and their agents, who were modifying while operating within—and sustaining—a still-living tradition, Adad-nadin-ahhes was building a new identity out of little-understood local remnants of the past, a strategy we will see often in postSeleucid Western Asia, not least in the case of the Sasanians. Moreover, the palace at Girsu was the result of an individual aristocrat’s efforts and resources. It pales in comparison to the size and splendor of the structures that Anu-Uballit.-Kephalon and Anu-Uballit.-Nikarchos constructed, which were possible only because of Seleucid royal munificence and will.

Reimagining Babylon Roman literary sources of the first century BCE through third century CE suggest that Babylon experienced a significant loss in population, which has often been cited as evidence that the city was completely abandoned. The Parthian city was far from the teeming metropolis it was in the age of Alexander and the early Seleucids, but despite some rhetorical hyperbole, these authors uniformly relate

that the city was still inhabited, just not to the extent it once was.151 About 100 to 130 hectares of the city were built over with habitation in the Parthian era, which might suggest a population of around 20,000 inhabitants for the Parthian city.152 With much of its original extent and ancient buildings decayed or decaying, Babylon would surely have been a disappointment to Trajan, whose invasion, in fact, acted as the catalyst of a more profound decline and loss of function for the temples.153 Pliny indicates that the temple of Bel was still standing in the mid-first century CE, though unfortunately we do not have archaeological evidence to confirm this, as the original excavator, R. Koldewey, never recorded or published the levels that overlay the Neo-Babylonian temple.154 This state of affairs was likely stable until the second and into the first half of the third century CE. Babylon was still populated at the time of Septimius Severus’s invasion, and literary sources record a massive temporary displacement of the city’s population fleeing the Roman advance.155 The third-century Tabula Peutingeriana includes Babylon as an important trading center between Vologasia and Seleucia-on-the-Tigris.156 Even if it was simply part of a programmatic statement, a passage in the Babylonian Talmud (ca. 219 CE) lists the temple of Marduk in Babylon and temple of Nabû in Borsippa among ancient “houses of idolatry,” indicating that cultural memory lingered around these sites, even if they had since fallen into ruin and been built over.157 During the Parthian period, the city’s shift away from its ancient Babylonian heritage intensified. Parthianperiod building in Babylon focused on Greek institutions and implanted contemporary Hellenistic architectural forms, including a grand embolos and a reconstruction of the city’s theater on an expanded and up-to-date ground plan. The monuments of Greek civic culture were still flourishing even as the city’s ancient religious sites began to fall out of use, suggesting that the city’s Greek architectural and cultural traditions enjoyed greater resources and vibrancy than its Babylonian institutions. In many cases, these new monuments were built or renovated at the expense of the old ones. “Hellenic” culture, institutions, and membership in the politai, which at this point were synonymous with membership in the late Seleucid and Arsacid urban mercantile elite, had increasingly usurped this role from the Babylonian institutions. Babylon’s theater provides the most important example of this shift in the urban cultural topography to Homera.158 Like the theater of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, that of Babylon took on the role of one of the city’s most important urban focal points of political power and

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FIGURE 4.13 Archival photograph of the excavation of the Parthian-period embolos, Babylon (see fig. 3.10 for location). Courtesy Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft.

cultural identity. In the Parthian period it was rebuilt on a larger, more elaborate plan about the same time that the sacred districts began to fall out of use. In fact, the theater was built with bricks with stamps of Nebuchadnezzar II, likely mined from the ziggurat of Etemenanki, privileging the new Greek topography over the Babylonian one.159 The original theater, possibly built under Antiochus I, was not dissimilar to that of Ai Khanum. Interestingly, the design of its rebuilding and expansion resembles Roman theaters rather than classical theaters, which included a square complex with an interior peristyle court.160 Many scholars assigned its reconstruction to the reign of Antiochus IV, largely because none could fathom that the traditions of Hellenism could be this vibrant, but all archaeological and epigraphic evidence suggests that the theater was rebuilt and enlarged in the Parthian period. The rectangular complex with the peristyle court was an integral part of the complex laid out at the same time as the theater. Parthian slipper-style sarcophagi and other remains found under this complex suggest that this reconstruction on a more Roman-style plan took place under the Parthians, sometime in the first or second century CE.161 When the theater was renovated, the Parthian-era builders updated it with contemporary architectural ornament seen elsewhere in Parthian Mesopotamia. The theater’s proskyneion received Parthian-style stucco ornament with ivy leaves similar to that found at Assur,

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FIGURE 4.14 Plan of the Parthian-period reconstruction

of the Greek theater of Babylon.

FIGURE 4.15 Archival photograph of the stucco decoration of the Parthian-period theater of Babylon. Courtesy Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft.

and the columns were reconstructed as composite columns with the same profile again as those at Assur.162 Several fragmentary Babylonian diaries reference the theater (bı¯t ta¯martu, “place of viewing”), and many of these record that it served as theaters did elsewhere in the Hellenistic world: as a point of communication between political authorities and the culturally Greek urban elite. These diaries state that “parchment letters” of the king or the governor were read to the politai in the theater, including letters from Seleucid, Hyspaosinid, and Arsacid kings.163 As at Seleucia-on-the-Tigris and Susa, the Arsacid kings of kings used Seleucid traditions of communicating with the Greek population of Babylon, as did the kings of the breakaway kingdom of Characene while they held the city. Analogous to Susa’s evidence of an epigraphic gallery of royal epistolary communication, Babylon’s theater remained the premier point of communication between the sovereign and the Greek politai, demonstrating how Hellenistic versus Babylonian culture was the imperial idiom that

the Arsacids chose to leverage when ruling the great Mesopotamian cities. The Parthian period witnessed major renovations and updates in other urban spaces within Babylon as well. As at Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, Susa, and Dura-Europus, it is likely such construction grew from the patronage activities of the city elite working under the auspices of the Parthian authorities. On the northern edge of the ‘Amran ibn ‘Ali mound the German excavation uncovered two sections of a major Parthian-period embolos.164 This porticoed thoroughfare, composed of composite brick columns covered in gypsum stucco, aligned with the columns of the bridge over the Euphrates and ran along the southern edge of the Esagila precinct.165 Although it was a new installation, it followed the southern edge of the ancient sacred district, thus conforming the new Hellenistic urban feature to the city’s urban contours. Very little evidence elucidates whether or not the Arsacids initially used the old palaces of Babylon, but

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they did not survive in their original form for long.166 By the late Parthian period, the Southern Citadel palace had fallen completely out of use. Certain sectors were built over with other structures, and graves were even quarried into their very walls.167 Similarly, the Parthians raised fortifications over the former Summer Palace (Babil), converting the hill into a stronghold aloof from the city.168 The construction techniques and the approach to urban reorganization presage and parallel those we will see in the transformation of Parthian Nippur. Instead of restoring ancient structures or rebuilding them, in Babylon as in Nippur the Parthians choose to obliterate and completely repurpose them.

New Regional Foundations and Dead Cities Reawakened and Transformed At the same time that the ancient cult sites of Babylonia entered their fi nal decline, Mesopotamia as a whole received a vibrant new Arsacid topography of power. In the mid-first century CE, the Arsacids built new trading emporia and new regional administrative capitals with fortresses and palaces. Some of these were new foundations, while others were ancient cities and cultural landscapes newly reinvigorated and repurposed with fresh Parthian investment. In order to gain or regain control of the Mesopotamian and Persian Gulf trade, the Arsacids invested heavily in new sites in northern and southern Mesopotamia.169 In the region around SeleuciaCtesiphon and Babylon, two eponymous settlements, founded by Vologases I, were pivotal in establishing Arsacid control over trade in Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf: Vologescerta (*Walaxškert) and Vologasias (attested in Aramaic as b’lgy’).170 Vologases I founded Vologescerta about 3 kilometers to the south of the conurbation of Seleucia-Ctesiphon on the Nahr Malka, and the trading emporium of Vologasias on the Euphrates to the west of Babylon.171 While their archaeological sites have not been located, literary evidence and trade inscriptions from other sites provide their general locations. Vologasias flourished through the second century and was instrumental in controlling and benefiting from trade flowing from the Persian Gulf to Rome. In northern Mesopotamia, the Arsacids refounded several cities that had nearly become defunct, reinvigorating them after a long period of desolation and transforming them into Parthian imperial strongholds. New Arsacid governors’ palaces anchored the resurgence of these cities. Parthian builders at times integrated surviving features of the ancient cities into their new foun-

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dations, such as ziggurats and temples, yet only in exceptional cases did they retain their original purpose. More often than not, they repurposed them entirely, completely reconfiguring the cities’ symbolic urban topography in the process. Converting ancient sacred sites or former seats of kingship into Parthian fortresses or palaces was a key strategy in the Parthians’ larger campaign of repurposing and recoding Mesopotamia’s landscapes and cityscapes.172 The Parthian transformation of the sacred city of Nippur and resurrection of the former Assyrian capital of Assur present the most dramatic examples, but we have seen this before in the conversion of Babylon’s former Summer Palace into a citadel, a fate that the ziggurat at Borsippa shared as well. Parthian builders hollowed out the ziggurat’s interior to form galleries and raised a bastioned fortification wall to connect it with the Ezida temple.173 In the first century BCE, after a long period of abandonment, the Arsacids converted Nippur’s former sacred center, the Ekur, into a fortified citadel, repurposing its ziggurat to serve as its monumental centerpiece.174 Like Assur, Nippur owed its resurgence to the Arsacids’ firstcentury policy of investing in and asserting control over southern Mesopotamia.175 In an even more dramatic fashion than at Assur, the Arsacids not only built a new administrative center but totally remade Nippur’s ancient and venerable topography. In the mid-second century CE, the Parthians converted the remains of Nippur’s sacred precinct, the Ekur sanctuary, and its ziggurat into a fortified citadel, repurposing it and obliterating any previous connection to its original function. In the fi nal construction phase, the Parthians built a grand palace centered on a quadruple ayva¯ n court within the citadel. Built on the highpoint of the landscape, the complex took symbolic as well as military control of the landscape. The Oriental Institute dedicated the ninth and tenth seasons (1964–67) of its excavation of Nippur to the Parthian fortress and its palace.176 The OI excavations clarified the architectural phases, which the Pennsylvania excavations had previously understood to belong to a single period, revealing that construction on the fortress took place in three phases, each more ambitious than the last. Fortunately, the Parthian remains were not obliterated to excavate earlier levels, as has unfortunately occurred at many sites in Mesopotamia with incredible losses for our understanding of this crucial period. The Parthian complex was so extensive, and its foundations sunk so deeply into earlier levels, that it presented an obstacle for further excavation, since dis-

mantling its walls would have required an investment of labor and funds disproportionate to what survived undisturbed underneath them.177 The Iraqi government eventually requested that the walls be left standing so as not to detract from the site’s potential as a tourist destination. The Parthian fortress of Nippur was rebuilt and enlarged twice after its initial construction, each time on a grander scale.178 None of the phases was brought to full completion; however, the complex was occupied after each building campaign despite being incomplete. A copper coin of Pakoros II, dated to 394 of the Seleucid era (82/3 CE) and associated with the occupation of the first phase of the fort, provides a terminus post quem for the completion of the first phase. The first phase, likely initiated sometime ca. 70–80 CE, witnessed the construction of a massive platform surrounded by a fortification wall whose function was just as much to intimidate visually as to withstand a siege. This artificial platform, which extended to the northeast of the ziggurat, occupied an area of approximately 10,117 meters square. At the northeastern base of the ziggurat, where the ground fell away steeply, the Parthian builders created a retaining wall out of baked bricks, some of which were mined from the ziggurat itself, while others were likely dug from a depression inside the wall to the northwest of the ziggurat.179 This was fi lled with wet, packed earth, in order to create the terrace.180 The Parthian builders encompassed the complex with a new fortification wall punctuated by alternating square and semicircular bastions. In general, the Parthian walls largely followed the line of the Sumerian walls, though new foundations were sunk where needed.181 These efforts, which are associated with the reign of Vologases I, did not include any permanent structures built inside the fortification. However, reed and palm log huts were constructed inside, possibly as temporary housing for a garrison. In order to prevent erosion or simply for visual impact, the remains of the ziggurat were plastered over with mud plaster. A copper coin of Osroes, issued no earlier than 89/90 CE and recovered from the occupation layer of the fi rst phase, suggests the second building phase began sometime after 90 CE.182 The second phase oversaw the expansion of the fortifications and the construction of more durable storerooms and housing inside them, with a great concentration extending across the interior of the southeastern wall. The second phase also oversaw the addition of four enormous buttresses on all four sides of the ziggurat, which still rose in the center of the fortified com-

pound.183 This phase hosted intensive occupation with a great deal of refuse and evidence of wear and repair accumulating. The third phase corresponds to the period of prosperity that the region experienced after the invasion of Trajan (ca. 120s CE). During this phase the Parthians extended the terraced platform on the northwest, rebuilt its fortification walls with new bastions, and strengthened the ziggurat-tower in order to facilitate further building on its summit. The interior of the precinct and the remains of earlier structures were filled in with rubble to level the interior of the precinct. Most importantly, a palace organized around a central court was constructed in the north quadrant (see fig. 15.7). Although not fully completed, the citadel was occupied for several years before it fell out of use with the city’s decline. As at Nippur, Arsacid investment resurrected Assur, though the ancient functions of several rebuilt sacred structures were retained. After a period of decline following the fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the city showed signs of renewed prosperity in the Seleucid period, including stamped, early second-century amphorae attesting to trade, though its primary period of growth occurred under the Arsacids.184 Contrasting with Nineveh’s, Uruk’s, and ultimately even Babylon’s contraction and decay, Assur began growing in the first and second centuries CE when the Parthians built it into a provincial capital.185 In fact, two-thirds of the coins recovered from Assur are Arsacid, attesting to the pivotal importance of the Parthian period for the rebirth of the city.186 The Parthian city developed atop the Assyrian city, occupying 50 of the 75 hectares of the original Assyrian city.187 While the Parthian city reoccupied many important parts of the Assyrian city, the conformation of the city changed. Two major clusters of Parthian structures were excavated at Assur: a group of temples located between the Enlil-Assur ziggurat and the northern extremity of the city’s plateau, and a new palatial complex near the south (see figs. 15.5–6). The palace, which will be discussed in a subsequent chapter, is highly significant because it is preserves the earliest example of the new tradition of Arsacid architecture, featuring multiple barrel-vaulted ayva¯ ns arranged around a central court.188 While the palace represented new currents coming from the Parthian court, local religious traditions were rekindled and given new monumental focus in the Parthian city. A new temple rose in the southwest corner of the former temple precinct of Assur on the simplified Babylonian design that appears throughout the Seleucid Empire.189

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FIGURE 4.16 Aerial photograph (ca. 2005) of the Parthian palace and fortress of Nippur constructed within Ekur, the sanctuary of Enlil. The square Great Room and main ayva¯n of the Parthian palace are visible to the lower left of the former ziggurat. Courtesy APAAME (20050926 GK-3558).

The new Arsacid temple precinct, whose rectangular circuit walls measured ca. 250 by 100 by 200 meters, encompassed the old Assur sanctuary and ziggurat. The precinct contained multiple temples and walls or porticoes divided it into smaller subsections.190 The excavators found the remains of multiple altars and fragments or plinths of dedicatory statues of the city’s rulers, whose inscriptions draw many parallels with the religious life of Hatra.191 A new temple to the god Assur was built on a new ground plan over the ruins of the old temple in the first century CE. The temple’s interior layout followed the Seleucid-Babylonian Breitraum tradition; however, its façade engaged the new Parthian prestige architecture.192 In its initial phase, two ayva¯ ns graced the façade, at least in the reconstruction favored by the excavators, which is not unlikely given later

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developments in the city and in Hatra. The temple received a new floor and stepped entranceway in the late second century CE.193 Its façade expanded to a triple ayva¯n, echoing the temple architecture of Hatra as well as the nearby palace. This additional space contained benches along the walls for worshippers, recalling a similar architectural feature and function in Hatra. A colonnade inspired by Seleucid architecture bordered a courtyard that lay before its entrance. Epigraphic evidence suggests that the New Year’s festival continued to be celebrated, and the great festival house that accommodated it was rebuilt on its Assyrian form but decorated with Greco-Parthian architectural ornament.194 Two other temples rose to the east of the Enlil-Assur ziggurat. The so-called Freitreppenbau rose just to the east of the ziggurat, backing up onto its precinct wall.195

It was built on a Breitraum design with a cella and antecella. It has been reconstructed as fronted by a triple ayva¯n, which is likely, since the Assur temple also had this feature. The central ayva¯n had benches for visitors, and altars were discovered on the adorsed steps that led up to the temple’s elevated stylobate. The façade was decorated with alternating engaged pilasters and columns and a grape-and-vine frieze. This temple was likely dedicated to the god Bel, and functioned as a “lower temple” connected with an “upper temple” dedicated to the god rebuilt on the ziggurat.196 Located within the same precinct, the so-called peripteros was a rectangular structure divided longitudinally into three spaces. Its interior layout followed the Breitraum design, but again, a Parthian-style ayva¯n fronted the structure and a colonnade surrounded it on three sides. Because it lay within the precinct of Bel, it is possible that this temple served the goddess Nannai, daughter of Bel. In addition, two other temples were built within the precinct walls of the old Assur sanctuary. One of these (Temple N) fell out of use, but the other (Temple A) was rebuilt in the Parthian period.197 The Parthian building reused the original ground plan, with a cella and an antecella, and even incorporated some of the original temple’s lower walls. The temple’s architectural ornament was the characteristic Hellenistic style of Seleucid and Parthian Mesopotamia. An 80-cm-high stele with a sculpture of Heracles was found in the temple’s cella, suggesting that it was dedicated to Nergal, who had become assimilated with Heracles in northern Mesopotamia.198 Assur survived Trajan’s sack of the city in 116 CE and persisted in a reduced state after that of Septimius Severus in 198 CE.199 As its economic fortunes were linked to Hatra, it did not long survive the coming of the Sasanians and their devastation of the city.200

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The Arsacids, through their tenure as the Iranian world’s longest-lived dynasty, created foundational architectural and cultural forms that shaped Iranian kingship through the early modern period. While they portrayed themselves on their coins in Persian satrapal costume, the early Arsacids were equally driven to engage and reinvent the traditions of Seleucid kingship. As they came to power, Seleucid kingship was, in effect, the supreme royal idiom in the Iranian world, a heritage that the Arsacids eventually claimed, as the Seleucid anchor in Nisa’s metopes attests most vividly. Far from

ushering in an unambiguous revival of Persian royal traditions, they formulated their claims to kingship using the architectural and artistic trends developed by the Seleucids and Greco-Bactrians, even as they introduced new forms that spoke to their Iranian constituencies. As the cutting-edge architecture of Parthian Nisa attests, the Arsacids created a new imperial statement that engaged the Seleucids’ Perso-Macedonian architectural fusion and took it in new directions. The Arsacids celebrated their new dynastic claims employing Hellenistic art’s naturalistic sculptural forms and divine and royal iconographies. Many of these, like the iconographies of Heracles, Tyche, and Zeus, were now “bilingual,” visually referencing Iranian deities and concepts (see fig. 11.4). Responding to the Seleucids and GrecoBactrians while targeting elites of all sorts throughout the Iranian plateau, the Arsacids articulated a claim of simultaneous dominance over the Hellenistic world and ascendancy within the Iranian world. When the Arsacids conquered ancient cities such as Susa and Babylon, the Seleucid institutions and urban features of these cities were more important than their pre-Hellenistic ruins. Paralleling the importance and longevity of the theater at Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, Babylon’s theater was rebuilt and expanded by Arsacid authorities or the city elite, and under the Arsacids the city gained its new monumental colonnaded thoroughfare, one of the largest in the Hellenistic world. Even as these urban features that grew from Seleucid urbanism and architecture flourished, Babylon’s ancient temples and palaces entered their final decline, falling out of use and eventually being repurposed or built over. Similarly, the ruins of the Achaemenid palace at Susa remained a ruin while the Greek city flourished, and Parthian satraps receive the city’s accolades with Greekstyle statues erected in the new city center. Certain Achaemenid sites were important to the Arsacids, especially in northern Iran. However, these were, almost without exception, sites that retained an importance through the Seleucid period. While we have no evidence that can speak to the Arsacids’ engagement with the former Achaemenid (and from the Parthians’ perspective, Seleucid) palace of Ecbatana, it is clear from their investment in the city that it was very important. Their expansion of the city, however, developed from contemporary architectural and planning trends, rather than Achaemenid precedents. After initially taking over the topography that the Seleucids had established, the Arsacids began to claim Western Asia landscapes,

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rebuilding and reinvigorating ruined urban and sacred centers, such as Assur and Nippur, and establishing new cities and parallel foundations, like Ctesiphon and Vologasias. With Nippur’s ziggurat standing as an important case study, the Parthians neither obliterated nor faithfully restored these ancient cityscapes, but har-

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nessed and strategically reshaped them to serve their new imperial vision. The available literary, epigraphic, or archival sources do not provide us with the same detail, but the archaeological evidence shows that the dynasty made a deep and lasting impact on both Western Asia and the Iranian world.

CHAP TER FIVE

Rival Visions and New Royal Identities in Post-Achaemenid Anatolia and the Caucasus If [Mithradates VI of Pontus] himself were compared to them with respect to his lineage, he was more respectable in origin than that assembled mass, since he could trace his paternal line back to Cyrus and Darius, the founders of the Persian Empire, and his maternal line to Alexander the Great and Seleucus Nicator, the founders of the Macedonian Empire. just. ep. 38.7.1

The kings of Cappadocia say they trace the origins of their house to Cyrus the Persia; they also claim they descend from one of the seven Persians who dispatched the Magus. . . . The eldest of [Ariarathes II”s] three sons, Ariamnes inherited the kingdom. He arranged a marriage alliance with Antiochus (II) Theos, whose daughter, Stratonice, he married to the eldest of his sons, Ariarathes (III). diod. sic. 31.19.1–6

The Persians and the Greeks: the most fortunate roots of my ancestry antiochus of commagene, nomos 2.24–34

The Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia have formed the focal point of much of our investigation thus far. After the weakening and ultimate dissolution of the Seleucid Empire, the Arsacids offered a new vision of Iranian kingship; however, they were not the only Iranian dynasty to do so. This chapter turns to post-Achaemenid Anatolia and the Caucasus and the kingdoms founded or ruled by dynasts who traced their roots to Persian satrapal houses. While they did not enjoy the immediate tangible connection to the ancient Persian dynastic centers in Pars, whose proximity the Fratarakids capitalized on, the descendants of satrapal lines in the west held tenaciously to the memories of their Persian ancestors. These dynasts crafted visions of a “neoPersian” or even “Perso-Macedonian” kingship, which subsumed the legacy of both the Achaemenids and the Seleucids. Indeed, the fraught yet creative conflict, collaboration, and exchange that arose from the interchange among these dynasts, the Arsacids, and the Hellenistic and Roman West were pivotal in the formation of a new Middle Iranian kingship, even if the empires

they built were ultimately short-lived.1 Moreover, the monumental legacy of these western dynasties shaped the political landscape and cultural memory of these regions for centuries thereafter. Alexander’s rapid advance through Anatolia into the core of the Achaemenid Empire spared many Persian satraps, leaving them in place. Some regions, including Cappadocia, Pontus, and Armenia, he bypassed entirely. Despite the Successors’ episodic attempts during the wars of the Successors to extirpate and replace them, these dynasts and their descendants took advantage of the fluid situation following Alexander’s death to reestablish power and even claim new territories. The most important of these postsatrapal dynasties were the Orontid dynasty of Armenia and Sophene (ca. fourth century–ca. second century BCE), whose purported descendants later ruled the kingdom of Commagene until 73 CE, the later Artaxiad dynasty of Armenia (188–12 BCE), and the Mithradatid dynasty of Pontus (ca. fourth century–63 BCE). 2 Although their official genealogies were often embellished or, in places,

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Mazaca Arsamosata ! ! Venasa (Zeus Ouranos)! # ! Mt. Argaeus ! Comana-Cappadocia ! Carcathiocerta (Eğil) Zeus Daciëus (Nar Gölü) Arsameia-on-the-Nymphaios ! Arsameia-on-the-Euphrates # ! ! Nemrud Dağı Tyana ! Samosata Zeugma !

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240 Kilometers

MAP 4. Important cities and sites of the Perso-Macedonian kingdoms of Anatolia and the Caucasus. Map courtesy of Anthony Lauricella.

fabricated, some of these families could even legitimately claim Achaemenid blood. The Artaxiads and the Mithradatids both forged extensive though ephemeral empires during the fi nal dissolution of the Seleucid Empire. Never attaining the imperial reach of Artaxiad Armenia or Mithradatid Pontus, the Ariarathid dynasty, which ruled Cappadocia from the mid-fourth to the first century BCE, nonetheless emerged as an important player in the new post-Seleucid, Iranian world. In addition, literary sources hint that a similar regional reinvention of Persian kingship could have been at play in the kingdom of Media Atropatene during periods of semi-independence from the Seleucids before it fell permanently into the Parthian and then Sasanian political and cultural spheres of influence.3 As illustrated by the three quotes that opened this chapter, at least three of the main dynasties of Anatolia and the Caucasus traced their roots on the paternal side

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to Cyrus and Darius, to Seleucus Nicator on the maternal side, and taking advantage of the Seleucids’ own dynastic mythology, thence to Alexander. While scholarship has sometimes reflexively dismissed such genealogies as fantasy, many of these satrapal dynasties could truly claim Achaemenid blood, albeit by intermarriage through cadet branches. Just as importantly, many had arranged marriage alliances with the Seleucids at several points in their history, eventually becoming “half-Macedonian” and “half-Persian” in family background as well as royal culture. These dynasts’ “most fortunate roots” were not simply peripheral genealogical boasts but cornerstones of royal identity and legitimacy among the Ariarathids, Mithradatids, and later Orontids. These genealogies became sources of pride and arenas of competition among these dynasties. Embodying a conjoined “Perso-Macedonian” legacy, these royal identities grew from deep-seated cultural

and political memories within their kingdoms, which they deployed to mobilize elite powerbases and shore up their credentials in the face of the Roman and Arsacid advance. Unlike the Romans’ and the Arsacids’ and the Sasanians’ later appeals to these legacies, which played upon the opposition between the Persians and Macedonians, the heritage of the Achaemenids and that of the Seleucids held equal prestige and, most importantly, were not understood to be in opposition to each other.4 To boast both Seleucid and Achaemenid ancestry meant that a sovereign could claim not just the legacy of Alexander or Darius, but the totality of the “Iranian” tradition of kingship that Seleucid kingship embodied, which the Arsacids themselves had been eager to seize. The postsatrapal kingdoms of the west were a heterogeneous mixture of peoples, political entities, and economies. In this, their organization and composition bore a close resemblance to the Achaemenid or Seleucid satrapies whence they emerged. Much like an Achaemenid satrapy, the early Orontid and Mithradatid kingdoms consisted of estates owned by the king and nobility and richly endowed temples, with the majority of their population in villages.5 Greek culture and civic institutions did not hold sway over their inland populations in the same way it did their court and coastal cities. Yet within the courts of the Mithradatids, Ariarathids, and Artaxiads, Greek high culture eventually served as the preferred idiom for the kings’ artistic, scientific, and diplomatic expressions looking westward, even as they foregrounded and reimagined their connections to a Persian royal legacy looking east. Not all of the postAchaemenid Anatolian kingdoms enjoyed deep Iranian roots or were ruled by Persian dynasties. Ruled by a dynasty that stemmed from its Thracian population, Persian culture only lightly influenced Bithynia, and Achaemenid dynastic traditions do not appear to have played a significant role within its political culture. The original territorial boundaries of these dynasties’ original satrapies often did not endure far into the Hellenistic age. The wars of the Successors were the greatest catalysts for change, dislodging some of the ancient families from the regions they ruled under Alexander or opening a fluid political environment that invited some dynasts to enlarge their realms through opportunism. Some ended up carving out new kingdoms in entirely different regions from where their ancestors ruled. For example, the Mithradatids originally ruled as satraps in western Anatolia around Dascylium. Yet after being dislodged by Antigonus I Monophthalmos, they migrated to northern Cappadocia and Pontus, where they

founded their kingdom. The Seleucid Empire exerted some degree of influence over most dynasties, either by direct conquest or intermarriage. The decline of the Seleucid Empire after Antiochus III allowed these former dependencies to operate as truly independent kingdoms, with the most ambitious dynasties expanding beyond their prior frontiers. Not all of them attained or maintained independence from Rome or the Arsacids, but when the opportunity presented itself, the Artaxiads and Mithradatids in particular created powerful empires. The North Caucasus scarcely registers in the classical historiographical tradition, leaving us without the ability to flesh out the late antique epic histories.6 Yet the archaeological evidence from the lands of ancient Colchis and Iberia attests to Persian culture’s profound impact on the elites of Colchis and Iberia. Colchis (later Lazika) had and would continue to enjoy a long history of Greek influence, but like Iberia to the east, monumental architectural forms without any precedent in the region appear in the fifth century BCE. Iberia experienced an explosion of monumental building in the early to mid-second century BCE.7 This marks a new phase of development and likely corresponds to the formation and consolidation of the early Iberian state under the Pharnabazid (P’arnavazean) dynasty. Their sphere of influence did not often extend beyond the Caucasus, yet it is clear that the early rulers of Iberia engaged the wider phenomenon of post-Achaemenid Iranian kingship as they sought to establish legitimacy and compete against the Pontic, Armenian, Parthian, and Persian Empires.8 Although the medieval tradition places the first Parnavaz as a contemporary of Alexander the Great, the available textual and archaeological evidence indicates that the Pharnabazid Mtskheta did not coalesce and grow until the second century BCE.9 The evidence available for these kingdoms is highly uneven and reflective of both the interests of the Roman historical tradition and twentieth-century priorities for archaeological excavation. To cite an obvious example, while this period has been prioritized in Armenia, important sites associated with the Artaxiads and Orontids of Sophene have been deliberately ignored in Turkey. Conversely, classical literary sources provide precision and details that the late antique Armenian and Georgian chronicles and epics lack. While the Mithradatids’ royal tombs in Amasya provide an impressive monument to their dynasty, at this point relatively little archaeological evidence produced through systematic excavation exists that can flesh out the literary

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evidence’s tantalizing hints of their royal cities, estates, and fortresses. For this reason, the range of questions we can ask and answer changes according to region.

Armenia between Iran and the Hellenistic World The emergence of Armenia as a powerful independent kingdom had a profound impact not only on the Caucasus but on eastern Anatolia, northern Mesopotamia, and Syria. Armenia’s topographies of power changed noticeably from the Achaemenid through the royal Orontid, Artaxiad, and Arsacid periods with especially dramatic shifts occurring as the new Orontid and Artaxiad kings took power. The Achaemenid period of Armenia has received a great deal of scholarly attention, as have the Orontids’ building strategies with regard to their role in the development of Armenian settlement patterns, architecture, and regional memories of the Achaemenid Empire.10 My goal here is to situate this phenomenon within the wider context of the dynasty’s claims to the Persian royal legacy and the formation of a new Iranian kingship. The most noticeable shift—one that was consciously enacted—was the foundation of royal cities. As an Achaemenid satrapy, Armenia did not contain large urban centers. The majority of the population lived in fortified, clan-based villages in the highlands of Armenia. In antiquity and the early Middle Ages, cities were primarily royal creations and intrusions into traditional Armenian social order.11 Scholars have often spoken of the decidedly Greek cultural elements as an intrusion. While they were new and often at odds with Armenian social and cultural traditions, they were not a colonially implanted cultural form. Unlike the lands of the Arsacid Empire, Armenia had not been subjected to the same intensive campaign of Seleucid colonization. The Seleucids never directly dominated or colonized Armenia, so a different dynamic was at play with a different result. Cities are best interpreted as a technology that the kings crafted to project power, with equal parts local and foreign inspiration. When a ruler founded a city it was a statement of new royal, and at times imperial, ambitions and a break with the satrapal status. Indicative of this, the Orontid and Artaxiad kings named many of their royal creations with compounds stressing “happiness” (Old Pers. šiyati-), thus rooting them in an Achaemenid ideological onomasticon with deep and complex ideological significances. After the fall of the Achaemenids, the Orontids and early Artaxiads of Armenia built at strategically important sites featuring venerable ruins or places of natural

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beauty to create a new independent royal identity. They deliberately excluded ruins that had been associated with Persian satrapal rule, choosing to build at sites that had been unoccupied since the Urartian period.12 The sites of Erebuni, Altıntepe, and Oshakan provide a view of the Orontid satrapal topography and architecture of power under the Achaemenids. While many other Urartian citadels and fortresses were left derelict, these sites continued to be occupied in the Achaemenid period. Erebuni in particular had functioned as an administrative center in the Urartian period and continued this vocation under the Achaemenids. Erebuni and Altıntepe both boasted monumental complexes with hypostyle halls. These were either rehabilitated and returned to use or built from scratch during the Achaemenid period.13 Architectural forms are empty of meaning when divorced from the complex web of human practice that enveloped them. In this regard, the hypostyle halls of the Armenian and, for that matter, Iranian highlands did not necessarily carry the connotation of royal power inherently.14 However, by the late sixth century, this was unquestionably the valence they carried. In this regard, as simply a “captive,” or site of a new monumental “proxy,” such architecture could not be divorced from the larger web of Persian imperialism and architecture extending throughout Western Asia and into the satrapy, especially if utilized by an agent of the empire.15 These novel architectural forms had the capacity to project Persian imperial power in the Armenian highlands and frame satrapal or subsatrapal authority as emanating from an even more potent source.16

New Orontid Royal Residence Cities Marking a distinct and strategic approach, the Orontids selected new sites on which to build a new royal capital and construct an identity as kings rather than satraps. We explore here the relationship of the Orontids and Artaxiads with both the Persian and pre-Persian topography of the region, and the visual, architectural, and discursive traditions of the Achaemenids and, ultimately, the Seleucids. As we will see, in eschewing sites of Perisan satrapal power, they by no means rejected an association with the empire and dynasty. Instead they embarked on a new mission to build a new royal identity. Armenia’s rich topography of magnificent ruins provided ample raw material to build a newly ancient and deeply locally rooted royal persona. After the fall of the Achaemenids, sites such as Erebuni and Altıntepe, loci of Achaemenid satrapal power,

lost prominence or were abandoned. The early Orontid kings selected the site of Armavir as their new royal capital, located in the western Ararat plain.17 It too had been the site of a major Urartian citadel, Arghištihnili, founded by Arghišti I in 776 BCE, but was depopulated after the fall of Urartu. Armavir emerged as an important settlement only after the fall of the Achaemenids and is decidedly an expression of the Orontid kings. After the fall of the Achaemenids and rise of the Orontids as an independent regional power, the newly royal dynasty reused the site and its Urartian fortifications. The Orontids rebuilt the internal palatial and administrative districts, reusing some of the internal ground plans and structures, in many cases with no modification.18 While Soviet archaeology emphasized absolute continuities and local origins, it is clear that the Orontids did indeed rebuild and added substantial sections, including masonry walls discovered underneath what had been interpreted to be an Urartian courtyard.19 The Urartian and “Hellenistic” settlements occupied several spurs of a basalt outcrop with the river Araxes to the south. The Orontid settlement (third to fi rst century BCE) reoccupied the eastern spur, which had served as a citadel in the Urartian period. 20 Here excavations yielded an elite residence at the summit and proved that several buildings within the citadel were in use and were subject to rebuilding and, in some cases, modification. 21 On the central and highest part of its summit rose an Urartian tower temple, which was modified and hosted some sort of cult activity again under the Orontids.22 To the west of this building rose a multiroomed palatial complex with finely wrought windows and decorative plaster treatments. It was built in the Urartian period and in use continuously during the Orontid period. Downhill from the palace, on the northwestern part of the hill, a semicircular tower was built to control the entrance to the palace. Its masonry, as other work from the Orontid period, was created with swallowtail clamps. The basic type of construction—mud brick on stone foundations—has been portrayed as an innate mark of continuity with the Urartian citadel, though this basic technique was also employed by the Achaemenids. 23 As we have seen, the significance of such techniques and materials was not fi xed any more than the sites themselves. Instead the perceived connections to an open-ended past was their true utility. The Orontid modifications shaped these ancient sites and their significances, though not without modification. A lower town was located below the fortress, between the outcrop and its spurs on the east and the Araxes

River on the south. Greek inscriptions, found to the south of the hill, were taken to suggest that an open-air sanctuary enclosing a grove of sacred plane trees, known from literary sources, lay here.24 When Hellenistic influence appears, it takes the character of a new and conspicuously elite technology of power. The seven Greek inscriptions cut into two boulders were discovered to the south of the citadel of Armavir.25 The content and purpose of these inscriptions do not yield any easy interpretation, though they clearly were connected with royal and priestly elite identity. Greek epigraphy in this case functions primarily as a visual expression of royal power, and command of this foreign, prestigious means of communication was a visual mark of distinction irrespective of its content.

New Orontid Royal Estates According to Movses Khorenats‘i, the last Orontid king, Eruand (Orontes IV), moved the royal residence westward because the Araxes River had changed course. 26 The settlement does not appear in any classical source, and only the Armenian historical tradition retains any memory of it. At least at the time of its foundation, this new royal residence did not resemble a self-contained and functionally divided Hellenistic city, but rather had the diffuse urbanization of a Persian royal or satrapal residence, such as Dascylium or Pasargadae. It consisted of a fortified, mountaintop royal residence, a forested hunting paradise, as well as a plantation with gardens, vineyards, and habitations. Movses Khorenats‘i lists and names each element separately, but it is clear that they functioned as an interdependent whole. The fortified royal residence, Eruandashat (Arm. Eruandašat, “Joy of Orontes,” < Mid. Pers. *Arwandaša¯ d; cf. Old Pers. *Aruvanta-šiya¯ti-), lay at the junction of the Akhurean and Araxes Rivers. The royal hunting paradise, called by Movses the “Forest of Creation” (tsnndots), was located to the northwest of Eruandashat and to the north of the Araxes. The royal estate, Eruandakert (“Made by Orontes” < Mid. Pers. *Arwandagird; cf. Old Pers. * Aruvantakr· ta-), was located to the northwest of Eruandašat and to the east of the Akhurean River.27 Finally, instead of including the royal sanctuary within the city walls, Eruand founded a separate settlement, “Bagaran,” where he set up “the complex of altars,” and statues that had been at Armavir. According to Movses Khorenats‘i, this was to prevent worshippers coming to sacrifice from gaining entry to the walled city, as had been a risk at Armavir.28 The ancient site of Bagaran is located around

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10 kilometers to the north on the right bank of the Akhurean River. Orontid Eruandashat and Eruandakert have not yet been excavated or surveyed, as the most plausible candidate site lies on the Turkish side of the border. The fortress of Eruandashat was likely located on a rocky outcrop to the north of the Turkish village of Tuzluca on the southern side of a loop of the ancient Araxes River (present-day Araqs/Aras), where it is met by the Akhurean (Arpaçay) River. The ancient fortress is most likely located underneath the standing remains of a medieval fortress. 29 Eruandakert, according to the literary evidence, would have lain in the valley to the north of the Araxes somewhere on the western side of the broad floodplain of the Akhurean River.30 Armenian excavations conducted in the last decade and a half have revealed monumental structures very likely associated with the hunting paradise of the Forest of Births.31 The excavators cleared a large square structure, measuring 24.40 by 24.20 meters, which likely functioned as a royal banquet hall. The square structure consisted of a central square hall, which measured 8 by 11 meters, surrounded with ancillary rooms that served as staging areas and kitchens.32 The excavators found charred roof beams when clearing the south side of the central hall. The position of the fallen beams and lack of columns bases suggest that some other design supported the beams. The structure appears to have met a violent end in the first half of the second century BCE, possibly connected with the rise of the Artaxiads, and was subsequently converted into a fortress.33 While this structure’s rough stone masonry and relatively modest size do not warrant direct comparisons to Achaemenid palaces, its general design evokes Persian or Seleucid palaces rather than Urartian architecture, not to mention literary descriptions of the royal paradise near Artaxiad Tigranakert. This suggests that these Persian traditions either persisted or were reinterpreted with Seleucid influence, in preference, at least in this case, to the style of architecture seen at Armavir. The “classical” period (III) of the citadel at Og˘ lanqala, Azerbaijan, yielded a structure with a similar collection of features. It presents an Urartian citadel with typical fi ne ashlar masonry, which had been abandoned before experiencing a major reconstruction in the Orontid period. The site yielded architectural elements that deliberately combine and elaborate Persian and Greek forms. This suggests not only that these architects elaborated their own versions of the post-Alexandrine Perso-Macedonian fusion,

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but that this phenomenon was replicated at provincial fortresses.34

The Artaxiads The rise of the Artaxiad dynasty marks a significant development in Armenian history, under whose kings Armenia became a significant player in the Hellenistic world. While its founder may or may not have actually been related to the preceding dynasty, Artaxias I took pains to portray himself as a member of the Orontid dynasty and initially worked from within the regional monumental traditions they established. Taking over Orontid naming conventions as his royal prerogative, Artaxias I founded a new eponymous city on the Ararat Plain, Artashat: “Joy of Artaxias” (cf. Old Pers. *R∙ taxšaçašiya¯ti-). It would persist as Armenia’s capital until the fourth century CE.35 Artashat prospered from its location on trade routes from northern Iran, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia, as well as from the richness of the surrounding agricultural land. The city flourished until the Persians destroyed it in the course of Shabuhr II’s Armenian campaigns (368–70 CE).36 Located on an outcrop made up of twelve hills, Artashat shows that Artaxias selectively adapted many of the same technologies of power and memory developed by the Orontids. Like Armavir, Artaxias founded Artashat at a site that did not have a history of occupation in the Achaemenid era, but did bear the remains of an Urartian fortress. This fortress was located on the highest of the twelve hills, and its fortification walls were rebuilt and integrated into Artashat’s massive new circuit walls. 37 Despite its importance, a royal palace has not yet been excavated at Artashat.38 Nevertheless, it is clear the city admitted influence from Mediterranean city planning and architecture under Tigranes II, a process that intensified after the Arsacid king Tiridates I received money and craftsmen from Nero to rebuild the city.39 While a royal palace has not been excavated, the acropolis yielded fragments of classically inspired architectural ornament and Roman baths, paralleling Garni.40 In addition to functioning as the main seat of royal power, under Artaxias I the new city became the religious center of Armenia through the exertion of royal will. While Armavir still retained a certain significance, Artaxias created a new cult site in the region around Artashat. In the medieval historiographical remembrance preserved in Movses Khorenats‘i, King Artashes (Artaxias) transferred the statues from the sanctuary at Eruandashat when he built the city of Artashat.41

Inscribing a New Armenian Royal Identity The Artaxiads expanded the Orontids’ more limited use of inscriptions to project power on the landscape, this time choosing self-consciously ancient, Achaemenid models instead of contemporary Greek ones. Inscribed boundary stones played a role very similar to rock reliefs in negotiating early Artaxiad royal identity in Armenia. Artaxias created boundary stelae to demarcate landholdings in the region around Lake Sevan. They provide important material evidence of Artaxiad efforts to take control of Persian royal traditions and the monumental and natural legacies of Armenia’s memorial landscape.42 The boundary stones have no direct Achaemenid precedents in Armenia. Instead, Artaxias formulated his new royal effort to take control of Armenia’s landscape in a regional monumental idiom, that is, Urartian boundary stones.43 The survival of Urartian rounded stone stelae with cuneiform inscriptions provided a monumental and memorial context for his royal statement. Analogous to the Orontid takeover of the Urartian citadels, they define the new Artaxiad dynasty with pseudoancient monumental expressions. While Artaxias played off the Urartian monumental tradition formally, he looked to contemporary formulations of “neo-Persian” kingship for their inscriptional content. The boundary stones’ epigraphic, linguistic, and sculptural modes of expressions evoked several Achaemenid royal traditions. Whereas the Urartian stelae are rounded on top, the Artaxiad stelae integrated a stepped crest broadly reminiscent of crenellations in Achaemenid architecture and Achaemenid crowns. Artaxias also “updated” their epigraphic idiom, choosing to use Aramaic, which was used for letter writing and record keeping in the Achaemenid as well as Seleucid and Arsacid Empires. Much as the Seleucids, the Mauryas, and the Arsacids, Artaxias deployed Achaemenid Aramaic not only as an idiom of communication, but for its inherent claims to superregional royal power.44 The fact that Aramaic was a language of the chancellery made it appropriate, given the “authenticating” role of the markers. However, the use of Aramaic alone instead of a Greek-Aramaic bilingual inscription might suggest that the Artaxiads consciously jettisoned Greek as part of a larger effort to characterize their rule in Persian terms.45 This points to another important fact: like Greek, Aramaic was spoken by no one in the kingdom, but employed as a foreign technology, both organizational and ideological. Only a few of those within the courtly circle would likely have been able to read the boundary stones, but the visual

FIGURE 5.1 Line drawing of a boundary stele of Artaxias I (ca. 161 BCE), discovered in Teghut, Dilijan, Armenia, now in the Yerevan History Museum.

experience of Aramaic as a language of royal communication and authority affiliating their patron with Persian kingship was the markers’ primary purpose. Content aside, as a pervasive monumental interface between king, subjects, and the landscape, the boundary stones made a deep impact on Armenia’s spatial imaginary of power, even though they were illegible to the vast majority of viewers. Amid all the other historical details lost or fabricated, the early medieval Armenian historical tradition remembers that Artaxias created inscribed stelae, indicating in Armenia memory of the royal act of reorganization, as the stones themselves survived well beyond the Artaxiads.46 The Artaxiad stelae were not the last time Armenian patrons engaged Urartian inscribed stelae as a way to leverage the deep past. Many Armenian churches around Lake Van and the Ararat Plain, most notably the mid-seventh-century church of Zuart’noc’, integrated Urartian stelae into their building fabric or associated complexes.47 However, while Artaxias’s stelae play a role in Armenian royal history, the early medieval Armenian memorial discourse understood Urartian inscriptions, both on cliff faces and stelae, to be markers of “ancient foreign authority.”48 Albeit terse, their content preserves a rare primarysource view into how the Artaxiads used the Persian

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royal tradition to conceptualize their kingdom. In some inscriptions Artaxias accentuates the Achaemenid dynastic roots of his name by using the “correct” Aramaic rendition of Artaxerxes, that is, Old Persian 49 “R∙ taxšaça” (‘RTH · ŠS[Y]). However, other inscriptions with the same general content use spellings that reflect the Greek version “Artaxerxes,” while still others use an Armenian phonetic spelling. Some words even appear to be idiograms for Middle Persian terms, for example, QT· Rbr, which could be read as Middle Persian *ta¯gabar, “diadem-bearer,” “king.” This word does not survive in any Pahlavi text, but does appear often in New Persian and the Old Armenian word for “king” (t’agavorin), reflecting the deep roots of the Persian origins of Armenian royal culture. This directly stems from the fact that when we speak of Persian kingship, we are dealing not with a direct reflection of the former Achaemenid Empire’s courtly center but with expressions that had been transmitted and translated increasingly through local cultures of kingship or through the mediation of Hellenistic culture. While not directly quoting Achaemenid royal inscriptions or titulature, the language of some of the inscriptions is Reminiscent of recurrent Achaemenid ideological sentiments, such as the king’s prerogative to organize the world and actively fight evil.50 In one of the inscriptions where the king’s name is transliterated from Greek, the king also alludes to a Mazdaean discourse very reminiscent of the Achaemenids. In the inscription from the stele found at Teghut, Artaxias is called “an ally of Xšaθra,” that is, Xšaθra Vairya (Mid. Pers. Šahrewar), one of the Amesha Spentas, the emanations of Ahura Mazda, through whom the Wise Lord created and preserves the living world. Xšaθra Vairya represents legitimate power and in later Zoroastrian tradition during the Renovation of the world and last battle between good and evil, the deity fights and vanquishes a demon who is his antithesis: misrule, violence, and injustice incarnate.51 Reinforcing this parallelism, in the next breath the inscription describes the king as the “conqueror of all who create evil.” Much like the Achaemenids, Artaxias I’s political actions actively fight the forces of evil and contribute to preserving the world’s proper god-given order. The efforts that the inscriptions make to bridge the gulf separating Artaxias and the Achaemenids suggest that they are part of a larger, overarching program of neo-Persian renewal. While Artaxias selected a new site for his royal capital, we have evidence that he actively engaged some Achaemenid-era sites in contrast to Orontid strategies.52

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Excavations near the village of Benjamin produced an Achaemenid-era elite residence whose architectural members suggest a highly skilled masonry workshop trained in the style of the imperial center, much like Karacˇamirli.53 As at other sites in the Caucasus, the Achaemenid-era residence contains forms that are much closer to Achaemenid prototypes than most structures associated with the courts of satraps or local officials. While the chronology is not entirely clear, nor is its ground plan, this site was occupied under the Artaxiads, and the palace was rebuilt after a period of destruction, largely on the same plans and reusing some of the Achaemenid architectural members. Even if it did not fully recreate the structure, resurrecting it was a powerful statement of continuity with the new dynasty’s ancient “ancestors.” An anepigraphic stele of Artaxias I was discovered in the excavations, suggesting that old and new blended together in the Artaxiad structure, and that the site was integrated into a wider Artaxiad topography of power and authority. In relating events during the Arsacid era, Movses Khorenats‘i mentions that King Trdat (Tiridates III) ennobled a relative of Saint Gregory the Great after he had been baptized, bestowing upon him the site of Draskhanakert. Movses Khorenats‘i suggests it was a great honor specifically because it had been one of Artaxias’s private estates.54 Not coincidentally, Saint Gregory’s estates were located in Ascilisene, the region that had hosted the most ancient Armenian cult centers. It seems that the church launched a major land grab, taking over many of the ancient temples and aristocratic estates.

Tigranes II In a strategy that parallels aspects of Seleucid settlements, Tigranes II (95–55 BCE) founded, or refounded, a number of eponymous settlements in both the original core of his kingdom and his newly won empire.55 Tigranes II intended these to consolidate and control his new empire as well as encourage its economic development. Like Seleucid settlements, those of Tigranes II varied in size and purpose, ranging from small, strategically sited fortresses or villages to a large metropolis. In addition to these new foundations or refoundations of existing cities, a faction in Antioch-Orontes invited Tigranes II to rule Antioch-Orontes, which he occupied ca. 84/83 and held at least nominally until 69 BCE. Tigranes II’s governor Magadates (Old Pers. Bagada¯ta), an Armenian official, incidentally, with an Iranian name, occupied Antioch’s palace, and there the king of

FIGURE 5.2 Tetradrachm of Tigranes II, Antioch mint. Courtesy Cornell Numismatic Collection (CNC_0750). FIGURE 5.3 Satellite image of

Tigranakert-Arzan (view from north). Semicircular outline of the ruins of the theater visible at lower edge by the river at the center right (© DigitalGlobe/Google Earth).

kings minted some of his fi nest coins in Antioch’s mint.56 From what the combined archaeological and textual evidence tells us, it appears that Tigranes II integrated aspects of Hellenistic city planning and urban monumental features with traditional highland Armenian city planning and fortress building and Persian palace traditions. In those cases where we have information beyond simply a settlement’s existence, the textual and archaeological evidence indicates that these foundations did not adhere to any single tradition, but rather were the expressions of and actors in the new Middle Iranian dynamic.

Late antique and early medieval Armenian sources indicate that there were two Tigranakerts in the historical province of Utik’. The classical geographer Ptolemy places a “Tigrana(van)” in Media, to the south of the Caspian Sea.57 Only one of these Tigranakerts has been located with a degree of certainty in Artsakh, Nagorno Karabakh, where city walls and a terrace buttressing the acropolis were constructed of fi nely hewn, rusticated ashlar masonry.58 Its excavation has been ongoing for years, unfortunately in contravention of UN accords. Because of this, new fi ndings will not be discussed in detail. The location of the royal residence of Tigranakert,

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at whose gates the final, fateful battle between Tigranes II and the Romans was fought, is still debated. Scholarship has put forward several candidate sites for the location of Tigranakert, the capital, all in present-day Turkey. These include Kızıltepe (Mardin Province), Silvan (Diyarbakır Province), and Arzan/Golamasya (Siirt Province). Arzan is the most compelling candidate both for a Tigranakert and the Tigranakert, though all sites are unexcavated.59 In addition to most closely matching the topographical details in a variety of ancient textual sources, the standing remains at Arzan closely parallel the character of those recently brought to light at Artsakh. Most tellingly, the site of Arzan preserves remnants of similar types of masonry, as well as the archaeological remains of a theater.60 The textual sources provide some idea of the growth and shift of Armenian urbanism. Tigranes II forcibly deported prisoners of war from Anatolia, upper Mesopotamia, and northern Iran to populate TigranakertArzan.61 Tigranes also compelled his aristocracy to move to the city and embellish it, and Plutarch relates that on the eve of its destruction the city was already splendid.62 When Lucullus took the city and sacked it, the soldiers carried off an incredible array of loot; the Roman general also discovered many actors that Tigranes had employed for the dedication of the city’s theater.63 Lucullus then made them perform to celebrate his victory. More importantly, these actors indicate that, like the Parthians, the Artaxiads engaged this aspect of Western Asian Hellenism. Indeed later, in 53 BCE, the Arsacid king of kings Pacorus heard the news that his general had destroyed the army of Crassus while viewing Euripides’s Bacchae as part of the wedding celebrations of his son and the sister of Artawazd II.64 This episode took place at Artashat, suggesting that the theater of Tigranakert was not an anomaly. In a sense, the main city of Tigranakert and the other eponymous satellites intensified the introduction of the new, Hellenistic phenomenon of urbanism in Armenia. However, the Artaxiads did not apply this Hellenistic technology at the expense of their own Iranian traditions. While they organized the cities to gain the benefits of concentrating political and economic power, the actual urban and internal composition of the cities was evidently mixed, even in the Tigranakert intended as the metropolis. Significantly, the placement of the palace departed both from Hellenistic cities, where they were walled or moated “cities within a city,” and from previous Armenian cities, where the palace occupied a citadel on the city’s highpoint.

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Looking back from the perspective of late antiquity, this type of urban layout can appear to be a long-standing “Iranian tradition.” Appian relates that Tigranes built a palace and hunting enclosures, as well as parks and ponds, on the outskirts of the city.65 The position of a royal palace on the outskirts of the city becomes a familiar Iranian institution in certain later Sasanian cities. However, it is important to point out that this did not naturally follow from the Achaemenid capitals, such as Persepolis or Susa. As was suggested by Gevork Tirats’yan many years ago, this was a royal tradition that grew from Achaemenid satrapal traditions.66 What was a variation of royal residences and the norm for satrapal provinces eventually became the chosen template for Iranian royal cities. Certain elements within the cities were taken from Hellenistic models, such as the theaters that were built and used in Tigranakert-Artsakh and Artashat.67 But, with regard to domestic architecture, not a single monumental structure resembling Hellenistic palaces has been discovered. We will see this Orontid approach to building a “newly ancient” topography of power again when turning to tombs and dynastic cult. Their fellow postsatrapal Persian dynasts in Anatolia faced similar challenges and followed similar strategies, though responding to different conformations of regional and royal cultural dynamics. In all cases, articulating a new Persian royal identity and reconciling it with their other royal legacies and power bases remained their chief goal.

Mithradatid Pontus What scholarship refers to as the Mithradatid dynasty sought its roots in an Achaemenid satrapal family who ruled an area of northwestern Anatolia along the Black Sea. They stemmed from one of the leading aristocratic families of the Achaemenid Empire and could quite legitimately count Darius I as an ancestor.68 Their lands originally centered on Bithynia, but the family soon gained Mysia, which had briefly been given to Orontes, the rebellious former satrap of Armenia (and ancestor of the Orontids), after he had made peace with the king. After he rebelled a second time in the Satrapal Revolt (362/1) and was removed once and for all, Mysia was added to the Mithradatids’ lands.69 Alexander retained the Mithradates who was ruling the satrapy at the time of the conquest. This Mithradates was the father of the founder of the kingdom, Mithradates I Ctistes (302–266 BCE). After his father ran afoul of Antigonus I Monophthalmos, Mithradates I Ctistes asserted independence

FIGURE 5.4 Tetradrachm of Mithradates VI of Pontus. Courtesy Cornell Numismatic Collection (CNC_0585).

and carved out a kingdom that pushed eastward into Cappadocia and Pontus.70 This later became the core of the kingdom. The Mithradatid kings were very much players in the military and diplomatic intrigues of the Hellenistic age and, through an ambitious series of dynastic marriages under Mithradates II (ca. 250–220 BCE), became intertwined with the Seleucids.71 Mithradates II married Laodike, the daughter of Antiochus II Theos and sister of Seleucus II Kallinikos, and promised a daughter, also named Laodike, to the Seleucid pretender Antiochus Hierax (239–226 BCE).72 Antiochus III married another of Mithradates II’s daughters, again named Laodike, and after the death of Antiochus Hierax, Mithradates II’s previous daughter Laodike was transferred to Antiochus III’s general Achaios.73 The reign of Mithradates VI Eupator (ca. 134–63 BCE) brought the kingdom to the height of its power, albeit briefly. Facing pressure from the Roman Republic and seeking to unite an increasingly diverse empire, Mithradates VI presented himself as a ruler who could brilliantly unite Persian and Macedonian heritages and cultures as no other king. Mithradates VI portrayed himself as a “new Alexander,” at the same time as he reinvigorated and foregrounded sites and rituals that were intended to engage Persian traditions. His reign was especially important, not only for the development of Mithradatid kingship, but Middle Iranian kingship in general. Accelerating and augmenting trends that had begun in Seleucid Asia, Mithradates VI integrated Greco-Macedonian, Persian, and steppe-Iranian traditions. Mithradates VI himself cultivated this status as a unifier and mediator between Hellenic, Persian, and nomadic Iranian steppe culture. His envoy, Pelopidas, urged the Romans to consider

that Mithridates is ruling his ancestral domain, which is 2,000 stades long, and that he has acquired many neighboring nations, the Colchians, a very warlike people, the Greeks bordering on the Euxine, and the barbarian tribes beyond them. He has allies also ready to obey his every command, Scythians, Taurians, Bastarnae, Thracians, Sarmatians, and all those who dwell in the region of the Don and Danube and the sea of Azov. Tigranes of Armenia is his son-in-law and Arsaces of Parthia his ally. He has a large number of ships, some in readiness and others building, and apparatus of all kinds in abundance.74

From the outside perspective of the Romans, this was yet another face of undifferentiated “Oriental kingship,” but they were not Mithradates VI’s intended audience; the lands of Iranian and Hellenized Asia were. But while the early Seleucids engaged Iranian traditions, they did not overtly claim the Achaemenid heritage or directly engage their royal traditions. Similarly, Mithradates VI overtly appropriated the traditions of Macedonian charismatic kingship and Alexander in a way that Tigranes II or Mithradates II of Parthia could or would not. The Mithradatid kingdom, at least as much of it as is visible in our sources, resembled the Achaemenid satrapies that preceded it.75 Much like an Achaemenid satrapy, the early Mithradatid kingdom consisted of estates owned by the king and nobility and richly endowed temples, with the majority of its population in villages. Inland cities were rare and the Mithradatids’ original stronghold of Amaseia functioned more as a central fortress than a city in the Greek sense. By the first century BCE, the court of the Pontic kings, like their counterparts in Asia Minor, had adopted aspects of Greek high culture. The influence of Greek culture on Pontus has largely been characterized as superficial, on account of the fact that the lands of the kingdom were not seeded

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FIGURE 5.5 View of the palatial district, Mithradatid tombs, and citadel of Amaseia (Amasya, Turkey).

with Greek poleis.76 While Greek culture and civic institutions did not hold sway over their inland populations as they did over their court and coastal cities, the Mithradatid kings engaged the evolving idiom of Macedonian charismatic kingship just as they cultivated their Iranian roots. Within the court, Greek high culture was the medium for the kings’ artistic, scientific, and diplomatic expressions. Even under Mithradates VI, who consciously foregrounded his Persian identity, the influence of Hellenic culture was strong. Mithradates VI’s strategy for creating his royal image was just as much one of reinvention as reinvigoration. Mithradates VI not only boasted of his royal Persian and Macedonian descent, counting as ancestors Cyrus, Darius I, Alexander, and Seleucus I, but reinforced a natural sense of continuity by naming four of his sons Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, and Oxathres all while portraying himself as a “new Alexander” on his coinage.77 Similarly, Mithradates VI consciously applied archaic terminology in the ordering of his empire, though it originally bore the marks of Seleucid organization too. For example, in addition to using Greek names for offices, in a letter to his governor inscribed in stone in Nyssa, the king addresses his governor as “satrap.”78 Similarly, in the majority of epigraphic and numismatic evidence, Mithradates VI refers to himself as “King Mithradates,”

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though scattered evidence indicates that he also experimented with the Iranian title “King of Kings,” briefly contesting it with Tigranes II and the Arsacids.79 As Mithradates expanded his empire around the Black Sea, the mixed Greek-Iranian populations of the Bosporus and nomadic Scythian populations of the Bosporan steppe were pulled into the orbit of this diverse coalition.80 The king may have even engaged Iranian eschatology in crafting prophesies of the fall of Rome, portraying himself as a “Future Savior” not just on the model of a Hellenistic king, but the revitalizing Savior (Av. saošiian∙ t-) of Iranian religious traditions.81 Armenia has provided much richer archaeological evidence of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods than have Pontus and Cappadocia. With the exception of the Mithradatid and Ariarathid royal tombs, very little evidence has been recovered of the palaces and estates that the Roman sources mention, but do not describe in detail. As well as Amaseia, the Mithradatids had inland residences at Cabeira, with a hunting paradise, and on Lake Stiphane. Mithradates VI’s mother and rival built a short-lived pleasure palace at Laodicea, though this was already in ruins by Strabo’s day. An important shift occurred during the reign of Pharnakes I (ca. 185–160/59 BCE), when the Mithradatids gained control of the Black Sea coast and conquered the Greek

city of Sinope.82 In addition, the Mithradatids had residences at Amisis and Pharnakeia on the coast. None of the royal residences or estates has been excavated, which represents a major gap in scholarship.83 Mithradates VI was born at Amaseia and used it as his main royal residence. We can only speculate about the palace’s architectural design, because it has not been thoroughly explored or excavated.84 Even so it is the most clearly visible vestige of the Mithradatid dynasty, with a number of associated features still preserved, including the royal tombs.85 Textual evidence suggests that Pontus’s royal and aristocratic paradise estates and fortresses grew from Achaemenid models, though we have little evidence of palatial architecture.86 Even the royal capital Amaseia adhered to this model, with a massive fortified palatial district enclosing rock-cut tombs looming high above the city proper. Other than the tombs, the only major remnant of the Mithradatid basileia visible is the gleaming ashlar curtain and retaining walls that divide the palatial district from the lower city.

Ariarathid and Ariobarzanid Cappadocia The Ariarathid kings of Cappadocia, like the Mithradatids and Orontids of Commagene, traced their lineage to one of the seven great aristocratic families of the Persian Empire and cultivated a genealogy that connected them to the Achaemenids.87 Like the genealogies of the other dynasties, whether the Ariarathid genealogy was fictitious or not was immaterial, as this sort of lineage was widely accepted as fact and pivotal for establishing their identity in relation to Iranian culture and the other Anatolian royal houses. Eager to engage Darius III, Alexander passed through southern Cappadocia, leaving northern Cappadocia untouched and its satrap, Ariarathes I, in power.88 Ariarathes sent contingents to Darius III’s army at Gaugamela, but with the last Achaemenid king gone and Alexander campaigning in the East, Ariarathes operated increasingly independently. Things changed drastically, however, after Alexander’s death. The Successors carved up the empire and began asserting authority over it. Ariarathes I’s satrapy was combined with southern Cappadocia and included in the portion of the empire given to Eumenes in the partition of Babylon. Ariarathes refused to submit, and, in 322, Perdiccas, the royal regent, invaded to impose this decision. Ariarathes was defeated, and Perdiccas crucified him and his courtiers for resisting. Underscoring the close ties the Iranian satrapal families maintained among themselves despite long distances, his nephew,

Ariarathes II, found refuge in Armenia. Taking advantage of the death of Eumenes, Ariarathes II returned to Cappadocia with an army supplied by his Armenian ally and killed the Macedonian governor. With Mithradates I Ctistes already occupying northern Cappadocia, Ariarathes II carved out a realm to the south of the family’s ancestral lands, which became part of Seleucus I’s kingdom after the battle of Ipsus (ca. 301 BCE).89 The son of Ariarathes II, Ariaramnes (ca. 280–ca. 230 BCE), endured Seleucus I’s attempts to bring all Cappadocia under his control.90 His son, Ariarathes III (ca. 230–220 BCE), was the fi rst to proclaim himself basileus on his coins, founding a royal dynasty that would last for two centuries. With Ariarathes III the relationship between Cappadocia and the Seleucid Empire improved with a series of strategic marriages and alliances.91 After the decline of the Seleucid Empire, Cappadocia looked first to Pergamon, before being caught between Rome and Mithradates VI, confl icts that ultimately extinguished the Ariarathid dynasty and devastated much of its kingdom. The Cappadocians then selected Ariobarzanes I, from one of Cappadocia’s Persian noble families, who ruled 95–63/2 BCE. Ariobarzanes I too became embroiled in Roman-Mithradatid confl icts. Largely unpopular and dependent on the Romans for support, he abdicated to his son Ariobarzanes II, who consolidated power before being murdered by internal rivals, possibly an anti-Roman faction, ca. 52 BCE. Ariobarzanes III was a partisan of Pompey, first, and after being pardoned by him, Caesar. We hear that his main rival was the priest-king of Comana, attesting to the continued importance and quasi-political power of what had been a dynastic possession of the old dynasty.92 Cappadocia’s last independent king, Archelaus, was chosen from another local noble family, and ruled until Tiberius incorporated Cappadocia into the Roman Empire.93 The Ariobarzanid period is especially interesting, as Cappadocia’s new royal family was challenged to establish control of an ancient realm while negotiating with shifting royal claims and alliances. Much like Antiochus I of Commagene, it is likely that the Ariobarzanids used funerary monuments as an important tool to take hold of Cappadocia’s landscape and royal legacies. Archaeological remnants of the Persian topography of power in Cappadocia are scant, though this is not to say that the landscape was pristine when the Ariarathids took royal power. Neo-Hittite tumuli and reliefs survive around Tyana, and some of the oldest temple states, like that of Ma at Comana, had ancient pre-Achaemenid

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roots, even if some gods, like Zeus Daciëus or Zeus Ouranios, might have gained Iranian characteristics or reinterpretations under the Achaemenids and Ariarathids. While we have no direct evidence of their architecture, the Achaemenid Empire undoubtedly controlled Cappadocia through a system of satrapal and “baronial” fortress and paradise estates, as elsewhere in Anatolia. This earlier pre-Hellenistic heritage certainly played a role in the formation of the religious and political landscape of the Hellenistic kingdom, though its impact is much more difficult to discern than in Armenia. The Achaemenid satrapy was ruled from Mazaca (modern Kayseri), and its growth effected drastic and lasting shifts in the Cappadocian geography of power.94 Unfortunately, no Achaemenid monuments survive to attest to its importance, which is not surprising given that it was likely organized on a diffuse model like other satrapal seats. Mazaca remained the most important city of Hellenistic and Roman Cappadocia, though other settlements of varying sizes and organization were founded or aggrandized.95 While the Cappadocian kings engaged Hellenistic culture as means to establish their credibility on the world stage, Iranian and local Anatolian cultural currents remained very strong even through the Roman era.96 Achaemenid imperial conventions made an impact and were the basis for the Ariarathid kings and their nobles, who were variously styled “satraps” or strateˉgai, reflecting mixed Persian and Seleucid conventions and identities of the king. Scholarship has routinely called the Ariarathids “philhellenes,” which greatly overstresses the actual impact of Greek culture on the province and within the Cappadocian kings’ own royal tradition.97 It is easy to believe the later kings’ propaganda if one focuses only on literary or epigraphic evidence of certain cities’ Greek political models, the king’s own social connections, and honors within Greek cities like Athens, or coin portraits that portray later Cappadocian kings as neo-Seleucids. However, such “Hellenization” was superficial in that it did not fundamentally alter Cappadocian culture, demographics, or political institutions. It was not intended to, nor did it result in, the integration of Cappadocia into the Hellenistic oikemene, but rather served as a tool for the kings to project power within their kingdom and engage the wider Hellenistic world. Although the majority of Cappadocian royal numismatic images portrayed the king using the conventions of Hellenistic royal portraiture, like the Mithradatids, at certain points the later Ariarathids deployed Persian (or rather “neo-Persian”) royal images, even at one point adopting their own ver-

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sion of the kidaris.98 The Cappadocian kings cultivated Iranian culture and a neo-Persian royal image in parallel to respond to the growing power of this newly relevant royal idiom in the royal discourse of their Mithradatid, Orontid, and Artaxiad rivals. Cappadocia, like Pontus, retained much of the character of an Achaemenid satrapy. The population was primarily based in villages, and its kings and nobility, who were largely Iranian or Iranized, resided in rural estates, which were the backbone of the kingdom.99 These estates controlled extensive plantations. Fortifications on these royal or noble estates or at strategic sites protected the kingdom. Most of the kingdom’s major settlements and administrative seats did not resemble Greek poleis as much as strongholds surrounded by villages and their associated plantations. Mazaca, Tyana (both refounded as “Eusebia”), and Hanisa were organized as Greek cities, as possibly was Ariarathia, a short-lived city founded by Ariarathes IV, which was later abandoned.100 Yet, even if the kings reorganized certain settlements according to Greek models, these Cappadocian “poleis” were primarily products and tools of royal control instead of the outgrowth of a deep transformation of Cappadocia’s culture and demographics.101 Other settlements were prosperous and important enough for Strabo, our primary source on pre-Roman Cappadocia, to consider “worthy of being called a city” (polis axiologos) or “having the aspect of a city” (poleoˉs kataskeueˉn) or a “village-city” (koˉmopolis). These include a variety of settlements, such as the socalled temple states of Comana and Venasa; Cadena, the royal residence of the last Cappadocian king Archelaus; or Garsaoura (Aksaray), a regional seat that Archelaus refounded as Archilais.102 This terminology as well as the constituent features of cities, temples states, royal and aristocratic estates, and strongholds reflects a kingdom whose urbanistic and cultural institutions grew from its Achaemenid satrapal roots, though with a significant admixture of Greek civic culture promoted by philhellenic kings. No evidence of urban topography or palatial architecture of Achaemenid or Ariarathid Mazaca survives, be it archaeological or textual. Strabo only mentions only one of the Ariarathids’ retreats, on an artificial lake that he created by damming the Melas River, which disastrously burst, causing massive downstream destruction.103 We do hear of various mountain strongholds held by kings, satraps, and nobles of the kingdom, some of whose remnants survive. In contrast, the religious and funerary topography of Cappadocia offers much richer evidence and played an important role in emplac-

ing and articulating the kingdom’s topography of power. These burial tumuli and mountaintop or lakeside cult sites imposed the enduring monumental presence of the ruling dynasty on the landscape of Cappadocia, outlasting their short-lived cities (see figs. 10.7–13).104

Orontid Sophene While the settlement strategies of the Orontids of Greater Armenia have received substantial attention, those of the early Orontids of Sophene and Commagene have not. In contrast to their later descendants, the Orontids of Commagene, who favored Hellenistic visual and architectural forms over Urartian or Persian traditions, the Orontids of Sophene emphasized archaic Persian architectural forms in their early royal residences, at least as far as the problematic evidence allows us to conclude. Once the Orontids of Sophene broke from the Orontids of Greater Armenia, a rebellion that had been aided and abetted by connivances of the Seleucids, they engaged or reinvigorated certain regional traditions of their Persian satrapal ancestors to give their fledgling kingdom the perception of depth.105 In addition, the onomasticon and eponymous foundations of the Orontids of Sophene foregrounded their Achaemenid and Orontid royal dynastic pretensions and Iranian cultural roots. Arsames (Old Pers. R∙ ša¯ ma-, “he who has the strength of heroes”) was a common name within the Achaemenid family and among the Persian elite. Sames could even reference the Avestan Sa¯ma, father of the Avestan hero Kərəsa¯spa, which would attest to some tradition of Iranian religious or epic lore within the family.106 Moreover, naming cities as the “joy of” or “happiness of” the founder appears to have been a characteristically Orontid-Artaxiad practice and occurs as a pattern in several later foundations, such as Arsamosata (cf. Old Pers. *R∙ ša¯ma-šiya¯ti-). Although the Orontids of Sophene continued these Persian traditions, they did not reuse sites tied to Achaemenid satrapal rule as their main cities. In this they followed a remarkably similar strategy to their forebears in Greater Armenia. If they had chosen to, the early Orontids could have rebuilt or reoccupied Tille Höyük, a site that had been an important center under the Achaemenids. Tille Höyük preserved a significant Achaemenidera manor house under its late Hellenistic layers. Instead it was abandoned after Alexander’s invasion, only later growing into a small frontier village, but never a royal residence.107 Instead of establishing a major city at this Achaemenid site, the Orontids founded new residence

cities to establish their new royal authority. Chief among these was Samosata. Samosata (Mid. Pers./Parth. *Sa¯ maša¯ d, Old Pers. *Sa¯ma-šiya¯ti-) was founded sometime before 245 BCE on the site of Neo-Hittite Kummuh . The archaeological, ˘ epigraphic, and literary evidence all points to a foundation by Sames (I) of Sophene, whom Antiochus of Commagene names as the grandfather of Arsames I in a fragmentary inscription.108 The damaged nature of the inscription has invited alternative readings, and some even have questioned the existence of Sames (I) of Sophene and, along with it, the possibility of a thirdcentury foundation, instead attributing the city’s foundation to Antiochus of Commagene’s grandfather, Sames (II), who lived ca. 130 BCE.109 Strabo (14.2.29) fi rst mentions Samosata’s foundation. If Strabo truly depended on the third-century author Eratosthenes for his description of the region, as has been argued, then the name of the city would have indeed been attested in the third century.110 Luckily the archaeological evidence from Samosata’s rescue dig has shed further light on the problem and reinforced the image sketched by the fragmentary epigraphic and textual sources. The ancient site of Orontid Samosata now lies under the waters of the reservoir of the Atatürk Dam, but before they rose, Nimet Özgüç was able to conduct two seasons of salvage excavations in 1983 and 1984.111 The excavations explored the lower city and the site’s acropolis. On the acropolis, work centered on two areas: the central trench and the west trench. Controlling as it did an important crossing on the Euphrates, Samosata had a long occupation history, consisting of fourteen levels stretching back to the Bronze Age. Interestingly, however, there appears to be a gap between the Assyrian and early Hellenistic/Orontid levels with no significant Persian remains.112 The “central trench” eventually yielded a first-century BCE palace of the Orontid kings of Commagene, which was decorated with rich mosaics and frescos.113 The “southwest trench” (“güneybatı ocag˘ ı,” also referred to as the “west trench” in some reports) extended from the palace to the edge of the mound. Here the excavators recovered a structure with well-finished limestone orthostats revetting its earth-fill wall.114 The excavators cleared a courtyard, two adjoining rooms, and an entranceway on the northeast wall, which was fronted by two simple torus column bases set on plinths.115 The doorway reused a block from late Hittite walls that retained traces of relief carving from its original context.116 An altar was discovered in the next season, which also made use of spoliated Hittite blocks,

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and a paved path connected the altar with the structure containing the orthostats.117 In the first season’s reports, Özgüç originally conjectured that the layer (VI) associated with the large building and the altar was dated to the late Achaemenid period since the building preserved architectural forms reminiscent of Persian palatial architecture. However, the results of the next and fi nal season’s excavations and the associated ceramic data convinced her it that it dated to the early Hellenistic period, and she referred to it as the “Hellenistic Building” in her 1996 report and the “Early Hellenistic Building” in her fi nal report.118 Özgüç ultimately concluded that this large, third-century building and the altar were built by Sames I of Sophene when he refounded the city as Samosata and initiated its role as one of the most important royal residences of the Orontid kings of Sophene.119 Its use of “sub-Achaemenid” Persian architectural forms is continuous with Orontid structures in Greater Armenia, as is its location at a site of ancient significance without Achaemenid satrapal connotations. It is, of course, possible that Sames (II) of Commagene (ca. 130) gave the city its name, yet the archaeological evidence, at least what is available to us now, points to an earlier Hellenistic foundation. With only a 25-hectare area and accommodating only about 10,000 people, the city was miniscule for a Hellenistic royal residence city if one compares it to true imperial metropolises such as Alexandria or Seleuciaon-the-Tigris. However, this smaller settlement fits the larger pattern established by the Orontids of Greater Armenia and scale of urbanization in Cappadocia and Pontus. Samosata represents a change from the topographies of Persian satrapal authority at Tille Höyük, which lost the relative importance it enjoyed under the Achaemenids and experienced a period of abandonment before growing into a small frontier village under the later Orontids and Romans.120 Samosata enjoyed a long occupation history, providing raw material for the Orontids to fashion a newly ancient royal identity. Just as importantly, the later Hellenistic palace of the Orontids of Commagene imposed a rather abrupt shift in architectural style emblematic of the later dynasty’s greater involvement with the wider Greco-Roman world and tenuous yet symbolically important connection with the Orontid line. The city of Arsamosata was founded ca. 240 by Arsames, son of Sames I. Arsamosata (Armenian, Aršamašat, Middle Persian *Arša¯ maša¯ d, Old Pers. R∙ ša¯ma-šiya¯ti-, “Joy of Arsames”) functioned as a royal residence and urban center for the Orontids of Sophene.

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Its founder was possibly the same Arsames who offered the rebel Antiochus Hierax refuge at his court and tried to withhold tribute from the Seleucids.121 In 189 BCE, Antiochus III besieged Arsames’s son, Xerxes, here to make him pay the tribute on which his father had reneged.122 Recording Roman-Parthian confl icts over a century later, Tacitus refers to battle at “a fortress known as Arsamosata,” reflecting the fact that the site remained important as a fortress even if the city itself had declined.123 Arsamosata was located between the Tigris and Euphrates in an area that Polybius describes as the “Fair Plain.” The city was located on the bank of the ancient Arsanias River (modern Murat River) near the village of Haraba, 70 kilometers east of Elazıg˘, Turkey. Baki Ög˘ün explored the site in the summers of 1969 and 1970 as part of the wider rescue excavations before the newly constructed Keban dam flooded the region and the site.124 The fortress of Arsamosata, known locally as S¸ims¸at Kalesi, took advantage of a hill on the riverbank while the city itself sprawled to the south, surrounded by its own fortifications. Much like the major Orontid sites in Armenia, the fortress yielded relatively continuous occupation layers from antiquity through the Middle Ages, but, as far as the limited soundings can prove, there was a gap between the Urartian and Hellenistic layers. Ög˘ün was not able to establish a date range, though he recorded the existence of early Hellenistic pottery in the Hellenistic level, which parallels the pattern established at Samosata.125 The city proper was occupied in the Roman period, but contracted in late antiquity to the fortress before growing again as a Seljuk settlement. The pottery suggests that the city was connected with Hellenistic Anatolia in contrast to the Orontid settlements on the Ararat Plain, which continued local forms. This indicates that Sophene began to be integrated with the wider Hellenistic world much earlier than highland Armenia. Unfortunately the excavations recovered no architectural remains other than a tower associated with the Hellenistic fortress.126 This employed ashlar blocks laid without mortar, paralleling Orontid monumental construction in Greater Armenia. According to the inscriptions of Antiochus I of Commagene, Arsames also founded fortified settlements on high rocky outcrops at Arsameia-Euphrates (present-day Gerger) and Arsameia-Nymphaios (Eski Kale).127 Arsames built these fortifications as he raised himself in rebellion against Seleucus II, whose rival, Antiochus Hierax, he received at his court.128 They provide some significant evidence on the development of the early Orontid

FIGURE 5.6 View of the Orontid relief and tombs, citadel of Arsameia-on-the Euphrates (Gerger Kalesi, Turkey). Rock relief visible above the three rock-cut ossuary-tombs. FIGURE 5.7 Detail of the rock relief of Sames II,

Arsameia-on-the-Euphrates.

kingdom of Sophene. However, the majority of the remains date to the first century BCE when these sites became important fortresses and ritual centers for the fi rst-century Orontid sovereigns of the kingdom of Commagene. Although it retained evidence of occupation in the Middle Bronze Age, much like the other Orontid sites, Arsameia-Nymphaios was not occupied in the Achaemenid era. As in the case of Samosata and Arsamosata, not to mention Armavir, Arsames selected a site that had no significant Achaemenid history. Like his father, however, Arsames evidently did make use of Achaemenid architectural forms in building the royal residence at Arsameia-Nymphaios. The late Hellenistic and Roman buildings obliterated and reused the earlier structures, but it is clear from the early Hellenistic remains that the site hosted some sort of elite palace or villa, which used simple Achaemenid-style torus bases.129 These were subsequently integrated into the late Hellenistic and Roman buildings.130 Arsameia-on-the-Euphrates has not received as much attention as Arsameia-on-the-Nymphaios. The site has

not been excavated and was only cursorily surveyed by the early twentieth-century expedition.131 Nevertheless, this settlement fits the pattern of Arsames’s other foundations: it is a virtually impregnable fortress set atop a flat-topped rocky outcrop. A small number of ossuary niches carved into the cliff face hint at inhabitants who adhered to Iranian mortuary strictures. In order to make this connection tangible Antiochus of Commagene carved a rock relief of his grandfather, anchoring the city to a deeper Orontid past. As it is unexcavated, we do not know about the nature of Arsames I’s original constructions at the site, though its scale, the funerary niches, and the monumental rock relief that Antiochus carved into its cliffs indicate that it was a significant settlement. It is also noteworthy that the subject matter and basic composition recall our sole relief from Media Atropatene, which portrays a king in profile wearing a similar costume of “Persian” royal robes and a mantle with a scepter across his shoulder.132 His headgear, a satrapal kyrbasia with cheek flaps tied up,

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matches the numismatic representations of the late third- to mid-second-century kings of Sophene and Adiabene, Xerxes and Abdisarres. This suggests both these dynasties participated in a wider regional culture of post-Seleucid Persian kingship, including the carving of reliefs at significant sites and, possibly, common iconographic and compositional conventions. According to Strabo, the original royal city (basileion) of Sophene was Karkathaiokerta.133 Pliny the Elder lists it among the most important settlements in the region, calling it Arg(i)athicerta (though often amended by editors to Carcathiocerta to match Strabo) and specifying that it is on the Tigris; Ptolemy too mentions an Artagigarta/Artatigarta.134 With its Iranian –kirt/-gird (“founded by”) ending, the name is in the style of an Orontid royal foundation, suggesting it gained its appellation from “Arkathius,” a king of Sophene previously unknown, though now attested through coinage.135 The name of this royal foundation, or refoundation, evidently did not stick, and the location’s original Hittite name, Ingilawa, is discernible in its Armenian name, Angł, and that of the present-day village of Eg˘il, Turkey, which lies slightly northeast of the ancient site.136 To judge from Strabo’s statement and the accumulation of royal tombs at the site, the settlement continued to function as a royal city after Samosata and Arsamosata were founded. Angł/Eg˘il hosted royal tombs of the Orontid dynasty, though whether these were just the Orontids of Sophene or the Orontids of Armenia as well is not entirely clear. The Orontids of Sophene were drawn to sites with signs of great antiquity whose origins had likely been lost in the mists of time, but which had not served as Achaemenid satrapal centers. Much like the Orontids of Greater Armenia, they used the remnants of Hittite and Assyrian architectural material, reliefs, and inscriptions as raw material to forge their new, independent regal topography of power. The cliffs of the citadel preserved a weathered Assyrian relief and inscription as well as several rock-cut features of a later date, which likely functioned as residential quarters or storage and cisterns.137 No matter if the content of the inscriptions was illegible, the Hittite orthostat reused at Samosata and the Assyrian relief silently present at Karthaiokerta (Angł/Eg˘il) marked their new creations as participating in an ancient tradition of kingship. These processes of elaborating a new royal topography continued under the Orontid kingdom of Commagene. This regional place-making was successful insofar as the rulers of the new kingdom of Commagene actively sought out and engaged these sites, which they understood to be the

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foundations of their Orontid ancestors. Antiochus of Commagene, in particular, was particularly adept at using the old Orontid topographies of power to smooth over the considerable dynastic and political discontinuities as Commagene became an independent kingdom after emerging again from the empire of Tigranes II.

Colchis, Iberia, and the PostAchaemenid Persian Legacy Persian culture made a deep impression on the elites of Colchis and Iberia. Colchis (later Lazika) had and would continue to enjoy a long history of Greek influence, but as in Iberia to the west, monumental architectural forms without any precedent in the region appear in the fi fth century BCE.138 The design, building techniques, and masonry of the palace at Gumbati clearly engaged the repertoire of Achaemenid palatial architecture. The palace has traditionally been dated to the Achaemenid period and interpreted as the residence of an Achaemenid satrap, possibly a “paradise” enclosure like Karacˇamirli.139 Its most striking remains are of a plinth and torus column base and fragments of at least five fi nely carved, stone bell-shaped column bases, whose design closely parallels column bases at Persepolis.140 These supported wooden columns for an entrance portico and, considering differences in size, perhaps another interior hypostyle room. The site of Samadlo yielded the ground plan of a structure that might evoke the Achaemenid towers at Pasargadae and Naqsh-e Rostam. The function of the Samadlo structure is another matter entirely, and if it corresponded to the Achaemenid towers, it certainly would not have been a fire temple.141 Either the residences of minor officials or local aristocracy, remains from Tsikiha Gora and Sairkhe in Colchis reflect cruder adaptations of Persian architectural features, including a column base and a local rendition of an adorsed bull protome capital.142 As attested by a much more abundant corpus of grave goods, including jewelry, horse-trappings, and luxury tableware, as well as pottery imitations, Persian court culture deeply impressed Colchis and Iberia even if political control was not always constant or direct.143 The appearance of new monumental structures in Georgia from the third to second century BCE evokes similar phenomena in Orontid Armenia at Erebuni and Armavir.144 Unlike Armenia, however, the lands of Georgia were not incorporated into the Urartian Empire. The landscape did not offer the ruins of Urartrian or Hittite fortresses of the sort that provided the Orontids of

Armenia and Sophene a preexistent, non-Achaemenid topography of power to revitalize and reinterpret.145 Monumental architecture only became prominent in Georgia in the Achaemenid period, and some of the sites that had been occupied in the Achaemenid period, including Samadlo and Tsikhia Gora, continued as important settlements, receiving new monumental architecture.146 Soviet-era archaeology reflexively labeled many of these sites “fi re temples,” identifications that have since been challenged, as in many cases also an Achaemenid date.147 Not in doubt, however, is the impact that Persian palatial architecture had on Georgia. Local elites adapted ground plans and architectural elements into local materials. But more striking is the array of monumental structures or settlements that appears at sites not occupied since the Bronze Age. In the early to mid-second century BCE, Iberia experienced an explosion of monumental building, a phenomenon Colchis did not experience until late antiquity with the formation of the kingdom of Lazika. This marks a new phase of development and likely corresponds to the formation and consolidation of the early Iberian state under the Pharnabazid (P’arnavazean) dynasty. While their sphere of influence did not often extend beyond the Caucasus, it is clear that the early rulers of Iberia engaged the wider phenomenon of postAchaemenid Iranian kingship as they sought to establish legitimacy and compete against the Pontic, Armenian, Parthian, and Persian Empires.148 Although the medieval tradition places the first Parnavaz as a contemporary of Alexander the Great, the available textual and archaeological evidence indicates that the Pharnabazid Mtskheta did not coalesce and grow until the second century BCE.149 The Pharnabazids built their royal residence and city at Armazi (present-day Mtskheta), which was strategically sited at the confluence of the Kura and Aragvi Rivers. From the first century BCE, Armazi and its associated features grew to become the most important palatial and urban center in Iberia. Though the region yielded considerable evidence of occupation in the Early Iron and Bronze Ages, Mtskheta itself had not previously hosted a monumental regional urban or palatial center during these periods or in the Achaemenid period.150 The Pharnabazids, in effect, chose a new site for the royal residence of their new kingdom. While Armazi was the site of Iberian kings’ royal residences and tombs, Iberia’s hereditary viceroys, the pitiakshes, cultivated their own residences and necropolises elsewhere, including at the sites of Armaziskhevi, located

3 kilometers to the west of Armazi, and Bori.151 The tombs of the pitiakshes, which contained rich grave goods, were gabled, built tombs made of stone or stone sarcophagi.152 The ancient city of Armazi lay on the site of the center of present-day Mtskheta. Literary and archaeological evidence indicates that the city and its outskirts hosted a royal residence, a royal garden, and tombs of kings, aristocrats, and common people.153 The acropolis of Armazi, Armaztsikhe (“the Citadel of Armazi”), was located on an outcrop across the river from Armazi (modern Bagineti hill). The earliest Pharnabazid foundations are located here. Several palaces, tombs, and, possibly, sanctuaries accumulated in both Armazi and Armaztsikhe until late in the fi fth century, when the capital was moved to Tbilisi.154 The earliest monumental structure excavated at Armaztsikhe is the so-called six-columned hall.155 Although it was originally dated to the fourth or third century BCE to fit the medieval chronologies, archaeological evidence indicates it was built later, in the second to first century BCE or even the first century CE.156 It consists of a rectangular structure with six columns running down the length of its central axis. The walls of the columned hall rose 3 meters in stone and were likely finished in mud brick, a similar technique to that used in the city’s original fortification walls. A shallow porch of six columns set between projecting pilasters (in antae) preceded the structure’s entrance on the east. Its exterior was decorated with red stucco, and the fragments of figural fresco painting were recovered from the interior. The ground plan clearly does not correspond to any Roman palatial structure and contrasts in design and technique with those Roman-inspired structures built over it and elsewhere in the citadel in succeeding centuries. The palace’s rectangular ground plan and central colonnade have been compared to the palace of Garni, but Armaztsikhe’s construction techniques and architectural features point to an earlier, more conservative tradition of Persian architecture. While Garni was constructed out of rough stone and mortar, a common late antique Sasanian technique, Armaztsikhe’s walls, constructed of mud brick on an ashlar foundation, link it with the traditions of post-Achaemenid architecture. Just as significantly, its entrance was located on the longitudinal, eastern façade, which was fronted by an entrance portico. These design elements tie it to an earlier tradition of post-Achaemenid, Persian architecture, either persisting or reintroduced from Seleucid and

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FIGURE 5.8 The Six Column Hall,

citadel of Armazi (Mtskheta, Georgia). Courtesy Stephen Rapp Jr.

Arsacid influence. Its entrance porch and doorway on the long, eastern façade involve it in the wider tradition of post-Achaemenid palatial architecture.157 This second-to-fi rst-century Pharnabazid zeal for building produced a number of other major sites, which are better preserved because they were not continuously inhabited through late antiquity. The second- to first-century BCE complex at Dedoplis Mindori supplies the closest parallels in construction techniques and general architectural design (though not exact ground plans).158 It is likely that the palatial structure at Armaztsikhe and Dedoplis Mindori arose from the same florescence of early Iberian royal building. Much like the Armenian evidence, the Pharnabazid palaces and estates redeployed Achaemenid architectural forms in new locations to create an independent topography of power.

Between Rome and Iran: The Caucasus in Late Antiquity With their continuing involvement in the Iranian world under the Arsacids and Sasanians, the Armenian and Georgian landscapes, much like the Armenian and Georgian languages, incorporated and preserved new architectural expressions that reflected sustained interactions with the Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian religious and political domains.159 The Armenian and Georgian vocabularies of prestige architecture and courtly and religious life, like their courtly epics, were

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deeply rooted in the Iranian cultural sphere.160 Paralleling other aspects of the languages’ royal vocabulary, like Armenian p‘ar˙k‘ and Georgian p‘arn, “Divine Royal Glory” (Old Pers. *farnah-, Mid. Pers. farrah; cf. Mid. Pers. xwarrah, Av. xvarǝnah-), these include Georgian niši/nišani, Armenian nšan, “sign, mark, heraldic symbol” (Mid. Pers. niša¯n), Armenian dastakert, “plantation, estate” (Old Pers. dasta-kr· ta-, Parth. dast(a)kirt, Mid. Pers. dast(a)gird), Armenian gah, “throne, courtly rank” (Old Pers. ga¯ θu-, Parth./Mid. Pers. ga¯ h), and maškapacˇeˉ n, “royal pavilion” (Mid. Pers. maškawaraza¯n), barj, “feasting cushion, rank” (Mid. Pers. ba¯ liš), and bazmakan, “feast, banqueting couch” (Mid. Pers. bazm). Like Georgian taz˙ari, Armenian tacˇar and aparan are two commonly used words for “palace” or “banqueting hall,” and both have clear roots in the Old Persian vocabulary of prestige architecture.161 Tacˇar derives from Old Persian tacara-, known from Darius I’s inscriptions identifying the palace he built for himself at Persepolis or Artaxerxes II’s palace at Susa, and aparan derives from Old Persian apada¯na-. Similarly, the pre-Christian Georgian and Armenian vocabulary for sanctuaries continues Achaemenid and Parthian terminology and incorporates new, Sasanian-era changes. Armenian bagin and Georgian bagini (Old Pers. *bagina-, Parth. bagin) refer to a “place or altar of a god,” or a shrine with images, though not exclusively a temple. In contrast, Armenian atrušan and Georgian atrošani, “fi re altar” (cf. Parth. *a¯troˉšan, Mid. Pers. a¯tašda¯n), referred specifically to a

place hosting a fi re cult and could refer to interior or outdoor shrine, possibly the sort attended by a specific class of priest, which shows up in the Nisa documents: an a¯ turšpat.162 Armenian Mehean, “temple, place of Mihr,” on the other hand, was more often used to refer specifically to a temple, though it could be associated with either a bagin or an atrušan.163

Building Arsacid Armenia Throughout the first and second centuries, the Arsacid dynasty of Armenia consolidated their hold on the institutions and legacy of Armenian kingship. They were successful to the point that by late antiquity the name “Aršakuni” not only meant the Arsacid dynasty, but could be used to refer generally to all ancient Armenian kings. As an important component of this process, the Arsacid kings incorporated the Orontid and Artaxiad topographies of power, grafting their significance onto their own. Artashat served as the Arsacid royal residence. The Arsacids cultivated the ancient Armenian royal dynastic sanctuary, which had been shifted with each move of the royal capital since the Orontids. The ancient sanctuary of Bagawan became especially important for the Arsacids, and the royal family celebrated the Iranian New Year’s festival there.164 This parallels other evidence of Arsacid efforts to appropriate and incorporate the ancient Orontid and Artaxiad topographical traditions, and underscores how deeply integrated the landscape had become as a reservoir of legitimacy and memory for Armenian kingship. Even after their kings became Christian, Armenian and Georgian kingship continued to grow from deep Iranian royal roots. While Zoroastrianism, the Good Religion (wehdeˉn), was an important pillar of Iranian identity, and the Sasanians understood that a good Iranian should follow the Good Religion, the relationship between “Iranian-ness” (eˉrı¯h) and Zoroastrianism was not always clear-cut in either daily life or realpolitik. To be sure, the Islamic-era, Pahlavi priestly texts present “Iranian-ness” as conflated entirely with adherence to Zoroastrianism; however, in the Sasanian Empire Iranian identity had the expanded sense of both Iranian cultural and religious affi nity, and could be a mark of someone living anywhere in the empire, even converts to Zoroastrianism.165 Moreover, there was a great deal of diversity in the way Zoroastrianism was practiced, with several heterodoxies persisting, despite the efforts of priests like Kartir to extirpate them. The contrast between the views of the court and the Zoroastrian

priesthood is illuminating. The inscription that the high priest Kartir added to the Ka’ba-ye Zardosht clearly lists lands that he considered to be part of Aneˉra¯n in the late third century: Armenia, Iberia, Albania, Bala¯saga¯n, Syria, Cilicia, and Cappadocia.166 Shabuhr I’s inscription, carved a few decades earlier on the same structure, includes Armenia, Iberia, Albania, and Bala¯saga¯ n, all ˉ ra¯ nšahr. Reflecting a located in the Caucasus, in E priestly view, Kartir’s inscription judges these lands according to the degree to which their inhabitants adhered to the Zoroastrian religious practices of Pars instead of their importance to the empire or their elite’s integration into the Iranian cultural sphere more generally. While Kartir’s idiosyncratic priestly perspective, focused on his own formulation of Zoroastrianism, ˉ ra¯n, the Sasanians excluded Armenia and Iberia from E already considered them to be an integral part of ˉ ra¯nšahr in the early empire.167 Moreover, after its popuE lation had apostatized to Christianity the later Sasanians often put great effort into “reconverting” Armenia back to Zoroastrianism when they succeeded in reoccupying portions of it. Such a tension between political and cultural affi nities and fidelity to Zoroastrianism becomes magnified with the conversion of the Armenians and Iberians to Christianity. Even in times of open conflict, the kings and nobles of the Caucasus were, for all intents and purposes, full and active participants in the Iranian cultural sphere despite being Christian.168 As would be proven again when the Sasanians took power, Persian memory and the forms of the rightful Iranian king were as rooted in present political realities and regional traditions as the past itself. These new traditions of kingship were means to navigate multiple poles of power and root initially ephemeral political power deeply into the landscape. In the Caucasus, these strategies enabled these sovereigns to deploy ancient, competing, Iranian topographies of power in opposition to Sasanian pressure. The Armenian and Georgian courts eventually turned a different face toward the Roman world, but as witnessed by the intense interest and considerable resources they expended, the ancient Iranian past was a deep well of power and legitimacy, and was the idiom that the Sasanians found most powerful and threatening. It is notable that the Armenians continued to honor the tombs of their pre-Christian kings in a way that is unparalleled in the Roman Empire after Constantine. Pagan or Christian, the bones of the kings were the locus of the Armenian Royal Fortune. Garni is noteworthy because it demonstrates all of these processes at work at a single site. Garni presents a

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FIGURE 5.9 Plan of the fortress of Garni, Armenia.

site with a deep Artaxiad-Orontid, Urartian, and Bronze Age history, as well as illustrating the impact of Rome’s growing influence on Armenia. Garni was the site of an important fortress that had long defended the northern approaches along the Araxias River to the major settlements of the Ararat Plain. Like other Armenian fortress settlements, that of Garni capitalized on the natural advantages of a triangular promontory rising above the Azat River gorge. Natural precipices protected the southern half of the fortress, and protecting the north was a 314-meter ashlar fortification wall with fourteen bastions.169 The wall and its towers were constructed of huge basalt ashlars using dry masonry secured with iron clamps and sealed with lead. Lime mortar filled in any gaps. Following the pattern of Armavir and

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Artashat, Garni functioned as a fortress before and after the Achaemenid period. The site’s Soviet excavations identified four phases in the techniques and associated strata of the fortification walls. Excavators discovered foundations of a Bronze Age cyclopean masonry wall preserved in a few sections and accompanied by Early and Late Bronze Age sherds.170 This wall corresponds to other Late Bronze and Early Iron Age fortifications built before the Urartian expansion.171 The Urartian king Argishti I (785–763 BCE) left a cuneiform inscription recording his conquest of Garni (“Giarniani”) and forced deportation of its inhabitants.172 Like Armavir and Artashat, Garni was rebuilt in the third century BCE after falling into ruin in the Persian period. During this time, the site gained its massive, finely wrought ashlar fortification walls. Supporting its continued importance as a defensive bulwark in the period between the fall of the Artaxiads and the rise of the Arsacid dynasty of Armenia, Tacitus mentions Garni as a major fortress in the course of recounting Roman military interventions in Armenia ca. 51–52 CE.173 While Movses Khorenats‘i attributes the construction of the complex to Tiridates III, the archaeological evidence indicates that Garni’s fortification walls and the structures they enclose were built in several phases.174 Some sections preserved a Late Bronze Age cyclopean fortification wall. However, the walls that first traced an extensive fortification circuit show the characteristics of Orontid and Artaxiad masonry: large hewn ashlars, secured with iron clamps and without mortar, and measured according to the Nippurian cubit.175 The excavators dated this first construction period to the third to second century BCE, based on comparable techniques at other Orontid and Artaxiad sites.176 The fortress of Garni defended the northern approaches to the Artaxiad royal city of Artashat. Given the fact that the masonry of its first period closely matches the masonry at Artashat and Tigranakert-Artsakh, it is possible that Garni was built in the second century in the Artaxiad period to defend the new royal city. Although Tacitus mentions the fortress as intact ca. 51–52 CE, at a certain point, likely not long after, the walls were substantially destroyed.177 Their destruction can plausibly be associated with the Roman general Corbulo’s campaign, which culminated in the destruction of Artashat and capture of Tigranakert. After an interval, the walls were reconstructed in a major restoration. In those places where the Hellenistic walls survived, the new walls rose on their standing remains.178

FIGURE 5.10 Photo of Garni’s Ionic structure (standing remains), dark red stone foundations of the church (midground), foundations of the

Arsacid palace (foreground right). Courtesy Oana Capatina.

This restoration was carried out using dry masonry, but with stones that were of noticeably different size from those of the Hellenistic fortifications.179 The excavators associated this restoration with the reign of Tiridates I and connected it to a damaged Greek inscription on an ashlar found near the fortification wall, which had been fashioned into a khachkar, a stone cross stele, in the Middle Ages.180 The inscription’s lacunae have encouraged a range of different readings, and a number of scholars have offered alternative editions and competing translations of the inscription, most of which must be dismissed as overly imaginative. The inscription states that a king named Tiridates built a fortress for his queen in the eleventh year of his reign.181 Both the inscription’s regnal era and paleography cohere with the reign of Tiridates I and suggest the fortress was reconstructed ca. 76 CE. This corresponds to the Roman Empire’s contemporary policy of strengthening the passes through the Caucasus and controlling them through its allies.182 Garni remained an important royal residence and fortress for the Arsacids throughout the life of the dynasty. Garni’s best-known monument is an Ionic temple-like structure that rose on the southeastern point of the fortress’s interior. The Ionic building was constructed out of ashlar masonry with iron clamps and sparing use of

mortar. Despite being the best-known and most frequently studied structure of the complex, its exact date and function are still not entirely clear, though the weight of the evidence suggests that it was constructed in the late second or early third century.183 While many of its features correspond to the architecture of a standard Roman pedestal temple, several others are peculiar. Architecturally speaking, the Ionic building’s platform, frontal orientation, stone vaulted ceiling in the cella, and buttresses flanking the front stairway are consonant with Roman architecture. Its use of the Ionic order, which fell out of use in favor of the Corinthian order after the second century, suggests that it either dates before 200 CE or that it was a deliberate archaism. Its architectural ornament corresponds most closely to that seen in structures of late second-century Roman Anatolia.184 Unlike a normal temple, the entrance to this structure is oriented to the north, and it has been suggested that it incorporated a hole in the floor of the cella. The only clear parallels for these features come from funerary monuments of Roman Anatolia and Syria built to resemble temples. Cohering with this, excavations around the structure produced no evidence relating clearly to cult activity, but instead yielded many graves from the fi rst and second centuries.185 Large

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amounts of marble bas-relief fragments were recovered from the area to the north of the structure. These included remains of figural and architectural sculpture from a sarcophagus or sarcophagi whose ornamental features closely resemble Anatolian sarcophagi created around 175 CE.186 An Aramaic inscription created by the “Great King of Armenia, son of Vologases,” corresponds to Xosrov I, son of Vałarš (early third century–ca. 216), and mentions the construction of a palace.187 Movses Khorenats‘i paraphrases the content of the inscription in his narrative; however, Khorenats‘i, the author, attributes all the standing remains of the fortress to Tiridates III, and adapts the epigraphic evidence to the standing remains extant when he was writing. By the time Movses Khorenats‘i’s text was written, the Arsacid palace was in ruins and its foundations were partially built over by a seventhcentury church, possibly constructed by the catholicos Nerses III the Builder. However, the Ionic structure and the fortification walls still stood. Movses attributes the walls, palace, and inscription to Tiridates III, but without any other standing remains identifies the Ionic structure as the palace mentioned in the inscription. While the Greek inscription reflects Tiridates I’s initial rebuilding of the fortress, a complex of structures, whose masonry work reflects late third- to early fourthcentury techniques, was indeed likely the work of Tiridates III. Located on the southern tip of the fortress’s triangular enclosure, this complex of structures likely served as a royal residence and audience hall. The structures identified in this complex consisted of a two-story palace, storerooms, and a multiroom bath complex, all constructed out of lime mortar and rough stone masonry, with courses of brick alternating at irregular intervals with rough-hewn stone blocks.188 The palace and the baths were both oriented according to roughly the same axis, which differed from that of the Ionic structure, while the subsidiary structures in between them are slightly offset. Altogether, this complex occupied an area measuring roughly 40 meters long and 15 meters wide and extending along the western ridge of the outcrop.189 The main palatial structure lay 25 meters west of the Ionic building, and featured a grand hall on its lower story measuring 9.65 by 19.92 meters.190 A central colonnade of eight massive pillars placed on stone plinths running longitudinally across the room’s central axis divided the main hall of the palace into two “naves.” A corresponding succession of pilasters lined the east and west walls, from which sprung a vaulted ceiling that

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supported the second story. Fragments of painted murals indicate that the interior walls of both the upper and the lower story were richly painted. The exterior façade was articulated with elaborated alternating decorative insets and bays.191 The overarching architectural design of this structure does not correspond to Persian palaces or to late Roman palaces. In contrast, even in its reduced level of preservation, its exterior façade evokes the exterior ornamental brickwork treatments of Parthian and early Sasanian palace façades. Attesting to the sophisticated manner in which the Armenian court navigated between the Roman and Parthian cultural and political spheres, Roman-style baths with hypocausts and mosaics adjoined this late third-/early fourth-century palatial complex. These baths were constructed with the same masonry technique as the palace, which suggests they were not a foreign imposition nor were they disconnected from the original conception of the fortress. Also using this same rough stone masonry technique, a circular tower was constructed at the entrance of the fortress, and partially enclosed the eastern entrance, extending it over the gorge.192 This circular addition was constructed with an interior core of rubble fi xed with lime mortar rather than iron clamps and dressed with rectangular basalt stones that were a much smaller size.193 The excavators assigned this to the end of the third/beginning of the fourth century as well.

Architecture and Transcultural Royal Identities in Iberia and Armenia At a certain point, Armaztsikhe’s Achaemenid-style hypostyle hall and associated structures fell out of use. By the second century CE, Armaztsikhe had accumulated Roman-inspired palatial structures and baths, and was protected with strong fortification walls that enclosed an area of about 30 hectares.194 Part of the later phase, a building excavated at Armaztsikhe presents a wooden structure consisting of a hexaconch placed inside a square with a column base for a central pillar placed at the center. The excavator interpreted it as a temple; however, the structure was attached to a storage depot for wine, and no evidence of cultic activity was discovered. While its shape evokes later Georgian ecclesiastical architecture, it also matches contemporary, late antique Roman triclinia, and very likely served this purpose for its Georgian patron.195 The introduction of Roman building types and construction techniques is evident at several other palatial sites, where baths were constructed, and which were accompanied by an array of Roman forts throughout

Iberia.196 Like Armaztsikhe, the residence of the pitiakshes, Armaziskhevi also gained Roman-style baths. Located 20 kilometers northwest of Armazi, the site of Dzalisa witnessed the growth of a major settlement in the second century BCE.197 It gained a 2,500-squaremeter palace constructed in the Roman style. Built between the fi rst and third centuries CE, the lavish complex included such features as gardens, baths, a swimming pool, and fountains.198 A series of fortresses strategically placed on the approaching rivers protected Armazi and Armaztsikhe. These include the site of Ghartiskhari and Tsisamuri to the north, and Katsitavaina and Karniskhevei to the southwest and south, respectively. Aspects of the palatial architecture of Arsacid Armenia relate to and possibly engage Roman and Persian palatial architecture. Some, such as the Roman baths, are clearly imported wholesale and grafted onto the native traditions. The central longitudinal hall suggests a more complex set of interactions. Roman basilicaform audience halls, as witnessed at Trier and the Great Palace of Constantinople, were often joined by subsidiary courts and narthexes that screened or facilitated access, but not substantial blocks of rooms. Central longitudinal halls are the defi ning feature of Persian palaces, which are often contained within a block of subsidiary rooms and sometimes support a second story. None closely matches the Armenian palaces, which likely reflect a local adaptation. However, the literary descriptions of the Armenian court illuminate the activities of the Persian court much more closely, and it is likely that these great rooms were designed for feasting and wine drinking instead of solemn audiences. Past scholarship has often drawn parallels to Georgian palaces at Dzalis and Armaztsikhe, though it should be emphasized that these do not form a cohesive group either architecturally or chronologically. The palace at Dzalis clearly draws from Roman traditions and corresponds to a florescence of Roman architecture and influence in Iberia in the second century CE with intensifying Roman investment in the region.199 The fi rstcentury BCE palace from the acropolis at Mtskheta parallels the rectangular ground plan and central colonnade in the palace of Garni, though its construction techniques and architectural features point to an earlier, more conservative tradition of neo-Achaemenid architecture. 200 While Garni was constructed out of rough stone and mortar, a common late antique Sasanian technique, the six-columned palace at Armaztsikhe was constructed out of mud brick on ashlar foun-

dation walls. Just as significantly, its entrance was located on the longitudinal, eastern façade and was fronted by an entrance portico. These elements tie it to an earlier tradition of post-Achaemenid, Persian architecture. The closest parallels, at least for the interior design of Garni, come from within Armenia and appear to reflect a regional tradition of palatial architecture that had integrated Roman, Arsacid, and Sasanian traditions into Orontid traditions. These palaces consist of a hall with axial pillars forming the main palatial unit.201 Related, dependent rooms are located nearby, but are not an integral element of this main hall. While no fourth-century royal palace survives in the region of Dvin, the remains of two patriarchal palaces have been excavated, the first from the fifth century and the second from the seventh century.202 Each features a central hall with columns with a raised dais at one end. This central rectangular room recalls Roman basilica-form audience halls; however, its internal disposition relates more closely to Persian palaces. The fact that an internal colonnade lines the walls but does not inscribe side aisles recalls similar arrangements in the palace of Kish and Sarvestan as well as, more proximately, the engaged pilasters in the palace at Garni. Unlike Garni, the palaces at Dvin appear to have had a single story. While a Sasanian palace would have been roofed by a continuous barrel vault, the seventh-century palace at Dvin has been reconstructed with a timber roof with lanterns characteristic of Caucasian traditional domestic architecture.203 In both palaces, the central hall was enclosed on the north and south by subsidiary chambers.204 Combined with Garni, the two episcopal palaces built at the site provide some sense of the Arsacid Armenian palatial tradition, which combines local, Roman, and Persian traditions.205 Dvin’s sixth-century architectural revival was directly connected to the power and prestige of Smbat Bagratuni (d. 617), the Armenian governor of Gorgaˉn and commander of the Armenian and Persian cavalry. Smbat ascended in the favor of Husraw II and was given the belt and sword of Husraw II’s father, the king of kings Ohrmazd IV, who was deposed by Wahram Chobin (590–91), and eventually received the extraordinary titles “Joy of Husraw” and “Warrior of the Lords.”206 Smbat wielded his power as a grandee of the Sasanian court and protégé of the king of kings to rebuild the church despite the objections of the local military governors.207 His efforts prepared the ground for the flowering of Armenian ecclesiastical architecture in the mid-

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seventh century when Armenia gained breathing room while the Romans and Sasanians were reeling from the Muslim onslaught. This was spearheaded both by clerics, like the catholicos Nerses III the Builder, and by the lords of noble families.208 Georgia’s and Armenia’s ecclesiastical architecture complements and contextualizes this rather sparse evidence of late antique Caucasian palaces. Together Georgia and Armenia paint a picture of aristocracies and architectures that engaged both the Roman and the Iranian cultural and political worlds, while retaining distinct Georgian and Armenian cultural identities. Images celebrating wealth, strength, and prowess in Iranian terms appear on the exterior of several Caucasian churches. The façade of the Amatuni family’s seventhcentury Armenian church of Ptghni (Ptłni) prominently displays friezes of Sasanian-style teardrop ewers. This sort of vessel was used in the Persian bazm and became wildly popular across Eurasia in late antiquity, appearing wherever Persian influence was felt.209 With the ewer friezes nearby and with his Iranian-style riding costume (albeit crudely rendered), the horseman in one of the friezes on the south façade appears as an aristocrat invested with the same sort of “serving vessels of gold, royal robes, gilded diadems, [and] stockings set with precious gems and pearls” that Husraw II’s Armenian commander Smbat Bagratuni received early in his career.210 Just as notable in this regard is the hunt, which plays an important role in legends of both the Armenian and the Georgian monarchies and their heroes, and is of course a defining feature of Iranian kingship.211 Ptghni portrays two hunting scenes on the left and right springers of a window arch on its south façade.212 The hunter on the viewer’s left draws a bow on horseback, while another hunts on foot with a spear and faces a lion.213 The seventh-century Georgian church of Ateni Sioni near Gori portrays a similar hunting relief for a similar purpose.214 While not the sole focus and not nearly as grand, the exterior of the church seems to be treated as a freestanding Sasanian rock relief. However, at Taq-e Bostan or Sar Mashhad, the hunt is foregrounded, while in the Georgian and Armenian churches, the hunt takes its place among a plurality of visual and political cultures.

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The postsatrapal dynasts of Anatolia and Armenia presented powerful claims to both the Persian and the Macedonian royal legacies. Yet, it is important to underscore that even for dynasties with genuine claims to Per-

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sian ancestry, their artistic, architectural, and ritual expressions of “Persian” kingship do not always represent a continuous survival of the traditions of the central Achaemenid court, but rather a reimagination, which for their local legitimacy depended on claiming and reshaping the pre-Persian topographies of power and cultic traditions of their kingdoms, a problem to which we will turn in subsequent chapters.215 This is not to say that the royal traditions of Macedonian charismatic kingship were more authentic than the “Persianism” of the former satrapal dynasties.216 Rather, Macedonian charismatic kingship emerged from the breakup of Alexander’s empire as a dominant political and military force, instead of beginning life, as neo-Persian kingship did, as a fractured, alternative political-cultural counternarrative. For source material, these postsatrapal dynasties relied on family lore, provincial memories, and even outright invention to connect with and claim Persian royal culture. Still more, the Seleucids themselves were responsible for reenlivening or even mediating many of the Achaemenid traditions these dynasts sought to claim. The new post-Achaemenid Iranian royal identities of the west developed from dialectic and agonistic processes of exchange among aspirants and rivals. This formed new royal identities, which coalesced at several historical moments when two or more of these aspirants vied for ascendancy with their former Seleucid masters or new rivals, such as the Romans. Their new ceremonies, tombs, palaces, and sanctuaries responded to one another’s new formulations of royal power and claims to now half-legendary royal legacies. 217 Much like the Arsacids, the Mithradatids and the Orontids periodically vied with each other to claim for themselves or their offspring names like “Darius,” “Artaxerxes,” “Xerxes” or “Cyrus.” The competition among the Seleucids, Parthians, and the Greco-Bactrian kings shaped the remarkable emergence of the new Arsacid palatial architecture and royal cult. The struggle of the Mithradatids, Ariarathids, Orontids, and Artaxiads and with one another and with the Romans yielded a new vision of Persian kingship that creatively integrated and powerfully deployed the now spliced Persian and Seleucid dynastic traditions. The Roman Republic’s generals, like Pompey, were happy to cast them in the role of a “new Darius” so they themselves might play the part of a “new Alexander.” But within post-Seleucid Western Asia, Hellenism and Persianism were not polar opposites nor antagonists in a clash of civilizations, as portrayed by the post-Herodotean tradition. Presaging the tradition of the Book of

Kings, the legacies of Alexander and Darius were now intertwined, and there was nothing contradictory about kings like Mithradates VI portraying themselves as a “new Darius” and a “new Alexander” simultaneously. As much as these dynasties might have claimed, embellished, or reinvented grand Persian royal traditions, they relied on regional sites of memory and ritual traditions from the pre-Persian past to anchor their new visions. The independence and idiosyncrasy of these local memories of Persian kingship are paralleled in other aspects of their reigns. For example, in Tigranes II’s coin issues, he portrays himself in the “Armenian tiara,” which Antiochus of Commagene called the kitaris.218 This headgear is without visual parallel in surviving Achaemenid art and likely derived from local memories, precedents, or even an outright invention of what was purported to be a Persian tradition, yet it clearly represented supreme kingship to Tigranes II and his regional rivals, as Antiochus of Commagene indi-

cates when he boasts that he adopted it. Moreover, the postsatrapal dynasts often reoriented memorial significances of Hittite or Urartian ruins or architectural features toward their neo-Persian royal legacy, recruiting their regionally perceived primordial heft to augment what their great-grandfathers’ more modest satrapal estates lacked. Regional sites of memory and cultic traditions were enlisted in this process too, a process that was especially important in the postsatrapal kingdoms of the west. Just as the Arsacids remade Uruk, Nippur, and Assur, claiming and often radically repurposing them, Anatolian and Armenian sovereigns appropriated Hittite and Urartian ruins and traditions. They did so to build new, encompassing royal visions that took control of the landscapes of their kingdom, staked their claims to regional and pan-Western Asian legacies of Persian kingship, and just as importantly, contested the newly developing contemporary traditions of Iranian kingship with the Arsacids and Sasanians.

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Sasanian Rupture and Renovation

Upon overthrowing the Arsacids, the Sasanians quickly and dramatically reshaped Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau to bring it into accord with their new imperial vision. They established new regional settlements that controlled their surrounding agricultural hinterlands militarily and economically while expanding and restructuring the imperial cities of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. Their new cities brought new areas into prominence and rendered other cities and ceremonial centers obsolete, as well as the trade networks that had depended on them. Cities played an integral role in building the Empire of the Iranians not only materially but conceptually. In this chapter we pay special attention to the impact of Sasanian cities on their surrounding landscapes and the methods by which the Sasanians integrated one with the other. In this regard we focus especially on the Sasanians’ use of rock reliefs to recode the significances of the empire’s landscapes, be they natural features in remote locations, or those constellated around their new cities. These inscribed and sculpted landscapes not only enveloped Sasanian cities but, through epigraphic, visual, thematic, and odontic correspondences, integrated them with the surrounding environment. In linking the artistic and monumental elements that articulated their cities with related architectural and rock-cut features seeded throughout the landscape, the dynasty articulated a larger sense of imperial space. They extended the microcosmic symbolism of the city into the macrocosm of the empire, ensuring that one reinforced and was continuous with the other. In many ways, the Sasanians’ campaign of city foundation and their efforts to dismantle, sideline, and

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supersede the urban and environmental underpinnings of the former Arsacid Empire paralleled the Seleucids’ dismemberment of the Achaemenid Empire, as do many of its effects. However, in addition to using the tried and true Seleucid techniques of expanding or sidelining previous foundations, the Sasanians radically transformed or outright obliterated many significant settlements. For example, the Sasanians destroyed the vibrant trading city of Hatra. Similarly, they ended Susa’s long tenure as a semi-independent city-state, shifting population and political importance to their new foundations located elsewhere on the Susa Plain. Through more subtle shifts in local or regional settlement patterns, the former Seleucid and Arsacid metropolises of Seleucia-on-theTigris and Babylon all ceased to be living cities. Emptied of its population, Babylon and its walls were eventually converted into an extensive royal game park.1 Khuzestan and the “land behind Ctesiphon,” on the other hand, expanded exponentially and became the early Sasanian kings’ primary source of agricultural revenue. With shifts in the empire’s frontiers and military interests, fortress cities like Nishabuhr grew along the eastern frontier, and long-derelict ancient sites in northern Mesopotamia, such as Nineveh, enjoyed renewed importance as Sasanian settlements.2

Interwoven Sasanian Cities and Landscapes Early Sasanian urban design exhibits a great deal of variety and creative experimentation, especially in the Sasanian homeland, which was the incubator for later Sasanian cities. Most Sasanian cities resembled Arsacid and Seleucid urbanism more than the diffuse urbaniza-

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tion of Achaemenid royal residences and satrapal estates. However, when we expand the scope of our analysis to include the surrounding countryside it becomes clear that dense, fortified Sasanians settlements were indeed surrounded by a rich and complex landscape interwoven with monuments and extraurban palaces and linked with the empire’s chains of agricultural estates. In effect Sasanian urbanism integrated both approaches, nesting a dense, walled city at the center of a diffusely organized monumental zone. The dynasty’s most innovative city was undoubtedly Ardaxshir I’s great circular foundation of ArdaxshirXwarrah in Pars. Ardaxshir I’s first imperial city presents a self-conscious departure from earlier traditions of Iranian city design and was intended to be unique, commensurate with its status. As a perfect circle, ArdaxshirXwarrah contrasted with irregularly shaped walled sprawls like Hatra. Moreover, it stands apart from

most other Sasanian cities that adhered to this simpler (and cheaper) rectangular, gridded approach to city foundation. The Sasanians’ later foundations built on the tradition of urban design that the Seleucids established and the Arsacids and Kushans subsequently elaborated. In northern and eastern Iran, they did so quite literally. Most Sasanian cities, both new and newly refounded, consisted of an elevated citadel or palatial district, raised on an artificial platform or rocky outcrop, and an expansive, fortified lower city.3 In a campaign of defensive reinvestment and retrenchment in the face of fourth-century Hunnic inroads, the Sasanians founded several important cities in the Iranian east, such as New-Shabuhr (Nishapur). These established a new line of frontier defenses further west. Those cities they rebuilt, such as Ray, Balkh, and Merv, were reconstructed largely on the plans of their Parthian or, in the

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FIGURE 6.1 Aerial photo of Ardaxshir-Xwarrah (Firuzabad Iran). © Georg Gerster/Photo Researchers, Inc.

case of Balkh, Kushan iterations.4 The Sasanians appear to have been responsible for laying out a new square, fortified lower city at heart, retaining the old citadel on the hill known as the Kohandez.5 While no Seleucid levels have yet been detected at Ray, the cuts through Merv’s city walls vividly attest to the way in which the Parthian and Sasanian cities successively rebuilt and raised the walls established by Antiochus I’s Antioch-inMargiana.6 It is likely that the gridded Sasanian street plan loosely conformed to the Hellenistic city’s precedent as well.7 The Sasanians adapted these principles of post-Seleucid eastern Iranian urbanism in laying out newly founded cities and renovating old ones. Aerial photography, medieval textual sources, and (more rarely) archaeological excavation attest to gridded, rationalized street plans and even functionally or architecturally discrete districts at Bishabuhr, Eran-XwarrahShabuhr, Weh-Andiog-Shabuhr, New-Shabuhr, and Qasr-e Abu Nasr, Shiraz’s Sasanian predecessor.8 In some cases, most notably Bishabuhr and Ray, the palace or citadel was raised on a rocky outcrop or spur of a mountain, which linked into the city’s fortifications. Sasanian cities were intimately tied to agricultural and industrial production, which they organized, nurtured, and protected. As in the case of Seleucid and Arsacid cities, the Sasanian Empire’s urban expansion coincided with agricultural expansion by the Sasanians, especially in the empire’s two main regions of agricultural production, Mesopotamia and, later, the river systems of Khurasan. In these regions, cities like Weh-Ardaxshir, Susa, and Merv were set within a “tapestry of smaller towns, villages and villas set in a densely irrigated landscape of canals, fields, orchards and vineyards.”9 Mesopotamia in particular experienced an incredible expansion of agriculture in the Sasanian period, achieving a scale and organizational capacity that dwarfed those of the Sasanians’ predecessors and, in some areas, remained unmatched until the modern era.10 There the Sasanians created and expanded “large dendritic systems of canals bringing whole sub-regions of the plain into coordinated control.”11 Engineering works, such as bridges, and hydraulic installations, such as canals, dams, weirs, and mills, which constellated around and supported the cities, functioned as impressive monuments in and of themselves. The king’s engineering projects were such symbolically powerful expressions of his ability to make the earth flourish that we even hear report of the king holding court on a newly built dam.12 The Sasanians pursued a systematic and strategic approach to fostering trade and industry under the aus-

pices of the king of kings. Cities played a crucial role in this campaign. The primary purpose of several key foundations was to disrupt and supplant preexisting trading networks, especially those on which Roman merchants depended, by creating sites of trade, like ports or entrepôt markets, and workshops for the production of luxury materials. In addition to destroying Hatra (240/1) and banning Palmyrene merchants from the empire, the early Sasanians cultivated a chain of ports from the terminus of the Mesopotamian river trade at Meshan along the Persian Gulf coast of Pars to South Asian ports, which allowed them to muscle out the Romans from these markets. In the interior, the Sasanians’ new foundations not only provided a direct source of taxable income from the agricultural wealth of their hinterland independent of the great noble houses, but were developed as sites of industry for the manufacture of prestige items like silk textiles and precious metalwork. The Sasanian kings selected skilled craftsmen to work in royal workshops to produce luxury materials for imperial gifting and trade. These craftsmen were often members of minority groups among the cities’ populations; indeed, silk and metal workers regularly appear as deportees and, occasionally, Christian martyrs in a range of textual sources. The luxury items that they produced not only provided revenue for the king of kings independent of the royal houses, but generated equally important symbolic capital or “soft power” for the king.13 Silk clothing, jewelry, and table silver were some of the most important types of gifts that the king of kings gave to his court, his retainers, and his clients to mark their inclusion in the Iranian aristocratic hierarchy. Moreover, as Persian fashion and the Iranian aristocratic lifestyle grew in popularity among elites across the empire and beyond its frontiers, Sasanian sumptuary objects were the material driver of the Iranian, and increasingly global, economy of honors and distinction. The objects themselves, their ornament, and even figural representations in sculpture, mosaic, or fresco appear at sites or structures as culturally and geographically diverse as the Chinese and Tibetan tombs, the Gupta Buddhist caves at Ajanta, and Roman and Armenian churches like Hagios Polyeuktos and Ptłni.14

Victorious Cities and Imperial Landscapes Sasanian cities stood at the center of “memorial zones,” whose associated features, from rock reliefs to pavilions to bridges to hydraulic works or agricultural installations, all projected the king’s presence throughout the

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surrounding landscape. In the mountainous Iranian plateau, rock reliefs played an especially important role in constructing regional topographies of power. Emanating from the city, this “ideational infrastructure” of rock art integrated the king’s presence into the countryside and organized its space. Concentrations of reliefs accumulated at several sites first throughout the Sasanians’ home province and then throughout the empire, employing similar principles and indicating that the Sasanians developed the practice of cultivating ritually linked, monumental zones in Pars. The rock reliefs they created in the vicinity of these cities appear at many previously untouched sites, anchoring their new urban foundations in the timeless living rock and controlling the odontic space emanating from the city. The Sasanians created their cities as living monuments to their founder’s achievements and as stages on which to perform their role as earthly pivots. Following Ardaxshir I’s precedent, the strongest sovereigns founded cities across the empire to commemorate their deeds or royal titles.15 Sasanian naming practices for cities or provinces underscore their ideological importance in manifesting a king of kings’ power to rule and remake the world. They recall the tradition of Hellenistic and Arsacid eponymous foundations, but are more complex, adding particular triumphal or competitive commentary. Some, like Ardaxshir I’s city of Ardaxshir-Xwarrah, Shabuhr II’s (309–89) province of Eran-XwarrahShabuhr on the Susa Plain, and Yazdgird II’s (438–57) province of Eran-Xwarrah-Yazdgird in Gorgan, emphasize that the Iranian Royal Fortune favored the king.16 Others, like Weh-Andiog-Shabuhr or Weh-Andiog-Husraw, celebrate the kings’ victorious campaigns against the Romans and, by refounding “better Antiochs,” interweave the subjection of the Roman Empire into the landscape.17 Although many scarcely outlived their founders, in their patrons’ eyes, such cities would persist as living monuments. In addition to articulating the landscape around cities, Sasanian kings of kings created rock reliefs at relatively isolated sites, claiming important or unique local features, most notably springs. When a Sasanian king created a rock relief at a water source, he would carve it almost without exception as close to the water as possible.18 Wahram II, who was a particularly prolific patron, created reliefs at many regional sites throughout Pars as well as at those sites the first two kings of the dynasty brought to prominence. The relief of Sarab-e Bahram, which portrays the king of kings enthroned and flanked by adoring courtiers, was carved into the cliff face before

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a natural spring. His reliefs at Sar Mashhad, Barm-e Delak, Guyum, and Sarab-e Qandil were located near or at a comfortable distance from the nearest large settlement, and some were the likely sites of royal retreats.19 Their subject matter ranges from a dramatic hunting scene to simple compositions portraying the king with his queen or courtiers. The grandest of such water reliefs appears at the late Sasanian site of Taq-e Bostan, which not only claimed a water source and marked the site of a royal retreat, but incorporated the architecture and rituals of the Sasanian palace into the rock and the site’s spectacular natural setting.20 Just as “the act of perceiving the world binds the subject with the world of which he or she is already a part,” the king’s visual and metonymic presence in the landscape projected the experience of the king of kings’ power over the world into the daily life of his inhabitants.21 In many cases, the populations of the cities were themselves “victory monuments.” The inhabitants of many new royal foundations included survivors of defeated enemy armies and skilled laborers deported during decades of confl ict with the Romans.22 Few cities were peopled entirely with deportees, yet the presence of the latter along with the fruits of their labor played an important ideological role, allowing the kings of kings to enact his place as pivot of the earth and “Lord of the Seven Climes.”23 After Shabuhr I sacked Antioch he deported its inhabitants to populate several cities founded or refounded to commemorate his campaigns, a feat only repeated by Husraw I in the sixth century.24 These cities include WehAndiog-Shabuhr in Khuzestan and Bishabuhr in Pars, both of which became important centers of royal industry.25 Shabuhr I’s Kushan victories were no less important, as attested by the prominent place they occupy in the king of kings’ reliefs at Bishabuhr. Craftsmen deported from Bactria joined those from the west in these cities.

The City of the Fortune of Ardaxshir Once he had consolidated power in Pars but before his victory over Ardawan, Ardaxshir I withdrew to a site endowed with exceptional natural defensive capabilities about 125 kilometers south of the venerable yet less easily defended city of Staxr. There he built ArdaxshirXwarrah (Mid. Pers. Ardaxšı¯r-Xwarrah or Ardaxšı¯rFarrah, “Royal Fortune of Ardaxshir”), known from the tenth century on as Firuzabad.26 The city, which lay on a vast plain of well-watered arable land surrounded by mountains, served not only as his stronghold and

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primary power base, but also as a great laboratory for the king of kings’ experiments in city planning, architecture, and rock art.27 The king of kings laid out the city in a perfect circle with a diameter of ca. 1,850 m.28 The inner moated fortifications contained a central watchtower, the Terbal, and a fi re temple provisioned with cisterns, the Takht-e Neshin. An outer boundary wall 10 kilometers from the center projected the inner circle into the valley. Around twenty or so radials consisting of canals, paths, and boundaries extend well past the fortifications up the cliffs and out into the surrounding countryside. Far from an unbroken, ancient Near Eastern tradition, a precisely circular city on such a scale was without precedent.29 Reflective of Ardaxshir I’s developing ideas of the role of the Iranian king, it presents an urban plan of a sovereign who intended the

city not only to function as the center of an empire but also to symbolize the centrality of the king of kings within it.30 A circular fortification protected the valley from the east, and an aqueduct brought water through a rock-cut tunnel from the south to irrigate the plain. Remnants of Sasanian gardens dot the valley, including a square enclosure that even today contains myrtle hedges. The city’s palaces featured stuccowork patterned on Achaemenid ornament, in effect cloaking the king’s new creations in “Kayanid” ornament.31 Much like the city’s innovative palatial architecture, new royal image, and the fi ne sculptural forms and pure silver of the coinage that conveyed it, the city played an important role in distinguishing the new Sasanian Empire from that of the Arsacids. The city was a spatial instantiation

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FIGURE 6.3 View of the watchtower

(the Terbal) and fi re temple (the Takht-e Neshin) of Ardaxshir-Xwarrah.

of Ardaxshir I’s new imperial ideal, expressing a new idea of Iranian kingship and renovation, and exemplifying his claim that his uprising had finally broken the pattern of centuries of misrule, disorder, and decline set in motion by the “evil Alexander.” The royal presence spread visually through the landscape. After he defeated Ardawan IV, Ardaxshir I carved two monumental rock reliefs into the cliffs of the Tang-e Ab, a narrow gorge that served as the northern entrance to the valley. They depict Ardaxshir I unhorsing the Arsacid king and an investiture scene in which the king of kings receives the royal diadem from Ohrmazd.32 Ardaxshir I’s early reliefs reimagined compositions and themes present in Arsacid art, such as equestrian combat, but also established new compositions, themes, and iconographies that influenced the development of later Sasanian art. These include new ways of imagining the ancient themes of triumph and divine investiture.33 Ardaxshir I carved his first relief at Ardaxshir-Xwarrah on the cliff face of the river gorge that controlled access to the city from the north just at the point where it opened onto the plain. The relief is carved on the west face of the cliff to catch the early morning sun. Three equestrian combats unfold across the cliff’s face, beginning with the king of kings, who unhorses the last Arsacid sovereign, followed by the crown prince Shabuhr I and an unidentified beardless noble. The

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relief’s composition no doubt engaged Arsacid precedents, such as the equestrian victories at Bisotun, but Ardaxshir I’s relief introduces a monumental scale unseen in Iranian rock reliefs since the Achaemenids. At 19.8 by 4 meters, it sprawls across the cliff. Ardaxshir I’s second relief, executed further up the gorge to the north, portrays Ohrmazd (Ahura Mazda) granting the king of kings the diadem. This divine investiture is the fi rst time in Persian monumental art that the Wise Lord was portrayed fully anthropomorphized and at the same scale as the king of kings. Later Sasanian scenes of divine investiture derive from this precedent and portray a similarly intimate meeting of king and god.34

Bishabuhr and Its Landscape as a Living Victory Monument Bishabuhr (Mid. Pers. Bı¯ša¯ buhr or Weh-Ša¯ buhr, New Pers. Bı¯ša¯ pu ¯ r) in particular presents an illuminating case study in the development of early Sasanian techniques of creating interwoven ideational city and landscapes. Like Ardaxshir-Xwarrah, it integrates innovative design elements with sculptural and architectural features drawn from the “deep past” of Iranian tradition and, especially in the case of Bishabuhr, conquered peoples. Shabuhr I founded the city of Bishabuhr ca. 300 kilometers to the west of Ardaxshir-Xwarrah.35 The city

FIGURE 6.4 Triumph of Ardaxshir I, Firuzabad (relief I).

was laid out on a grid plan. Though this has often been ascribed entirely to the influence of Roman urban planning, as the last chapters have amply illustrated, grid plans were well integrated into Iranian urban planning by the Arsacid period. The city’s most prominent structures were its temple complex in the northeastern quadrant of the city and fortified citadel palace (also known as the Qalʿa-ye Dokhtar), which loomed overhead on a spur of the mountain. The excavated remains of the city demonstrate how the technologies of power and memory developed at Ardaxshir-Xwarrah provided a departure point for Shabuhr I’s own innovative structures. Both ArdaxshirXwarrah and Bishabuhr combine self-consciously innovative architecture and planning with the sculptural and ornamental forms of their “Kayanid ancestors.” Ardaxshir-Xwarrah did not receive much attention from later sovereigns, at least none that endures like its rock reliefs or early palaces. By contrast, the accumulated efforts of succeeding kings of kings converted Bishabuhr into a dynastic site of memory, performing for southwestern Pars what the sites surrounding Staxr did for the center of the province. Three succeeding Sasanian kings—Wahram I, Wahram II, and Shabuhr II—

responded to Shabuhr I’s memorial zone at Bishabuhr and carved their own rock reliefs in Tang-e Chowgan.36 In the sixth or seventh century, a court within Bishabuhr’s fire temple complex was remodeled to create a colonnaded court and ayva¯ n with architectural and ornamental features similar to contemporary structures at Takht-e Solayman and Ctesiphon.37 The massive masonry wall at “palais B” in between the base of the citadel and the intramural fi re temple complex was likely added after Shabuhr I’s reign. It contains figural sculptures of horsemen and courtiers offering diadems or standing in reverence. 38 This indicates that while Bishabuhr’s architecture might have become outmoded for contemporary court ceremony and tastes, the site itself remained significant and in use. Following his father’s precedent at Ardaxshir-Xwarrah, Shabuhr I converted the landscape around Bishabuhr into an environmental victory monument. Shabuhr I carved three rock reliefs along the Tang-e Chowgan, extending the king’s presence alongside this conduit through the mountains and embracing this important water source for the city. Underscoring the importance of the city for him as well as the gorge’s function as a large-scale monumental zone, Shabuhr

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FIGURE 6.5 Investiture of Ardaxshir I,

Firuzabad (relief II).

I carved an 8-meter-tall statue in the round in a cave high above Bishabuhr’s nearby river valley, the Tang-e Chowgan. The cave walls retain the marks of preparation for the addition of extensive bas-relief carvings, which were left unfinished. While we are left to speculate about what it was intended to host, the cave extended for almost a kilometer into the mountain, with a large pit as a possible focal point, either for a tomb or for cultic activity. Much like Darius I’s transformation of Naqsh-e Rostam, it is not inconceivable that Shabuhr appropriated a preexisting holy site, tying its numinous significances securely to his memory. It is possible that the king of kings intended this site to be the final resting place of his embalmed body or bones, though nothing remains in the cave but the statue itself to hint at any funerary furnishings.39 This idea is not without correspondences elsewhere in the Persian royal

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tradition. In the Book of Kings Husraw I requests that his embalmed body be deposited in a hidden mountaintop cave, which may have derived in some way from memory of this cave, if it is not an accurate reflection of Sasanian funerary custom. Whether the king’s remains rested there or not, it would have provided both another truly monumental focus for his memory and a setting for cult activity, for the king or reflecting other sacred significances the cave might have carried. Bishabuhr’s reliefs all define the king of king’s identity ˉ ra¯n ud Aneˉra¯n, providing a clear and as truly a king of E increasingly iconographically coherent interpretation of the deeper import of his military victories. These three reliefs at Bishabuhr join those at Naqsh-e Rostam and Darabgird to constitute a larger body of reliefs in which the king imaged and celebrated his lordship over lands and peoples beyond the traditional borders of Iran.40

FIGURE 6.6 Aerial photo of Bishabuhr (Kazerun, Iran). Georg Gerster/Photo Researchers, Inc.

ˉ ra¯n or obeisance of select sovereigns and peoples from E ud Aneˉra¯n. In these much more complex compositions, the reliefs incorporate Philip’s act of submission with those of the other kings, linking the Roman scene to additional scenes portraying the subjection of other peoples. Compositionally and stylistically, Shabuhr’s rock reliefs show a unique blending of Roman and Persepolitan motifs. This presents the very likely scenario of Roman craftsmen contributing to rock reliefs inspired by careful, on-site study of Persepolis.43 Within a wider exploration of the theme of sovereignty over Iran and non-Iran, the Roman emperors’ acts of obeisance overlap with the Kushan figures, who stand in supplication or submission before Shabuhr.44 Unlike Ardaxshir-Xwarrah, which did not receive the rupestral attention of later sovereigns, the accumulated architectural and sculptural contributions of three succeeding kings of kings converted Bishabuhr into a dynamic site of memory. Possibly the site of one of the province’s most important fires, the city seems to have been significant enough to take on the role in southwestern Pars that the sites surrounding Staxr played for the center of the province.

“Susa Made Iranian” FIGURE 6.7 Cave and colossal statue of Shabuhr I, Tang-e Chowgan

gorge, Bishabuhr.

Shabuhr I foregrounds his victories over many peoples, but those over the Romans and Kushans take center stage.41 Shabuhr I’s Roman victories are the sole subject of his reliefs at Naqsh-e Rostam and Darabgird, and this same theme remains the central focus of Bishabuhr I. The king of kings is portrayed mounted with the three Roman emperors he claims to have killed, or captured and made to pay tribute. The relief integrates these victories into a scene of divine investiture whose composition is similar to Ardaxshir I’s relief at Naqsh-e Rostam. The prone body of Gordian III under hoof finds a daivic visual correlate in the body of Ahreman below the horse of the Wise Lord. Similar scenes of Roman victory later form the central focus of Shabuhr I’s multifigure reliefs at Bishabuhr II and III, which extend his dominance over Kushan South Asia as well.42 Although they differ in size and integrate a different number of figures and registers, they both portray the king of kings receiving the submission of conquered peoples, backed up by rows of the Sasanian nobles. These two reliefs deal with roughly the same subsidiary themes: a demonstration of the support of the Sasanian nobles for Shabuhr I, and the subjection

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Susa has played an important role in our study from the Achaemenid period, and like the Achaemenids, the Sasanians considered Khuzestan to belong to the Iranian core of their empire and to be part of the lands that their “fathers, grandfathers and ancestors ruled from antiquity.”45 This region, centered on the Susa Plain, formed an extremely fertile and well-watered area of arable land close to the Persian homeland. Its cities became major sites of agriculture as well as industrial and artisanal activity, including metalwork and silk production. Still more, by the fifth century, the Susa Plain was filled with numerous monuments to the exploits of the kings of kings, especially “living monuments” in the form of newly founded cities themselves. Dams, weirs, and mills built partially through the labor of captured Roman engineers and masons supported the plain’s great agricultural and industrial expansion, especially textile production, a water-intensive industrial activity. The old city of Susa suffered considerable damage in the course of the Sasanian conquest. Roman Ghirshman noticed the effects of siege engines, catapult stones, and projectiles as well as extensive burning in his excavations of the late Parthian levels (level 5a).46 Although Sasanian Susa did not recover its Seleucid and Parthian extent, certain sectors were rebuilt, and some areas

FIGURE 6.8 Triumph of Shabuhr I, Bishabuhr (relief II).

gained important aristocratic dwellings. Ghirshman’s excavations in the Royal City cleared an area associated with the first Sasanian city (level 4b-c), which was built on top of the burned late Parthian city destroyed by the Sasanian conquest. This sector revealed densely built-up blocks of early Sasanian houses. In the course of clearing the area known as the “Donjon,” located to the south of the city, R. de Mecquenem uncovered a large Sasanian villa with hunt frescos that incorporated reused Achaemenid bases in both the interior colonnade of its interior great room and its exterior peristyle forecourt.47 The area of the Achaemenid apada¯na, which had long fallen into ruin, was built over with domestic structures. The early French expeditions did not systematically excavate the upper levels of the former Elamite acropolis. We know only that it yielded some architectural fragments and luxurious small finds. These included several bowls, one made of rock crystal and gold, another of jade, and two of fine silverwork, as well as stucco decoration and glazed ceramics.48 One can only speculate about what occupied the acropolis in the early Sasanian period, be it houses, merchant depots, or a villa, yet its small fi nds and architectural remnants make it unlikely that it was a slum. Between the reigns of Shabuhr I and Shabuhr II, the Sasanians invested heavily in the Susa Plain, converting

the region to a center of industry unparalleled in the empire and favored it with newly founded royal residence cities.49 In addition to the old city of Susa, the Sasanians founded two new cities, Weh-Andiog-Shabuhr and Eran-Xwarrah-Shabuhr, which coordinated numerous hydraulic and industrial works, such as water mills, weirs, bridges, and royal workshops. Shabuhr I refounded and expanded a Parthian military settlement located about 25 kilometers northeast of Susa as Weh-AndiogShabuhr (Mid. Pers. Weh-Andı¯o ˉ g-Ša¯buhr, “the Better Antioch of Shabuhr”), known more commonly in postconquest sources as Gondeshapur.50 The king made his foundation an important royal residence and major urban monument to his victories in Aneˉra¯n. It became an important winter residence for the early Sasanian kings, and we even hear of the Sasanian king receiving Roman legates there.51 Mirroring its status as a royal residence, the city became the seat of the East Syriac bishop who controlled this important region, and appears to have been second in precedence only to SeleuciaCtesiphon.52 Weh-Andiog-Shabuhr and its associated engineering works were founded to bring the Susa Plain to maximum agricultural and industrial exploitation, especially textile production. Evocative remains of hydraulic works survive in Khuzestan, many of which were closely associated with Shabuhr I’s foundation of

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Weh-Andiog-Shabuhr. The masonry techniques and engineering solutions of Roman engineers captured by the king of kings are especially noticeable in a 400-meter-long weir on the Dez River and ca. 550-meter bridge and dam on the Karun River at Shushtar ca. 38 kilometers southeast of Weh-Andiog-Shabuhr. The fine ashlar masonry of this bridge indexed the project to Shabuhr I’s other monuments that harnessed Roman labor, especially Bishabuhr, and like them displayed it as a royal ornament and victory monument. Analogous works at Pa-ye Pol and Ahwaz further south point to a similarly complex and well-developed hydraulic landscape.53 Shabuhr II destroyed the old city of Susa around 339 CE, reportedly using three hundred elephants to completely raze it.54 Our source, Sozomen, claims that the king destroyed the city to punish its Christians, whom he suspected of sympathizing with the Romans, yet in almost the same breath he states that for the three years prior to the city’s destruction, Susa’s bishop tried in vain to convert its inhabitants to Christianity, which would suggest that city’s ancient elites were the real threat and focal point of Shabuhr II’s fury.55 It seems that Shabuhr II’s true goal was in fact to extirpate what remained of the last self-governing Greek city to survive in Iran. Parts of the city remained derelict until the Islamic conquest, with a noticeable gap between the early Sasanian (IV) and early Islamic levels (II).56 No matter who offended Shabuhr II, his efforts to punish the city did not result in Susa’s total annihilation. The city appears to have been renamed “Susaˉ r-kar).57 Both the former sites of Made-Iranian” (Šu ¯ š-ı¯-E the Achaemenid apada¯na and Elamite acropolis yielded major hoards consisting of coins belonging mostly to Husraw II, suggesting that some inhabitants of means lived in the city. More substantial clay-brick houses were eventually built over the mud huts that had been raised on the early Sasanian manse with reused Achaemenid bases.58 Bullae found inside indicate that Susa was tied into Sasanian officialdom even if it no longer functioned as a mint city or administrative capital itself.59 ˉ ra¯nShabuhr II’s new city of Eran-Xwarrah-Shabuhr (E Xwarrah-Ša¯ buhr, “The Iranian Fortune of Shabuhr”) took Susa’s place as the new district capital.60 EranXwarrah-Shabuhr is identified with the archaeological site of Ayvan-e Karkha, located 17 kilometers northwest of Susa.61 The city’s principal structures and fortifications were constructed using baked bricks, signaling significant royal interest and monetary outlay. Shabuhr II

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laid out Eran-Xwarrah-Shabuhr as an elongated rectangle stretching almost 4 kilometers north-northwest to south-southeast and 1 kilometer east to west, with streets likely laid out on a grid and an interior divided into three separate sectors.62 While certain elements of Sasanian urbanism and engineering in the hinterland can be attributed to Roman engineering, this method of organizing a city was a central feature of eastern Iranian urbanism, and it cannot be understood as an entirely foreign element. Like Bishabuhr, Eran-Xwarrah-Shabuhr presents a coherent and regularized version of earlier Iranian urban design whose roots extended back to the Seleucid period. Bishabuhr and even more so Eran-XwarrahShabuhr resemble a regularized and topographically adapted version of former Seleucid cities like Merv with a gridded lower city and fortified palatial district. Both cities appear to be divided into separate sectors, some of which appear to be functionally discrete, like Bishabuhr’s sacred and palatial districts. Bishabuhr’s fortified palatial district was built upon a mountainside, though contiguous with the lower city, and while it is now only a huge hillside rubble field, the fused profile of palace and mountain spur would have presented a powerful “skyline.” While we have only a few textual sources that mention its ramparts, the White Palace of Ctesiphon likely formed a similar fortified palatial district. Weh-Andiog-Shabuhr has been largely lost to war, environmental depredations, and agriculture, but before the Iran-Iraq War its general scale and gridded urban plan could still be discerned aerially, confirming Hamza al-Isfahani and Yaqut’s descriptions.63 Presenting a rectangle ca. 3 kilometers long and 2 kilometers wide, it corresponded to the general scale of the later Eran-Xwarrah-Shabuhr, suggesting the two cities of the Susa Plain might have shared a similar shape and (possibly) organization. In addition, Hamza al Isfahani’s and Yaqut’s descriptions of Weh-Andiog-Shabuhr recall Mustafi’s description of New-Shabuhr: gridded, with eight principal streets to a side.64 The southern sector of Eran-Xwarrah-Shabuhr was divided from the north by a wall, and created a separate “royal” or “administrative district.”65 Within this district, Ghirshman explored an impressive structure with an innovative transverse barrel vault, which he understood to be a palace originally surrounded by garden spaces.66 Although it might not have been a royal palace per se, these ruins, which were still quite imposing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reflect its importance as an administrative capital.

Building a New Frontier and Defending the Empire of the Iranians Between the fourth and seventh centuries, the Sasanians invested heavily in the new eastern Iranian frontier. After the inroads of the Chionites and Hephthalites, the Sasanians converted their empire into a “walled garden,” building a chain of fortress cities and walls to defend their frontiers. The Sasanian city of NewShabuhr was founded in the late fourth century CE as part of this initial retrenchment. The city was the chief administrative center (šahresta¯n) of the province (šahr) of Abarshahr in the fifth and sixth centuries and served as an important stronghold to stabilize the empire’s eastern frontiers.67 The name “New-Shabuhr” (Mid. Pers. Neˉw-Ša¯buhr, “Good-(of)-Shabuhr”) appears as an honorary title within the court of Shabuhr I, which points to it being a royal creation.68 The early excavations of the city, sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were unable to discern any Sasanian remains.69 These excavations, which took place in 1935– 40 and 1947, focused largely on recovering artifacts and architectural remnants for display in the museum. Members of the team ultimately concluded that they had excavated an Islamic-era refoundation located at an entirely different site from the Sasanian city and that the location of the Sasanian city was still unknown. This assumption governed subsequent study of the city, though not without the objections of later scholars.70 Thankfully, new excavations by an Italian and French team and subsequent analysis of the thermoluminescence and archaeomagnetism of the site’s ceramics and bricks have revealed multiple periods of occupation and, indeed, evidence of its Sasanian occupation.71 The excavations documented nonurban occupation in the Achaemenid and early Parthian periods (ca. 450– 150 BCE), but the city proper only came into being in the Sasanian period. The Sasanians founded the city sometime in the late fourth or early fifth century, when its citadel was constructed. Much like the ancient cities of post-Seleucid Central Asia, the new Sasanian city was eventually expanded to include a citadel and fortified lower city.72 It was occupied to the end of the Sasanian period and after the Arab conquest the city was rebuilt on the same location. Avestan-tinged foundation legends that circulated centuries after likely grew from New-Shabuhr’s place on the late third- to late sixth-century frontier between Iran and Turan. A late Sasanian geographical text understands that the city “was built by Ša¯buhr the son of Ardaxšı¯r [. . . at the place where] he

killed the Tu ¯ ra¯nian Pahlı¯zag.”73 Islamic sources provide legendary Turanian founders for the city, like Afrasiab and Tahmurath.74 Likely among the motivations for investing within this region was the fact that the Fire of Burzen Mihr, one of the three “Great Fires” of Iran, was located in the region, in the Kuh-e Benalud range nearby, though unfortunately no archaeological site has yet produced unequivocal evidence of the sanctuary.75 This process further intensified between the reigns of Yazdgird I and Peroz I when the empire came under renewed pressure.76 Beginning in the fifth century, the Sasanians built extensive systems of walls and fortress to defend their northern and eastern borders. During this period the walls on the western Caspian Sea coast at Derbent and southeastern coast at Tamisha were raised, as was the 200-kilometer Gorgan Wall, the “Great Wall of Iran,” which extended across the Caspian Plain to the Alborz Mountains.77 These provided a forward operating base for frontier troops, and the Gorgan Wall appears to have been successful in deterring invasions of mounted forces. Just as importantly, these walls created a tangible frontier that redrew the limits of the empire and provided a sense of order.

Claiming Non-Iranian Landscapes Visually and Ritually When the Iranian king marched on non-Iranian lands, he claimed, occupied and conquered territories not only militarily but symbolically by introducing changes to their ideational landscapes. Rock reliefs were the most enduring mark of a region’s inclusion in the Empire of the Iranians. Ardaxshir I and Shabuhr I in particular created rock reliefs in conquered regions outside their homeland, permanently marking the space of newly conquered territory. A relief sculpture at the site of Salmas near Lake Urmia, now in Iranian Azerbaijan, was located in Media Atropatene near the Armenian marchlands. It portrays Ardaxshir I and Shabuhr I as coregents receiving the submission of two grandees. It has been interpreted as commemorating the submission to Ardaxshir I of Media, the last stronghold of the Arsacids, or the installation of two Armenian governors.78 The relief itself displays a rough, provincial style, indicating that the sovereign imposed his will and royal image on the province, but not his court artisans. No matter the style, the relief visually demonstrated that the Sasanians controlled the local hierarchy and is a testament to their control of the region topographically as well as militarily and administratively.

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FIGURE 6.9 Line drawing of the relief

of Ardaxshir I at Salmas, Iran, by Robert Ker Porter. O. Meredith Wilson Library Special Collections, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, (Porter 1821, 596x).

FIGURE 6.10 Shabuhr I hunting rhinoceros, Rag-e Bibi, Afghanistan. Courtesy Frantz Grenet and François Ory.

All reliefs that portray Shabuhr I’s Roman and Kushan victories figurally were executed at sites in the Sasanian homeland of Pars in southwestern Iran. However, the king of kings also carved a relief deep within the conquered territory of what had been the heart of the northern portion of the Kushan Empire, demonstrating his victory metaphorically with a hunting scene.79 At Rag-e Bibi in present-day Afghanistan Shabuhr I carved a relief on a cliff that flanked the main north-south route from Balkh to Bagram, con-

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necting Bactria with the Indian subcontinent, at once claiming the odontic space of the transcontinental trade route and marking the local topography of his new subjects.80 Although the relief is heavily damaged, the subject matter is recognizable, portraying the king of kings hunting rhinoceroses, an identifiably South Asian beast, subtly alluding to Shabuhr I’s victories over the Kushans and implying mastery over a landmass that extends far to the south of this mountainous Bactrian pass.

This relief branded formerly hostile topography as a master could a slave. It created a permanent visual reminder that the land was now a satellite in a larger realm, and disrupted preexisting memories of the site or the trade route that inhabitants or travelers might have cherished. While we can safely conclude that Shabuhr I, like Darius I at Bisotun or Van, intended such a relief to inspire fear, awe, and obedience in any beholder who would be traveling on the route that it marked, we do not know how successful either was in this aim. The reliefs endure—but save vandalism—any lewd gestures or verbal abuse, to which viewers on the route likely subjected the relief, were ephemeral. Similarly we can only imagine the tactics that individuals living in conquered regions whose landscape had been marked by the imperial center undertook to integrate or subvert the rupestral violence that had been infl icted on their landscapes. While pressing the military advantage, the Sasanian king used conquered or occupied lands as a ritual stage. Over the course of Husraw I’s wars with Justinian, the king of kings deployed numerous ritual performances to provide proof of the veracity of the Iranian cosmic order of things. These spoke on a variety of cultural registers, engaging Iranian royal symbolisms, ancient Mesopotamian precedents, and contemporary Roman practices. After concluding his campaign against the Romans and sacking Antioch, Husraw I bathed in the Mediterranean Sea and offered sacrifices.81 Bathing in seawater is not part of any familiar Zoroastrian ritual. Instead this ablution was a bespoke ritual instantiation of his cosmological role as “a god manifest among men, most glorious and victorious, who rises with the sun and gives eyes to the night,” and deliberate engagement with the deep history of ancient Western Asian kingship.82 While it made a strong impression on contemporaries, the performance follows in a long line of kings who marched from Mesopotamia to “make sacrifices” and “wash their weapons in the Sea,” including Sargon of Agade (2334–2279 BCE), Iahudn-Lim of Mari (ca. 1750–1734 BCE), Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE), and Shalmaneser III (858–824 BCE).83 It is possible that Husraw I drew on this deep well of ancient Western Asian royal tradition and cultural memory in staging this spectacle, even as he adapted the ritual to reinforce Sasanian royal ideology and speak to Iranian cultural sensibilities. The sun king rests in the “Roman Sea,” after “ordering the earth,” as the king of kings proclaims in a legend on a rare prestige issue of gold coinage, likely struck from his Roman tribute.84

In addition to occupying the Roman emperors’ place in Apamea’s hippodrome, Husraw I treated the Roman lands as his own.85 He made a show of caring for Roman farms, encouraging them to grow and become fecund, protecting the peasantry, and even dispensing alms to them.86 Some ancient observers understood this to be “Persian custom,” and indeed such reverence for the earth is integral to Zoroastrianism, but applied to enemy soil, this would represent a marked shift from earlier practices. Indeed, both Shabuhr and Kartir boast in their inscriptions that the lands of Aneˉra¯n were “burned, devastated and plundered” during the third-century campaigns, and later Sasanian sovereigns appear to have felt no such qualms about doing so either.87 More likely, Husraw I’s performative care for “his” lands was a calculated symbolic gesture intended to ritually demonstrate his cosmological role as the true Lord of the Sevenfold World. Husraw I’s primary audience was no doubt the Iranian nobility, but, like Apamea’s hippodrome games, the king also likely targeted Roman elites as well, not to mention Justinian himself. In doing so Husraw I subordinated and humiliated the Roman emperor in front his populace, providing tangible proof that the King of the Iranians, not Justinian, had the power and authority to protect and preserve the Roman lands.

The Cities and Sasanian Imperial Urbanism With ruins over twice the size of ancient Rome, the region around the old imperial cities of Seleucia and Ctesiphon became the Sasanian Empire’s largest and most important urban area. As under the Arsacids and Seleucids before them, the region served as the main administrative center, coronation site, and winter residence of the Sasanian kings of kings. Reflected in its Arabic name (al-Mada¯ʾin, “The Cities”), the Sasanian capital actually comprised a number of cities, which grew, declined, and shifted in importance over the centuries.88 Even in the early Islamic period, the region retained an impressive collection of monuments in various states of ruin. The Sasanians succeeded in expanding the conurbation to the maximum allowed by ancient technology and agricultural techniques.89 Bisected by the Tigris and interspersed with canals, agricultural installations, and royal estates, its setting differed markedly from those Sasanian foundations on the Iranian plateau, where the interplay between mountainous terrain and rock reliefs played a key role in extending the royal presence into the landscape. With its towering palaces anchoring the center, royal estates, pavilions, and subsidiary urban foundations articulated

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Ayvan-e Kesra

Ctesiphon (Madina al- Atiqa) Tell ’Umar (Watchtower)

Ruins of Seleucia Canals

Weh-Ardaxshir)

(Salman-e Pak village)

Tell Baruda Qasr Bint-al Qadi

Ayvan-e Kesra* (see inset)

Old Course of the Tigris

Sites where marble, opus sectile, and mosaic work were excavated

(Modern Road)

Site of WehAndiogHusraw (Rumagan)

American Excavations Italian Excavations

1

Bostan Kesra*

“The Cities”

German Excavations

0

Tell al-Dhaba i

Aspanbar

Tell Dhahab*

*

0 25 m

Tigris

2 Kilometers

FIGURE 6.11 Plan of “The Cities”: Weh-Ardaxshir, Ctesiphon, and Aspanbar.

the ideational landscape of “The Cities,” that is, the conurbation of Ctesiphon, Weh-Ardaxshir and Aspanbar, and extended the royal presence far into the distant suburbans and surrounding plain. Al-Madaʾin was explored archaeologically only sporadically over the course of the twentieth century, despite the importance of the region for Sasanian as well as Arsacid and early Islamic history. Much of the archaeological record has since been permanently lost to environmental degradation, war, and looting. Our knowledge of the cities depends primarily on the early German explorations of the 1920s and 1930s, which were very poorly published, and the evidence produced in several Italian campaigns conducted in 1960s and 1970s.90 Nevertheless, we can gain a fragmentary idea of the region’s development and urban character from putting the archaeological evidence in dialogue with scattered topographical references in a variety of Roman sources, indigenous Jewish rabbinical texts, East Syriac Christian chronicles and hagiographies, early Islamic histories and geographies, and, more recently, satellite imagery.91

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Ctesiphon, located to east of the Tigris and called Madı¯na al-ʾAtı¯qa (“The Ancient City”) by the Muslim geographers, continued to flourish through the late Sasanian era. Al-ʾAtı¯qa has received the least amount of archaeological attention, and much of what we know about Arsacid and Sasanian Ctesiphon derives from textual sources. Its most important urban feature mentioned by both the late antique and Islamic sources is the fortified White Palace. Often confused with the great Ayvan-e Kesra, this palace was the primary residence of the Sasanian kings of kings when they resided in Ctesiphon. Already in existence under Shabuhr II, it was maintained until the end of the empire and even into the early Islamic period.92 We do not know where it was located, but it was apparently close enough to the Tigris that Shabuhr II could be awakened in his bedchamber in the palace by the clamor of the crowds.93 The palace appears to have been heavily fortified, for which reason Yazdgird III took refuge there during the Muslim advance, and the Muslim commander Sʾad preferred to reside there, designating the great audience hall in Aspanbar a mosque.94 A number of

late Sasanian and early Islamic aristocratic houses grew up in the section called Maʾarid, located 3 kilometers north of the Taq-e Kisra.95 Seleucia, in contrast, had fully declined by the Sasanian period. The abandoned city appears to have been a place of public execution, Jewish and Christian burials, as well as the site of Christian martyria.96 In the late Sasanian era, a fortified watchtower was built on the hill that had been the theater of Seleucia.97 The Sasanians significantly expanded the settlements around Ctesiphon over the course of the empire, founding several new cities and raising new palatial structures. Ardaxshir I transformed the region when he established the city of Weh-Ardaxshir (Mid. Pers. WehArdaxšı¯r “The Good-(city of)-Ardaxshir”) around 230 CE across the Tigris to the southwest of Arsacid Ctesiphon.98 Weh-Ardaxshir was called Nea-Seleukeia in Greek, and in Syriac Sliq (“Seleucia”), Kokhe (after the ˉ za¯ (“the pre-Sasanian settlement), or simply Ma¯ h· o City”). Attesting to the currency of its official Persian name, Weh-Ardaxshir was known in the chronicles of the Arab conquest as Bahurasir. Weh-Ardaxshir grew across from Ctesiphon, where the Tigris narrowed. Here, in the first two centuries of the empire, a bridge or, at times, bridges linked Weh-Ardaxshir to Ctesiphon, which still flourished and grew itself. Together they appeared as a formidable set of linked fortresses. These various semipermanent pontoon or wooden bridges could be disconnected in times of trouble, ensuring that if one city was taken the other would not easily fall.99 Weh-Ardaxshir was encircled by 10-meter-thick mud fortification walls made up of 30- to 35-meter linear segments punctuated by 9.3-meter-wide bastions every 38.3 meters.100 These mud walls were repaired and rebuilt several times over the life of the city as it grew to be the most important city in the region in the early empire. Like the Sasanian fortifications at Merv and Takht-e Solayman in design, the bastions were semicircular and presented an imposing façade to would-be attackers.101 Writing after Julian’s failed invasion and with the benefit of recent eyewitness reports, Gregory Nazianzos describes the cities thus: Ctesiphon is a powerful and impregnable fortress strengthened with a wall built of baked bricks, a deep moat, and the swamps from the river. And another fortress makes it stronger. Its name is Kokhe, made with equal security in terms of both natural features and engineering, composed to such an extent that both seem to be a single city divided by the river’s width.102

While we do not know the full extent of its walls, it is possible that Ardaxshir I originally intended that Weh-

Ardaxshir share Ardaxshir-Xwarrah’s circular plan, although it eventually took on an ovoid shape to conform to the river’s course. In fact, many other details known about Weh-Ardaxshir appear to correspond to the general conception of Ardaxshir-Xwarrah, though on a much larger scale, stretching ca. 2,860 meters in diameter compared to Ardaxshir-Xwarrah’s ca. 2,050–70 meters.103 No mention is made of a royal palace, and as at Ardaxshir-Xwarrah, the kings of kings likely intended to reside outside the city walls. Like Ardaxshir-Xwarrah’s Takht-e Neshin, the region’s most important fi re was enthroned in a temple in Weh-Ardaxshir and supported with lavish subsidies.104 The Italian excavations explored the elevated area at the city’s center (Tell Baru ¯ da) and a region to its southwest (“Artisans Quarter”). They did not reveal any of Weh-Ardaxshir’s major urban monuments; however, combined with the German explorations, they provide an impression of its urban character and perhaps, by extension, that of Sasanian Ctesiphon. The Italian excavations suggest that the city developed from the beginning on an irregular plan.105 A few main arteries are detectable, and their arrangement roughly corresponds to the circular shape of the city, though they do not appear to have been laid out on any regular pattern. Mud-brick buildings with no apparent functional division or centralized planning fi lled in the irregularly shaped city blocks excavated in this region. Artisans’ workshops coexisted with shops and dwelling areas, though this is not uncommon in premodern cities and characterizes Sasanian Merv, even if the main arterial streets conformed to a more regular pattern.106 Like Parthian Seleucia, larger structures were interspersed with the smaller dwellings. The northern block preserved the remains of a large late third-century house that was built on a plan recognizable from late Parthian architecture. It consisted of an open court facing a façade with a triple ayva¯n, which led to a vaulted rectangular great room.107 Known only from descriptions in textual sources, Weh-Ardaxshir incorporated one of the cities’ strongest citadels, the Aqra d’Kokhe, which likely housed the city’s mint.108 The rather horrifying descriptions in the Syriac sources, which describe it as “the prison of oblivion,” inform us that its bowels contained an infamous dungeon where prisoners were collared and left to starve to death.109 In addition to Christian martyrs, such as Bishop George of Izala, disgraced members of the Sasanian family were imprisoned here as well.110 When faced with invaders the kings of kings tended to seek refuge in the citadel on the opposite side

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of the river from the enemy; thus Husraw II fled to Aqra d’Kokhe when Heraclius advanced from the north, and Yazdgird III sought the protection of the White Palace in Ctesiphon when the Arabs advanced from the south.111 Despite its political and symbolic importance for the Persian Empire, Iranians formed the minority of the population in the cities.112 While an important population drawn from the Iranian elite resided in the city as administrators, soldiers, or courtiers, the majority of the city’s inhabitants were Aramaeans, Syrians, and Arabs adhering to Judaism and Christianity as well as various other faiths, such as Manichaeism. Italian excavations in Weh-Ardaxshir even yielded several fragments of Gandharan sculpture, though it is uncertain whether these originated from an object of devotion, or were used in some other context, like a spoil of war or a merchant’s ware.113 Despite the execration of Buddhist “idols” in later Middle Persian literature, their appearance should not be too surprising. The Kushan lands had once been integrated into the empire. Merv contained significant Buddhist monuments that thrived under Sasanian control.114 Aspects of Merv’s Buddhist architecture, monumental clay sculpture, and portable objects confirm ties to the larger world of Bactrian and South Asian Buddhism and its material culture, though they equally attest to the influence of Iranian art and architecture.115 Ironically, we know the least about the Cities’ Zoroastrian sacred topography. In addition to a rabbinical academy and synagogue, the palace of the Jewish exilarch was located in Weh-Ardaxshir.116 As Christianity became an increasingly important demographic and even political force in the Sasanian Empire, an overlapping Christian topography of power developed and became more and more visible in the Cities and throughout the empire.117 Textual sources attest to a number of churches, theological schools, martyrial shrines, and monasteries in the cities and their periphery, with churches growing up in the sixth and seventh centuries near both the White Palace in Ctesiphon and the great ayva¯n of Taq-e Kisra across the river.118 Just as Weh-Ardaxshir held the most important fire temple, so too was it the location of the cathedral and residence of the East Syriac (or “Nestorian”) catholicos. The Cathedral of Kokhe remained the seat of the catholicos, and in 544 it was even enshrined into canon law that, to be legitimate, the catholicos must be enthroned at this church.119 However, with the decline of Weh-Ardaxshir and eventual rise of “New Ctesiphon” on the east bank of the Tigris, the Christian hierarchy gravitated thither to be close to the king of kings, as did the wider Persian aristocracy. The Cities’

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Christian topography became visible in a new way in the age of Husraw II when it gained royal patronage and in some instances even played a role in Husraw II’s claims of sovereignty over Rome. In addition to building a new treasury to showcase the Holy Cross, Husraw II eased strictures on Christian building and actively supported the construction of several churches.120 Much like the convent built on behalf of Shirin near Qasr-e Shirin, several churches or martyria were built for or given special patronage on behalf of Husraw II’s Christian wives around Weh-Ardaxshir and Ctesiphon.121 Throughout the Sasanian period, the Tigris subjected the city to several floods and eventually settled into a new course yet again sometime after the fifth century. The Babylonian Talmud/’Eruvin attests to the Tigris destroying over 70 cubits of Weh-Ardaxshir’s walls in the late fourth century.122 Those portions of Weh-Ardaxshir that the Italian excavations revealed were densely occupied into the late fifth century.123 Sometime in the reign of Peroz (459–84), the Tigris changed course a third time, bisecting the city and flooding much of the rest of it. Those densely settled regions excavated by the Italians show evidence of stagnant water on the roads and in the buildings.124 This flooding caused the city to decline but did not bring about its complete obsolescence.125 Settlement continued in the city’s more elevated regions, such as Tell Baru ¯ da and Qasr Bint alQadi.126 The catholicos of the Church of the East continued to be enthroned at the Cathedral of Kokhe until at least 1318 CE.127 Hastened by the flooding, the city of Aspanbar, or “New Ctesiphon,” grew on the new east bank of the Tigris.128 While the Iranian plateau contained sites that were sacred to the memory of the dynasty and their identity as Iranian kings of kings, this region to the southeast of Ctesiphon was the showcase for the late Sasanian kings of kings’ wealth, power, and lineage. Aspanbar expanded exponentially during and after the reign of Husraw I, although earlier kings appear to have already invested in the region, at least since Shabuhr II, if not earlier.129 Given evidence of earlier settlements under later monumental constructions, later kings expropriated land occupied by humble communities, for their ambitious building projects.130 Contrasting with Weh-Ardaxshir and Ctesiphon, Aspanbar was an unwalled, sprawling array of residential areas and suburban estates centering on the kings of kings’ palatial complex, which was bounded on its western flank by the Tigris. In this region, near the royal palaces and treasuries, the late Sasanian kings of kings maintained gardens,

game parks, polo grounds, and treasuries.131 We have textual evidence of at least one church in the vicinity of the royal palace, where a rival catholicos was consecrated in 521, attesting to the church’s stature if not the canonical nature of the election, and many of the houses in the region yielded evidence of Christian material.132 Aspanbar’s palatial complex stood at the center of a larger monumental zone that grew and changed with every reign. Two colossal structures, whose scale even dwarfs the Ayvan-e Kisra, appear in the later empire: Tell al-Dhabaʿi and Tell Dhahab. While we will discuss Tell al-Dhabaʿi in greater detail within the context of Sasanian palaces, it shares many features in common with Tell Dhahab, most notably the profusion of marble, opus sectile, and stucco sculpture that decorated it, and, in its second stage, its function as an artificial ter_ ahab), or “Golden Hill,” race. At Tell Dhahab (Tell D located about 2 kilometers to the southeast of the palace complex, the German excavations discovered a massive square platform constructed of mud bricks. Its retaining walls, 138 meters on a side and 8.80 meters thick, enclosed an earlier settlement whose honeycomb of ruined houses likely provided stability for the packed earth fi ll that raised the interior to the level of the walls.133 Internal buttresses strengthened these walls in a manner similar to that at Tell al-Dhabaʿi, the colossal late Sasanian platform built in Aspanbar immediately to the south of the Ayvan-e Kisra.134 Tell Dahab’s stairway, external walls, and floors were finished with a gypsum plaster, and several fragments of stucco were recovered from the site, including rosette patterns that are almost identical to those that decorated the Tell al-Dhabaʿi’s second phase. Both structures were an outgrowth of late Sasanian hypermonumentality, which reached its height under Husraw II, and it is very likely that one, if not both, of these structures had something to do with the memory of Husraw II’s treasury pavilion preserved in both contemporary and post-Sasanian sources. Tell Dahab’s huge platform would have easily supported a suitably monumental structure, though as at Tell al-Dhabaʿi, the postconquest Arab spoliation left no trace of a ground plan. Tell Dahab bore many features seen at other monuments built in the reign of Husraw II, most notably its scale, the height and prominence of its platform, and its stairway. Like the palace at Kangavar, a 50-meter, double-adorsed stairway fronted it on at least one and maybe more sides. This feature, which hearkened to Achaemenid architecture, is a characteristic of architecture associated with Husraw II’s reign.135 The excavators found a large amount of incredibly rich, though frag-

mentary, decorative marble, opus sectile, stucco, and mosaic tesserae at both Tell Dahab and Tell al-Dhabaʿi.136 In fact, these decorative materials were so similar in style and workmanship that the structures they embellished were most likely built or renovated at the same time, possibly even by the same teams of craftsmen. Unfortunately, like many of Aspanbar’s once prominent archaeological features, Tell Dhahab has been lost to decades of agricultural development, leaving us with only the evidence documented by the German expeditions.

The Cities and the Performance of World Sovereignty As the primary urban showcase for the late Sasanian kings of kings, the Cities gained a rich monumental landscape directly related to the kings’ claims of world sovereignty, including grand palaces and even a living “Roman” city complete with a hippodrome. In addition to such spectacles as the cities’ treasuries, which displayed loot taken from the empire’s Roman and Turanian enemies, and palace murals, which portrayed major victories, these spaces provided a ritual stage for the king of kings to manifest his role as Lord of the Seven Climes. This could take the form of true ritual performances, such as court ceremonial, but was also simply conveyed through the constant living presence of captured Romans or, briefly, the presence of the Romans’ most venerated relic, the Holy Cross, in a Sasanian treasury. Directed to the same audiences, the Iranian nobility, client kings, foreign rulers via envoys, and the army, these ritual, urban, and architectural statements provided complementary types of “proof” of the king of kings’ claims of world sovereignty. The scale of Sasanian investment in the region around Aspanbar is stunning, not just for its extensive urban infrastructure, fortifications, hydrology, and agricultural estates, but in terms of the scale and variety of its monumental architecture and ritual spaces: the symbolic infrastructure of empire. A number of important royal monuments, including many of the “wonders” of the reign of Husraw II, clustered on the east bank of the Tigris, both around Aspanbar and further afield, and the most spectacular of these are associated with the reigns of Husraw I and Husraw II by either textual or archaeological evidence. The urban and monumental creations of both kings were concerned with defi ning their cosmological role as font of all legitimacy for earthly sovereignty. Not surprisingly, given their intensely intimate yet fraught relationship, many were

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intended to display evidence of or offer venues for performatively asserting the king’s cosmological dominance over the Roman Empire. On a purely material level, many structures deliberately flaunted mosaic work, stone inlay, and marble taken from Rome or fashioned by Roman artisans taken during the campaigns of Husraw I and II.137 This was no superficial display of loot but joined a much wider and complex orchestration of resources. The patronage of both kings grew from the same Iranian royal worldview that portrayed the Sasanian king as acting as a new Fredon or Eraj. However, as we will see, Husraw I’s and Husraw II’s strategies of patronage and claims differed in several important and interesting ways. On the east bank of the Tigris several kilometers south of Aspanbar, Husraw I founded the “Better Antioch of Husraw” (Mid. Pers. Weh-Andı¯o ˉ g-Husraw), with captives deported from the Roman east and materials stripped from his sack of Antioch.138 Also simply called “the Roman City” (Mid. Pers. Ru ¯ maga¯n), the city survived well into the early Islamic period as al-Rumiya.139 The original early twentieth-century German excavators hypothesized that a walled section adjacent to the Ayvan-e Kesra could have belonged to Weh-Andiog-Husraw, but most literary sources place it on the Tigris and at a much greater distance—around 2 to 6 Arabic miles or a day’s journey.140 The most likely candidate site lies within the loop of Tigris to the south of Aspanbar, where there was, at least up through the last half of the twentieth century, a large expanse of mounds and discolored earth still visible despite the area’s intensive agricultural activity.141 Evidence from the Syriac sources paints a darker picture of the site than the privileged position that Procopius describes its inhabitants as enjoying. The city was surrounded by an earth wall, intended to keep the city’s 30,000 residents interned more than to defend it.142 Weh-Andiog-Husraw appears to have functioned as both a labor camp and a living urban victory monument to the king of kings’ Roman campaigns.143 Despite many individual attempts to escape, the inhabitants were dependent on Husraw I for their survival and made a show of mourning his death.144 In addition to Roman-style baths, the city was supplied with a hippodrome, which functioned at least up to the death of Husraw I.145 As I have explored in greater detail elsewhere, the hippodrome appears to have been an especially important feature within this new Roman city.146 Like his ritual bath in the Mediterranean or show of fostering the Roman landscape’s fecundity, the hippodrome games were among the campaign rituals that

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the king deployed while occupying Roman territory to performatively exercise his prerogatives as the true lord of the western clime. This hippodrome, possibly joined by another in the city, provided a permanent venue for the king of kings to contest this space with Justinian I, about whose specially staged spectacles Husraw I heard through his envoys. The construction of this “Roman city” developed from a long history of Iranian efforts to symbolically reduce Rome to its proper role as a client and tributary of the true king of kings. Like Shabuhr I’s “Better Antioch,” it complemented and reinforced the king of kings’ battlefield and diplomatic assertions. When Sasanian kings undertook military campaigns they pressed the symbolic advantage over their adversaries as much as a military one for both internal and external audiences.147 Exacting cash payments from foreign states as tangible evidence of their subordinate and tributary status grew to be a central ritual and ideological tool by which the Sasanians performatively demonstrated the veracity of their cosmological assertion that the Iranian king of kings was the pivot of the earth and font of all legitimacy for earthly sovereignty.148 The issue of Roman payment of “tribute” to Persia arose after Shabuhr I’s victories over multiple Roman armies. Shabuhr I’s Ka’ba inscription portrays Philip’s payment as evidence that he was now “tributary and subject” (pad ba¯ z ud bandagı¯h), and lists Rome as among the lands that are subject to him.149 Shabuhr I’s reliefs reinforce these statements, and after Julian’s defeat (363), Persia began to demand payments from Rome, ostensibly for upkeep of the Daryal Pass defenses and later to deal with the Hephthalites in the east. The Romans mostly complied, with Yazdgird II (441) and Kawad (502) launching campaigns when they refused. In 502, 530, and 540, Kawad and Husraw I ravaged the Roman east, withdrawing only after the Romans submitted gold payments.150 These recurring campaigns ceased only in 562 when the Romans again agreed to submit annual payments of around four hundred to five hundred pounds of gold. This amount was infinitesimal compared to the Persian economy and could not have appreciably impacted the Sasanian Empire’s fi nances.151 The primary significance was symbolic and performative: propaganda directed at internal elites, clients, and foreign enemies to the east. Brought back by the mule load, they testified to the king of kings’ and Iran’s divinely ordained supremacy as ultimate seat of world sovereignty and were tangible evidence of Rome’s subordination.152 The amounts demanded were thus small enough

that the Romans would consider it cheaper to pay them than to respond militarily, yet substantial enough to make a symbolic impact. While they might have pretended it did not bother them, it clearly did, not least because Sasanian political cosmology was evidently quite convincing to many of the peoples in the imperial interstices. At certain points, the Romans evidently decided that playing this unwilling role in the Sasanians’ political theater was doing more harm to their global prestige than risking outright war. While Husraw I concentrated on claiming Rome’s urban spaces and performances of power, Husraw II’s ambition was nothing less than expropriating the Roman emperor’s primary ideological foundation and source of supernatural power, that is, his privileged relationship to the Christian god. This is not to say that he converted or downplayed his role as a central figure within the Good Religion. Evocative of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, Husraw II presented himself as controlling and uniting all religious traditions, while rising above them and enjoying a unique divine favor that transcended any particular creed.153 The siting of major churches, patriarchal residences, and even some monasteries demonstrates that Christians had long engaged the cities’ nodal points of royal power. Husraw II’s patronage of convents, monasteries, and churches around the Cities as well as around other palatial sites like Qasr-e Shirin presage his later efforts to more aggressively leverage Christianity as a royal support and incorporate it permanently into the empire’s topography of power. Yet, in Husraw II’s later reign, Christianity moved from an important minority religion to an additional supernatural support for the empire and mark of divine favor for the king of kings. The monumental zone around Aspanbar played a key role in articulating Husraw II’s cosmological and imperial pretensions, and as such it was the location of many of the architectural “wonders” of his reign, preserved in the medieval sources.154 Husraw II built a special treasury to display the loot from his Roman campaigns, which was located somewhere within Aspanbar’s monumental sprawl. Tell Dhahab presents the most promising candidate site for this treasury. It was an exceptional structure that would have been suitably monumental for such a role. Given that the site itself has been almost completely destroyed, we cannot be absolutely certain that Tell Dhahab was one and the same as this treasury pavilion. However, all available evidence suggests that Tell Dhahab, like the last stage of Tell al-Dhabaʿi, grew from Husraw II’s postconquest patronage.

Husraw II’s treasury pavilion was a central architectural manifestation of his larger program of claiming the powers and prerogatives of Roman kingship, to rule as truly haft kišwar xwada¯y. The Syriac, Greek, and Arabic sources all suggest that the function of such a treasury was not so much to provide a secure storage space as to present a palatial pavilion meant to permanently showcase the fruits of Husraw II’s Roman victories, most notably the Holy Cross recently taken from Jerusalem.155 It should be noted that only the Christian sources suggest that Husraw II constructed a treasury exclusively for the Holy Cross. Taken with the other descriptions, it appears that the Holy Cross was one of many priceless objects that the court showcased. Although they give it primacy, the Christian sources also mention that Husraw II displayed the cross alongside such other spoils as liturgical plate. He paraded it as the centerpiece of his spoils of war, exhibiting it in his palace treasury and, in certain instances, apparently even appeared with it by his throne as a symbol of Iran’s world sovereignty when he held court.156 [The conquerors] prepared a number of chests and sent [the Holy Cross] together with countless vessels and precious objects to Husraw. When [the convoy] reached Yazdin, he organized a great feast. With the permission of the king, he took a piece of [the cross] and then sent it to the king. [The king] placed [the Holy Cross] in a position of honor with the sacred vessels in the new treasury that he had built at Ctesiphon.157

Husraw II fashioned the Holy Cross and the treasury that contained it into a multivalent symbol of and monument to triumph and divine favor that spoke to multiple constituencies. The king presented the Holy Cross to his Iranian elites as a trophy and symbol of Rome’s subjection, which was its dominant valence within courtly circles. From this point of view Husraw II seized what was, in effect, not just a symbol of Christianity, but Roman imperial victory. Yet his display of the Holy Cross, either at a purpose-built pavilion or within an audience hall, also offered a monument that could speak directly to the empire’s Christian constituency in a way that no previous Sasanian king had ever attempted.158 Only the Romans thought it was sacrilege that the Holy Cross should reside in the Empire of the Iranians. For Christian elites within the Sasanian Empire, including the Christian official Yazdin, who was responsible for building the treasury to house it, the cross could be taken as incontrovertible evidence that the Christian god’s divine favor had been permanently translated, along with the Holy Cross, to Iran. The Holy

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Cross became an additional source of supernatural power supporting the king, which he could wield to secure and expand his empire. Moreover, it was one of many tools that Husraw II deployed to gain the loyalty and cooperation of Christian communities within the empire to defend the empire against the Romans, not least the Armenian and Georgian nobility, as well as East Syriac Christians.159 As illustrated above, the king of kings began to distribute fragments of the cross and bestow them on those Christians who were held in high favor, complementing the more traditional gifts of marks of distinction such as precious textiles, diadems, belts, and silver plate. Husraw II took control of the triumphal and victorious role of the cross in “mass media” directed to Roman audiences as well. Husraw II was intimately acquainted with Roman regalia, as was the Roman court with the trappings of Sasanian royal power.160 Even the Book of Kings recounts an episode where Husraw II is gifted Roman imperial garb by Maurice and must carefully reconcile its Christian symbolism with his identity as a Sasanian king of kings.161 While it is a poetically embroidered post-Sasanian source, not to mention possibly generated from propaganda created by the court of his Parthian rival Wahram Chobin, it reflects true events and likely undercurrents early in the king’s reign. After his conquest of Egypt, Husraw II had no qualms about associating himself with a cross in coinage intended for his newly conquered territory. Instead of simply continuing Roman coinage unchanged, the mint of Sasanianoccupied Alexandria subtly yet deliberately fused Sasanian and Roman symbolics of power. The obverses of this bronze coinage portray a figure in Roman imperial costume based on the royal image of Heraclius wearing a diadem surmounted by a cross. The appeal and utility of the cross grew not from its pure religious symbology but its associations with Roman imperial power and legacy, not to mention the pragmatic concern of issuing a coinage with a visual characterization of royal power that was readily understandable to its constituency. The emperor’s head, however, is flanked by the sun and moon, a clear addition of Sasanian royal astral symbolism.162 This central visual and ideological feature of Sasanian royalty, kinship with the sun and moon, was certainly not bestowed on a Roman emperor. Instead the king of kings manifests himself as a Roman emperor,

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channeling both the sacred power of the cross and the “Good Luminaries.”163

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Our analysis of these newly founded cities shows that the Sasanians developed a systematic approach to founding cities and articulating an ideational landscape in their hinterland. All elements are not present, nor do they survive in every city, but correspondences across regions and reigns are compelling. Ardaxshir I and Shabuhr I not only fashioned a new vision of the past but innovated an urbanistic and architectural repertoire that inspired the activities of their successors. The founders of the dynasty used these techniques to reconstitute and reanimate the awe-inspiring, yet half-understood monumental patrimony of Pars, weaving together old and new sites, rituals, and images, as well as creating vital new sites of memory such as Ardaxshir-Xwarrah and Bishabuhr. Their rock reliefs, which fused the king’s identity with the landscape and use of Achaemenid ornamental material to negotiate his relationship with Iran’s ancient heritage, provided important precedents for Naqsh-e Rostam, the dynasty’s supreme site of memory.164 The shapes of Ardaxshir-Xwarrah and Weh-Ardaxshir offered a distinct and likely deliberate contrast with previous Iranian cities. These circular cities were much more difficult to lay out compared to a grid. The king of kings must have undertaken this considerable additional outlay of resources and logistical complexity primarily because of what he understood to be its symbolic power. Nevertheless, his early experimentations at Ardaxshir-Xwarrah established a foundational approach to developing ideational land- and cityscapes. These cities embraced fire temples and, at Weh-Ardaxshir, eventually churches and synagogues. While ArdaxshirXwarrah’s palaces stood further apart from the urban core, this separation reigned in all other cities used as royal residences. The rich topography of memory that the first two kings of kings wrought yielded a tangible and powerful experience of their vision of the past where the Sasanian, Achaemenid, and Kayanid dynasties were part of a coherent whole.165 Just as importantly, their sites and techniques enabled their successors to continually reconnect with this heritage and create new, powerful, and politically useful visions of the past themselves.

PART T WO

SACRED SPACES

In part 1, we investigated the formation of the Achaemenid topographies of power that established the material and conceptual foundations of Iranian kingship. We then analyzed the Seleucids’ subsequent strategic destruction and reorganization of this Persian imperial topography. As we saw, the Arsacids and the postsatrapal dynasties of the west built new visions of royal identity, and the ideas of Iranian kingship they engaged depended just as much on the legacy of the Seleucids as on that of the Achaemenids, whether this was acknowledged or not. This holds equally true for sacred spaces, as we will see. In part 1, we considered the role that patronage of non-Iranian temples played in gaining control of regional urban traditions in several places, most notably in Achamenid, Seleucid, and, to a lesser extent, Arsacid Babylonia. Notably absent from our analysis of the formation of early Achaemenid imperial space was a concomitant construction of Persian temples and spread of an official Achaemenid fire temple architecture. In part 2 we turn directly to this problem of Persian religious architecture and the nature of sacred spaces in Iranian religions. Before analyzing their role in supporting and enacting Iranian royal identities, by necessity we must confront a persistent problem in the study of both the art and the archaeology of ancient Iran and Western Asia: the role of sacred architecture in Iranian religions and the origins of Iranian temple architecture. Chapters 7–9 offer a new interpretive approach to a number of central questions that have vexed the study of Iranian architecture and religion for over a century: Did the Achaemenids build fi re temples in their homeland and across their provinces? If so, what did they look like? If not, then what sort of sacred architecture or spaces did they favor instead? How did the Seleucids engage with Persian religious traditions? What was the legacy of Persian religion in the lands of their former empire? These questions are impossible to answer if one begins, as much past scholarship has, with a methodological approach that expects (or retrojects) a stable “orthodox” religious and architectural tradition that was spread throughout Western Asia by the Achaemenids.1 Such an approach imposes, in essence, a developmental arc similar to those that prevailed in other ancient Mediterreanean or West-

ern Asian cultures. As we will see, the present state of evidence suggests something quite different. Many of the sites and structures discussed in these and the foregoing chapters have, in past scholarhip, carried the designation of, or were understood to reflect, Achaemenid fire temples. However, archaeological evidence of monumental Zoroastrian fi re temples appears unproblematically and in abundance only under the Sasanians (224–642 CE).2 The ranks of these pre-Sasanian fire temples have thinned considerably as old sites have been subjected to new dating technologies and more critical analyses.3 It is still too soon to write defi nitively about the early development of the pre-Sasanian Zoroastrian fi re temple, although a basic picture is beginning to emerge. Of the temples identified as such in this study, none originally were created as fire temples, although a few were adapted to this function at a later date with the Sasanians’ influence or compulsion. Those pre-Sasanian structures that have been reliably dated and show secure evidence of a fire cult follow a different architectural tradition unrelated to that of Achaemenid or Seleucid sacred architecture.4 The Sasanians were ultimately responsible for the spread of a different type of sacred architecture that, while surely rooted in late Parthian architecture, became closely associated with their new “orthodox” fi re cult: the chahar taq (cˇa¯ha¯r t. a¯q). The chahar taq, a centralized domed space with a vault supported by squinches on four piers, figured prominently in late Arsacid and early Sasanian palatial architecture, and the early Sasanians recruited it to serve as the key feature of a new, standard type of fire temple. Several grand, monumental sanctuaries that the Sasanians sponsored outside of Pa¯rs incorporate this novel style of temple architecture for the new orthodox Sasanian fi re cult.5 This style of domed architecture is ubiquitous throughout the Sasanian province of Pars, appearing in both large and small structures. This new type of fi re temple architecture and fi re cult was imprinted on a variety of sanctuaries as the Sasanians systematically seized or destroyed all sites and traditions that could buttress a claim to royal power.6 In the chapters that follow I offer a new history of Iranian sacred architecture, which tells a story of

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innovation and reinvention rather than simple continuity. I argue that we must jettison the idea of a monolithic tradition of Persian fire temples spread by the Achaemenids and concentrate instead on a more diverse, yet empirically grounded, body of evidence. After exploring the nature of Persian sacred spaces in the imperial center, we examine the processes by which the Achaemenids and their satrapal or elite agents imposed Iranian cultic significances on non-Iranian provincial landscapes. In some cases this involved implanting Persian cults wholesale, although in most cases the empire simply interpolated some sort of Persian identity into non-Iranian regional cults through more subtle means, such as patronage or cultic participation. The massive changes that the Seleucids wrought form a major pivot point in this story and mark the first time we have evidence of the

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implantation of a centrally conceived tradition of temple architecture. We analyze the impact of Seleucid sacred architecture on Iranian sacred architecture as well as the Seleucid engagement with Persian cultic traditions, though here again the evidence tells a story that departs from previous narratives just as much as the Seleucid official style departed from traditional Greek architectural forms. Finally, we consider how postsatrapal dynasts cultivated and augmented Persian cultic identities within their kingdoms, at times even reinventing or manufacturing new ritual and architectural forms and deploying them to gain control of ancient Iranian cultic traditions. While the trajectory that our evidence traces is often discontinuous, in all cases sacred spaces and structures were co-constituent of Iranian religiosity and of Persian royal identity for patrons, practitioners, and observers.

CHAP TER SEVEN

Persian Religion and Achaemenid Sacred Spaces

In contrast to many other ancient Western Asian religious traditions, Zoroastrianism did not develop a unified tradition of temple architecture that evolved continuously through all periods.1 The Persians under the Achaemenids cultivated a vast array of ritual practices, which they staged both in their vicinity of their palaces and at sites of man-made and natural beauty. In their provinces they engaged the sacred landscapes and structures of their subject peoples, offering sacrifices and patronage at a variety of sites, including temples. However, they did not create and impose a tradition of fire temple architecture on their empire. It is important to assert this at the outset because throughout the last century scholars have repeatedly assumed the existence of—and often attempted to reconstruct—a transmillennial tradition of Iranian temple architecture built to house a sacred, ever-burning fire in the manner of a late antique or medieval Zoroastrian fi re temple, retrojecting them onto the ancient evidence.2 A more problematic tradition of scholarship sought the roots of a primordial “Aryan” architecture and religion in these imagined Iranian temple traditions. Eventually allied with similar endeavors in the Third Reich, some of these early scholars, such as Josef Strzygowski, Walther Hinz, and Stig Wikander, studied Iranian religion and architecture as part of reconstructing a quintessential “Aryan” architecture.3 The Austrian historian of art and architecture Josef Strzygowski produced the most comprehensive system and argued that the essential characteristic of primordial Iranian (i.e., Aryan) architecture was a centralized structure built on a “radiating plan” (strahlenförmige Grundriss), which could be discerned in the architecture of any “Aryan” people, from Iranians to

Armenians to Germans.4 As a testament to his conviction that his scholarly work was playing a vital role in connecting German culture to its Aryan roots, he even proposed that an “Aryan” fire temple be built over the ruins of Vienna’s former Jewish Ghetto.5 Although they might have disagreed on finer points, various strains of scholarship wove these disparate structures together into a linear, developmental architectural and religious tradition and traced its influence thence on non-Iranian architecture and religion.6 Scholarship from the last century enlisted a rotating cast of structures as potential Achaemenid fire temples and, at times, vainly sought to descry traces of anachronistic ritual activities, architectural forms, or race in the archaeological evidence. These included, among others, ˉ yadana at Susa, the Ka’ba-ye Zardosht at the so-called A Naqsh-e Rostam, the Zendan-e Solayman and the mudbrick terrace of the “Sacred Precinct” at Pasargadae, various structures at Persepolis, including Xerxes’s “Gate of Nations,” the courtyard of the hadiš, Kuh-e Khwaja in Sistan, and Takht-e Solayman in Iranian Azerbaijan. Scholars often tried to explain the sites’ heterogeneity of architectural forms through multiple social, functional, or, in the case of Nazi-era scholarship, racial categories. All the sites and structures these earlier strains of scholarship cited as the earliest Persian fire temples have since proven either to have served something other than a fire cult or to have been built well after the Achaemenid era, or both. Of these, scholarship depended ˉ yadana at Susa, particularly heavily on the so-called A as it was the only site thought to be from the Achaemenid era that presented a structure that appeared to match later, post-Achaemenid ground plans.7 The late

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nineteenth-century explorer and self-taught archaeologist Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy explored this structure using primitive methodologies.8 Dieulafoy arrived at an Achaemenid date primarily because the structure incorporated Achaemenid column bases and rested on a gravel foundation, a building technique now known to have persisted in the region well into the Parthian era.9 It long served as the evidentiary linchpin; however, later analysis of the site’s ceramics and architectural members by more competent archaeologists revealed that the structure in fact dates to the late Seleucid or early Parthian period (ca. second century BCE) and merely incorporated mismatched Achaemenid bases spoliated from nearby Susa.10 Its ground plan corresponds to postAchaemenid artistocratic residences excavated across northern and eastern Iran and represents an equally likely function.11 Although this evidentiary cornerstone has long since been removed, the scholarly edifice built on it has only recently collapsed fully. Paralleling this largely Western European debate and later spliced with it, mid- to late twentieth-century Soviet archaeology put forth a heterogeneous grouping of sites and structures as contenders for the title of earliest Iranian fi re temple. These include the mid-secondto early fi rst-millennium sites of Jarkutan in northern Bactria (Uzbekistan); Togolok-1, Togolok-21, and Gonur in Margiania (Turkmenistan); and a structure from an earlier level of Kazakl’i-yatkan, all associated with the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC).12 Just as contemporary scholarly consensus has rejected the excavators’ attempts to connect the monumental architectural features of BMAC with an introduction of early Iranian or Indo-Iranian culture, none of the early “fi re temples” from Bactria, Margiana, and Chorasmia can be associated with Iranian cults.13 Needless to say, these sites have nothing to do with post-Achaemenid iterations of Zoroastrian cult. Without clear archaeological evidence or indigenous textual sources, scholarship has had to come to terms with a variety of conflicting textual sources.14 The various components of the Avesta, even in its youngest sections, contain no mention of temples, fire or otherwise, and the Achaemenid archival sources and inscriptions mention sacrifices and cult sites only generally. The earliest and most influential classical author for both ancient and modern authors is Herodotus. In a short excursus, Herodotus describes “Persian” religion, by which he appears to mean the religious customs of several Iranian peoples. He famously states: “It is not [the Persians’] custom to set up statues, temples (neˉous) or

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altars, but consider those who do to be foolish” (1.131). A handful of later classical authors, some writing before the fall of the Achaemenids, show the influence of, or at least do not contradict, Herodotus, stressing that the Persians sacrifice in open air.15 Herodotus’s clear and simple statement seems to confirm the lack of archaeological evidence of a widespread system of Achaemenid state fire or image temples, though it is contradicted by archaeological and sillographical evidence of other forms of religious architecture such as altars, platforms, and towers. While it neither mentions a “temple” (naos) nor even a “sanctuary” (hieron), a fragment of the Babyloniaca of Berossus, a Babylonian priest who wrote a history of Babylon in Greek for Antiochos I (281–61 BCE), has been especially important for scholarly debate on Persian religion.16 The passage states: [The Persians] did not believe in wooden or stone images of the gods but in fi re and water like the philosophers. Later, however, after many years they began to worship statues in human form as Berossus reports in the third book of his Chaldaean history. Artaxerxes, the son of Darius, the son of Ochus, introduced this practice. He was the fi rst to set up an image of Aphrodite Anaitis [Ana¯hita¯] in Babylon and to require such worship from the Susians, Ecbatanians, Persians and Bactrians and from Damascus and Sardis.17

Berossus only mentions that Artaxerxes II introduced the veneration of a statue (to agalma) of the goddess Ana¯hita¯, not temples. Nevertheless, scholarship repeatedly used this passage as the basis for arguing (1) that Artaxerxes II introduced temples into Persian religion, and (2), occasionally, that these temples housed a fi re cult along with a cult statue, as well as (3) that these temples evolved continuously into the Sasanian period. The dominant interpretation of these texts that continues to affect scholarship arose from the arguments of Stig Wikander and Mary Boyce. They, and those who followed them, generally accepted Herodotus and held that the Persians did not use temples until the time of Artaxerxes II. Wikander argued that a cult of fire “must have” joined Artaxerxes II’s image cult of Ana¯hita¯ in a temple, since he believed this to be the primordial Iranian cultic tradition.18 According to Wikander, this combination thus created the first “fire temples.” Building on earlier scholarship, most notably that of Kurt Erdman (1941), Wikander assumed that this late Achaemenid temple architecture established a pan-Iranian tradition that evolved continuously through the Sasanian era. While generally accepting Wikander’s interpretation of Berossus, in the late twentieth century Mary Boyce, the influential scholar of the history of

Zoroastrianism, modified this theory to accord with her own views on the antiquity of contemporary Zoroastrian practices. She hypothesized that a rival temple cult of fire that excluded images “must have” emerged from an offended “orthodox” Zoroastrian community to counter Artaxerxes II’s introduction of statues and, presumably, temples.19 This, she argued, was the genesis of the true Zoroastrian fi re temple, a tradition that she argued persisted in purity alongside the heterodox “image temples” until the Sasanians suppressed the worship of cult statues in late antiquity. Despite the persistent influence of the ideas of Boyce and, through them, Wikander, no archaeological or indigenous textual evidence of any kind corroborates their claims that grand, officially sponsored Achaemenid Zoroastrian fire temples were the genesis of a Pan-Iranian tradition of temple architecture. Such expectations stemmed in no small measure from a desire to trace back to a unified and stable transmillenial Iranian religious tradition, either in search of a primordial Aryan religion or, less nefariously, to establish the antiquity of contemporary Zoroastrianism. Boyce in particular often mapped contemporary Zoroastrian practices onto those of the ancient world, filling in evidentiary blanks with the traditions of the Zoroastrian communities in Iran and India that she studied ethnographically and with whom she developed close relationships.20 While the Achaemenids promoted and actively shaped the Zoroastrian religion, one cannot simply label Achaemenid religious beliefs and practices as “Zoroastrian” without important qualifications, given this heavy historiographical baggage.

Achaemenid Temple Patronage Temple building and restoration were among the most important means by which ancient Western Asian sovereigns publicly displayed piety and made their mark on the built and natural environment.21 Royal patronage of huge temple complexes was especially prominent and persistent in ancient Babylon and Egypt as well as Elam, the region whose people and culture most profoundly impacted and guided the genesis and development of the early Persian Empire. 22 A wide variety of sacred structures flourished in Elamite religion, and the preAchaemenid Elamite language contained a rich and nuanced vocabulary for various types of temples, shrines, and chapels.23 The vast majority of these Elamite sacred structures are known only from the inscriptions on the bricks that once constituted them. While

most Elamite temples are lost, the Middle Elamite site of ˇ og¯a¯ Zanbı¯l) preserved the actual ground Choga Zanbil (C plans of a number of temples, which, by and large, relate to Mesopotamian architectural traditions.24 The Achaemenids did not adopt this once widespread and important institution. No archaeological evidence of an Achaemenid-era, Elamite-style temple has yet emerged in Elam or Parsa, be it in the form of an actual site or even just a few inscribed bricks. In contrast to the royal traditions that they supplanted, the Achaemenids did not leave us vast temple complexes with towering architecture. This has often puzzled scholars expecting or hoping to find grand, royally sponsored fire temples that could stand as counterparts to the great temple complexes of Egypt, Babylonia, or Greece. This also marks an important point of contrast with both the Seleucids and the Sasanians, who each introduced a distinctive type of religious architecture across their Western Asian empires.25 The fact is, the Achaemenid kings did not impose a uniform system of sacred architecture throughout their empire. In contrast, the scale, lavishness, and relative ubiquity of their palatial structures overshadow the types of sacred structures and spaces they did build in Iran. Within the wider province of Achaemenid Parsa, no evidence has yet emerged of an Achaemenid structure that functioned as a Zoroastrian fi re temple or housed the cult statue of an Iranian deity in the architectural and ritual tradition of a Mesopotamian, Elamite, or Greek temple until after the fall of the dynasty.26 Achaemenid patronage and building practices in their homeland contrast sharply with their patronage of temples dedicated to indigenous cults in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt. There they supported priestly hierarchies or sponsored repairs and small-scale additions. Darius I and Xerxes I mention temple restorations programmatically in the Babylonian or Elamite versions of certain royal inscriptions, and archaeological evidence across the empire attests to actual patronage both great and small across their empire.

Temple Architecture and Iranian Religion The first temples that appear in a region and in a time period securely inhabited by Iranian-speaking peoples, and thus likely built and used by Iranians, were excavated at the site of Tepe Nush-e Jan in Media. The site yielded evidence of two temples, the “Central Temple” and the “Western Temple,” which were in use sometime during the seventh century BCE.27 The exterior of the

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Central Temple presented an elaborate, roughly symmetrical cruciform shape, while the Western Temple had an irregular ground plan formed from two rectangular sections of different sizes joined together. Although the ground plans of two structures diverge, they shared a number of internal features, which indicates that their architects and patrons intended them to serve a similar cultic tradition. Both temples have a single entrance, an entrance corridor, an antechamber with a spiral ramp leading to a second story above the antechamber, a large central sanctuary decorated with niches, a lockable door to the sanctuary, and a single freestanding fi re holder located to the left of the entrance to the sanctuary.28 The excavators recovered no evidence of the deity or deities honored at the temples. Only the altar might suggest a relationship with Zoroastrian practices; although this is far from conclusive, it is not impossible.29 While the shape of the altar, roughly square with a stepped fire capital, evokes later Achaemenid fire altars, the Central Temple’s fire holder was made of plastered mud brick versus stone. In contrast to remains and sculptural portrayals of Achaemenid fire holders, the shaft of that of Tepe Nush-e Jan was very short, raising the top of the altar only .85 meters from floor level. At the end of its life, the Central Temple was decommissioned and carefully sealed up by filling it with shale and immuring the top of the walls with brick, a procedure that recalls Mesopotamian decommissioning practices.30 The altar was given special attention to ensure that it was protected. A small, .80-meterhigh mud-brick wall was built around it, and the space between the altar and the protecting wall was carefully filled with shale fragments.31 The external features of these temples recall aspects of Urartian temples, and their offset sanctuary entrances evoke the Elamite temples from Choga Zanbil, which are among the few Elamite temples that have been excavated. While certain features, such as a divided inner sanctuary and niches, vaguely parallel those features in Mesopotamian temples, neither presents the typical Mesopotamian straight-axis Langraum ground plan, nor did their cultic furniture recall Mesopotamian temple furnishings.32 The exterior plan and tower-like appearance of the Central Temple vaguely evokes Urartian temples, but the overall design of the temples finds no ready parallel at any other site.33 Their architectural traditions grew from ancient Western Asian architectural traditions generally but were not rooted in any one exclusively. While Boyce dismissed them entirely, preferring to explain them away as foreign temples introduced by a

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Median king’s non-Iranian queen, others argued exactly the opposite and proclaimed them to be the fi rst unquestionably orthodox Zoroastrian fi re temples. 34 Neither of these absolutist pronouncements is correct.35 Although they did not provide sufficient evidence to identify the exact nature of the cults they hosted, the temples at Tepe Nuš-e Ja¯n clearly show that some Medes adopted architecture for cultic purposes and this may have had some relationship to Iranian religiosity. They are important insofar as they force scholarship to nuance and reconsider the scope and accuracy of the claims of Herodotus and other classical sources. Most significantly, the architectural and cultic designs of the temples do not reappear in the Achaemenid era, and, as far as we currently know, the temples did not ultimately participate in a larger, continuous tradition of Persian or Iranian sacred architecture that the Achaemenids themselves promoted and spread.36 Careful observers of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions have pointed out that Darius I never boasts of building or restoring temples. 37 The only mention of temples arises in a passage in the Elamite and Akkadian versions of his Bisotun inscription, which was written for the whole empire and disseminated widely beyond Persia. Darius I disseminated the text of the inscription throughout the empire, with a fragmentary Aramaic version appearing in Egypt.38 Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian versions of the text appear as monumental inscriptions alongside figural sculpture in a monument that was carved into the living rock at the site of Bisotun in Media and installed along the sacred way of Babylon.39 Here Darius I states that he rebuilt the sacred sites that Gaumata destroyed.40 The Elamite version calls these sites “temples,” as does the Akkadian version (Achaemenid Elamite ANzí-ia-anAN: ziyan, lit. “places of seeing [the gods],” “temples”; Babylonian é.˹meš˺ šá DINGIR. ME š “houses of the gods”). While the Elamite and Akkadian versions agree, the Old Persian version, instead, chooses a more open-ended term from the root yad “to sacrifice”: a¯yadana¯ (“places of sacrifice,” “cult sites”). Darius I does not identify these sacred sites ritually, geographically, or architecturally, despite the fact that he carefully recorded all other details of the rebellious lands elsewhere in his inscriptions. Rather than a specific record of individual restorations, the mention of “temple restorations” joins a list of other wrongs that Darius I made right and like them was intended to be a programmatic demonstration of good kingship understandable throughout the empire. Darius I continued the Persian policy of subsidizing various cults throughout the empire

after the reconquest, many no doubt including temples. As a programmatic statement of good, divinely inspired kingship, this passage was adapted to the cultural idioms of the regions where it was sent.41 Readers of the text would expect that the king would restore or purify a temple if he would act in accordance with the actions of ancient Elamite, Babylonian, or Egyptian royal precedent, while an open-air cult site would make sense within Iranian religious experience and landscape. Temples (Elamite ziyan) did not play an ubiquitous role in Persian religion as documented in the Persepolis archives, yet a few tantalizing hints suggest that Parsa might not have been entirely devoid of temples in the traditional Elamite or Babylonian sense. Three tablets from the Persepolis archives use the word ziyan, though none document that ritual occurred at them, and only one connects the word with a toponym. This sanctuary is given 9,405 quarts of wine from the official distribution system.42 Unfortunately this place-name, Harkurtiš, is not otherwise attested in the archive or located.43 If they did not arise from a scribe’s idiosyncratic desire to use a specifically Elamite cultural reference to refer to a different type of sacred site or structure (e.g., the Persian word *bagina), these rare appearances of the word ziyan could perhaps attest to early Elamite temples that remained in service or to a temple of an expatriate community. In this regard, a handful of temples to Mesopotamian gods seem to have existed on the Iranian plateau before the rise of the Achaemenid Empire.44 It is clear that foreign gods were present in Iran and considered to be the internal affairs of expatriate communities, but their relationship to actual structures is unclear. In the Achaemenid Empire, expatriate communities of kurtaš laborers, including Babylonians, Assyrians, and Greeks, brought their own religious traditions to Parsa, and it is possible that some might become attached to such places of worship. However, these workers could be transferred throughout the empire, and they appear in the archives designated only by their documentary origin, thus the last place they were sent from, not their place of birth. For the sixteen years of Darius I’s reign that the Persepolis archive covers, we have no explicit record that these cults were integrated into or supported by the official state distribution system. Outside the homeland, however, the major cults of Babylon, Sardis, and Egypt received state sponsorship, suggesting that a cult’s relative importance was more crucial than whether it was “foreign” or not. We have later hints of Iranian sanctuaries in classical textual sources, including Polybius, who describes the

current condition of Hellenistic Iran; Arrian, who describes events during Alexander’s campaigns; and Plutarch, who purports to describe events in the Persian Empire or conquest of Alexander, though writing in the Roman period.45 This body of textual sources comes from the early Roman period, well after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire. It is only at this point that we begin to hear mention of Persian “sanctuaries” (hiera) or, more rarely, a “temple” (naos). In Media, textual sources suggest that the Seleucids maintained (and periodically plundered) a temple to Artemis/Ana¯hita¯ near Ecbatana.46 Unfortunately, no archaeological evidence of this structure has been discovered to corroborate the textual evidence. It is significant, however, that sources mention a temple in this region only from the Seleucid era on, which suggests that some of these sites received temples only in the post-Achaemenid period.47 Taken altogether, the archaeological, archival, and epigraphic evidence presents one very important fact: while temples might have existed on the Iranian plateau, extensive temple building in the manner of the kings of Elam was one aspect of Elamite culture that the Achaemenids evidently did not apply in their home province of Parsa.48 Given the profound impact of Elamite culture on other aspects of Persian culture, this state of affairs might seem anomalous, but only if one assumes absolute continuity between Persian religion and pre-Achaemenid Elamite religion and with highland Elamo-Persian practices and those of the lowlands. While the Persian Empire in general cultivated and reinvigorated many aspects of the previous eras’ religious practices, we have no evidence that the new Teispid and Achaemenid royal families of Parsa continued the traditions of temple building and restoration that marked Elamite royal patronage practices in the Early and Middle Elamite eras. We can only speculate whether this was because temples were never prominent in Parsa in the Middle or Neo-Elamite periods, or if this change arose from a cultural shift.49 The fact that we have no evidence of pre-Achaemenid Elamite temples in the core of Parsa compared to the lowlands would suggest that this was the normal state of affairs in the highlands before the rise of the Persian Empire.

Understanding Persian Sacred Spaces and Religious Architecture While not involving fi re or image temples per se, the available archaeological and archival evidence of Persian religious activity and patronage nevertheless

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presents a coherent picture of Persian sacred architecture and ritual in their homeland of Parsa and a few of their provincial centers. The Persepolis archival tablets allude to a rich repertoire of Persian rituals performed at sites within Parsa. These include daily offerings, huge sacrifices, and funerary cults. In a few instances the tablets provide clues as to the topographical context of the rituals. The most commonly occurring ritual is the lan, or “offering” ritual, which was performed with bread, beer or wine, and occasionally sheep or goats.50 The lan was a common sacrifice that individual cultic personnel supported by the state performed monthly or even daily for a diverse assortment of Elamo-Persian gods.51 The offerings (daušiyam or simply gal “rations”) allocated for these sacrifices served as allowances for the priests performing them. Although some erroneously argued that the lan was a “Zoroastrian state ritual” celebrated for Ahura Mazda, the Persians performed the lan for a wide variety of gods, the vast majority of whom were nonIranian.52 Furthermore, unlike other rituals, the lan is not mentioned in the Old Persian royal inscriptions when the king sacrifices to Ahura Mazda, which one would expect if it were the chief state ritual. Though they were performed less frequently than the daily lan offerings, the Persepolis archives indicates that the Achaemenids’ most important, prestigious, not to mention expensive, religious rituals were large-scale royal sacrifices followed by massive feasts. These include the supreme šip sacrifice and the bakadaušiyam (Old Pers. *bagadauçiya-). The bakadaušiyam also involved a large amount of commodities and a massive feast, though without the supremely royal scale and connotations.53 Even if they offer detailed accounts of the commodities needed to perform them, the Persepolis Fortification Tablets do not contain direct descriptions of the ritual protocol of these sacrifices. They do, however, often record the names of the sites where the rituals were staged and some of the features of those sites. Internal evidence in the Persepolis archives, related archaeological sites, and classical sources that reflect these institutions flesh out these crucial yet terse indigenous records, and all place them in open-air settings.54 This combined evidentiary stream presents the elaborate open-air sacrificial feast known in Elamite as the šip. The Persian king or his agents celebrated it for a large assembly of people arranged in concentric rings, with the most important individuals at the center and altars standing at the center of the assembled crowd.55 Depending on the community for whom the sacrifice was staged and who was staging it, be it the community

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of workers, court functionaries and nobles in attendance at a specific royal residence, the Persian army on campaign, or assembled representatives, the feast had the power to portray the empire in microcosm. In the many archival records extant that record provisions for the šip, temples (Elamite ziyan) do not play a role. Ahura Mazda was not the only god to receive such an elaborate sacrifice in the archival sources. Like the lan the Persians performed the šip for a variety of gods other than Ahura Mazda, who is named individually much less often than Elamite gods. However, when a king specifies the type of sacrifice he performed for Ahura Mazda in a royal inscription, he refers to it in Elamite as the šip. While the Old Persian versions of Achaemenid royal inscriptions simply say that kings of kings generically “sacrificed” (yad) to Ahura Mazda, the Elamite translations often provide more nuance as they offer correspondences with the more varied Elamite ritual terminology used in the Persepolis archival tablets. For example, in the Old Persian version of Darius I’s famous inscription from Susa (DSf), the king simply states that he sacrificed to Ahura Mazda (yad).56 The Elamite version of this inscription provides an equally generic wording. Darius I states, “I gave ‘offerings’ [gal] to Auramazda¯,” without specifying the type of ritual(s) in which offerings were consumed. 57 In contrast, in an inscription preserved in many copies, Xerxes boasts that he destroyed a dai̯ vada¯na (“place [for the worship] of the demons”), purified the site, and sacrificed there to Ahura Mazda.58 While the Old Persian version again simply uses the generic verb “to sacrifice” (yad), the Elamite version specifies the type of ritual used to worship both the daivas and Ahura Mazda: it calls them a šip, the grand feast celebrated for many people, which seamlessly connects to other mentions of this supreme example of Elamo-Persian religiosity as witnessed in the Persepolis archives. It claims that at the daivada¯na a šip feast was performed for the daivas, and after purifying it, Xerxes “performed for Auramazda¯ his [appropriate]’ šip” (Elamite šibbe hudda).59 Scholarship has often sought to attach various archaeological sites to Xerxes’s daivada¯na passage, from the temple of Marduk in Babylon to the Parthenon in Athens.60 However, the inscription itself describes the site and ritual in characteristically Elamo-Persian terms: the inscription does not describe a foreign cult or ritual but a Persian one. The Babylonian version essentially calques it, indicating it was a Persian concept. In describing the place, the Old Persian and Elamite versions both use the word daivada¯na, “place of the daivas,” which the Elamite

incorporates untranslated as da-a-ma-da-na, while the Babylonian version translates the term as bı¯t lemnu¯ti, “house of evil (creatures).”61 According to the inscription the daivas and Ahura Mazda were worshipped at exactly the same location, with exactly the same type of ritual: a šip, the specifically Elamo-Persian cultural and ritual idiom recognizable from the Persepolis archive.62 In order to accommodate a šip it would most likely have been a sacred site of the type that we know accommodated other šips: an open-air sanctuary.63 One final important point: in stressing that the sacred site and the ritual were Persian, this is not to say that daiva worship or such an actual site ever existed or such an event ever took place.64 As with Darius I’s restoration of temples, such a localized rebellion might have taken place; however, it could be more useful and appropriate in such an inscription to present it as an open-ended statement of good, divinely inspired kingship. Like Darius I’s a¯yadana passage, if he wished to, Xerxes clearly would have named the land of the quashed rebellion with the same level of specificity that he used to name all the lands that bore him tribute at the inscription’s start. The fundamental goal of the dai̯ vada¯na passage was not to record events but to impose a religious duality on political activity in the realm: the king worshipped Ahura Mazda, and the Great God guided his actions. Any rebellious person or province worshipped the daivas, and the daivas were behind any rebellion against the imperial order.

Persian Sanctuaries and Their Natural and Architectural Focal Points While archaeological evidence of official Achaemenid fire temples is lacking, a relative abundance of archaeological, textual, and sillographic evidence documents Persian open-air sanctuaries. At this point they represent the only securely Persian sacred space. Those that leave archaeological traces consist of precincts surrounded by some sort of barrier with support buildings. The most lavish incorporate altars or some other special structure, such as a tomb monument or a tower, as an important focus. For many, both in the Persian homeland and in colonies, altars or natural features such as lakes, mountains, rivers, or trees were the true focal point instead of any single structure. Paradise enclosures are conspicuous for hosting the most lavish sacrifices. The sites that host the šip and bakadaušiyam sacrifices most often in the Persepolis tablets, such as Tikranuš, Appištapdan, Batrakataš (Pasargadae), and

Persepolis itself, were provisioned with either a palace, paradise (Old Pers. *paradai̯ da-, Elamite partetaš,), or both.65 The presence of paradises or royal palaces underscores the supremely royal nature of both the sites and the sacrifice no matter if it was officiated by the king of kings himself or one of his proxies, such as the chief official overseeing Parsa, Pharnakes (Parnakka), during much of the Persepolis archive’s life. When approaching these sites, we should keep in mind their “multifunctionality.” Paradises could contain or be associated with everything from storehouses to palaces to sanctuaries with exquisite sacred architecture.66 The archaeological, textual, and archival evidence related to Pasargadae shows that it contained all such features. Of the šip sites recorded in the Persepolis archives, Pasargadae is the only one that has been localized and excavated. The complex preserves a large open space that accommodated these activities and incorporated ritual furniture stemming from Iranian religious sensibilities not directly mentioned in the Elamite texts. The sacred precinct at Pasargadae consisted of a large open plain surrounded by low walls and two 2-meter limestone plinths set 9 meters apart, both supported by foundations.67 Stairs lead up to one of these plinths, and together with the altar they evoke the reliefs on the Achaemenid tombs of a king standing on a platform worshipping a raised altar holding a blazing fire. At the western end of the precinct rose a terrace measuring 74.85 by 50.40–46.65 meters, whose five levels were constructed from dry-stone masonry with a mud-brick level on top.68 Herzfeld, and many following him, wished to reconstruct the terrace as supporting a stone structure mirroring the Tomb of Cyrus, thus providing an architectural reflection of the tomb on the opposite end of the complex. The mud-brick upper terrace, however, bore no evidence of foundations that supported such a structure, either of stone or mud brick. Needless to say, the design of the terrace does not resemble the stereobate of the tomb. The size of the mud bricks from the upper terrace indicated only that it could have been built any time within the Achaemenid or Seleucid period, though more likely in the Seleucid era. No matter when it was constructed, the design of the terrace related to the layout and, thus, activities of the enclosed precinct below, providing either a raised focal point or elevated viewing area for proceedings. This precinct lay outside the boundary of the palatial district, indicating that the Persian kings built it to accommodate a wider constituency than those who were allowed into the actual palace-garden-tomb complex.

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A number of other Achaemenid sites have been described as open-air ritual centers, though no archaeological, archival, or textual evidence directly documents the type of ritual practices performed there in the Achaemenid era. While we cannot reconstruct the exact ritual protocols, our sources agree that Persian religion used the landscape as a stage for ritual performance. Persian sacred space was coextensive with the natural environment—the landscape was at once a ritual implement and a ritual participant. Mountains, bodies of water, and trees were important focal points of Persian religiosity. Such activity appears across our sources, from the archival material to Herodotus’s famous statement that the Persians sacrifice “on the highest peaks to the heavens which they call Zeus.”69 The Persepolis archival texts record sacrifices on or at mountains and rivers, where they appear to be a familiar, though of course not exclusive, feature of Persepolis’s ritual repertoire.70 However, these “mountain sacrifices” and “river sacrifices” do not appear to be offerings rendered to the natural feature, but rather a specific type of priestly sacrifice supported by the Achaemenid royal distribution system.71 It is likely that the Median site of Bisotun (Old Pers. *Bagasta¯na) was already sacred in the Achaemenid era, and this contributed to Darius I’s desire to carve his monumental rock relief there. The Achaemenid court physician Ctesias describes the mountain as “sacred to Zeus,” and the site of a paradeisos.72 The sanctuary precinct walls are still visible in aerial imagery and ran from one cliff spur to another, enclosing an area approximately 180 meters.73 Within the precinct a sloping hillside leads up to a rubble field, which, in turn, abuts the cliffs. Two artificial terraces mark the hillside with evidence of cult activity on the southern ledge of the upper terrace. A rock-cut stair leads from the rubble field to a third zone that looked down upon Darius I’s rock relief and preserves evidence of cult activity. The natural, open-air, cliff-side terraces, which have holes carved in them, are the only evidence of cult. These have been called variously “fi re bowls” or foundation holes, though they could just as well date from a later period or be signal fi res.74 Ganjnama, also in Media, was a location of two rock-cut royal inscriptions carved by Darius I and Xerxes that put an indelible Achaemenid mark at the site of a waterfall on a mountain pass.75 Rock-cut holes in the natural open-air terrace above the site have been associated with ritual activity, which is likely, given the proximity to the royal inscriptions.76 While such a sacred space would not leave many archae-

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ological traces, the Achaemenid rupestrian inverventions at these sites would make the ephemeral ritual connection between the sacred mountain and a mountain sacrifice more permanent. In addition to making sites visible, such royal religious practices were a means to wrest sites that had received cultic attention away from previous regimes. The remnants of Assyrian reliefs at the sources of springs or rivers within the empire provided precedents and challenges.77

Towers and Fire Altars The corpus of ritual scenes from the Persepolis archival seal impressions provides an especially detailed body of primary-source evidence of the ritual and monumental environment that extended beyond the confines of the great palaces or paradise enclosures. These have been made accessible and coherent through the pioneering work of Mark Garrison.78 The seal imprints largely cohere with the indigenous archival and textual evidence: they do not portray fi re or image temples conforming to Elamite, Mesopotamian, or late antique Zoroastrianism, but rather depict open-air sacrifice focused on various types of altars. The glyptic evidence portrays two general groups of scenes: rituals performed by figures in crowns and royal Persian robes, and rituals conducted by individuals in normal Iranian trouser suits. The rarer, more elaborate representations of royal individuals portray them standing before a coffered structure with two crenellations ending in fi nials. PFS 11* and PTS 22 are rare in that the crenellated tower structure has a spherical device in the central space. In three other examples a vegetal motif rises from the center, but never fi re.79 Those that portray scenes of nonroyal officiants show individuals in procession to, or standing before, a blazing altar. Rather than holding a fire for veneration, these altars were clearly meant for immolating sacrificial offerings. In eleven particularly fi ne seals the fi re altar appears before a taller, coffered structure or “tower.” About half of these seals pairing the blazing altars and towers portray the towers with crenellations, while the other half show two triangular masses that form a V-shape. There is no distinction in scene type between the crenellated and V-shaped towers, but there is no fire on top. A fire always appears on the stepped altars, but a fire never appears on the taller, coffered “towers.” The officiants often carry libation vessels, pour offerings into the fi re, drink ritual offerings themselves, and lead sacrificial animals to the altar. Although it runs counter to older assumptions that the

FIGURE 7.1 Line drawing of Achaemenid seals (top to bottom, left to right): BNF Pauvert 16; Walters Art Gallery inv. 42.698; Gordion 2342 SS 100 [after Dusinberre 2008]; PFS 11* on NN 939; PFUTS 111 on PFUT 698–201; PFUTS 91 on PFUT 691–103; PFUTS 33 on PFUT 845–101; PFS 75 on PFUT 2146–105; PFUTS 147 on PFUT 547–201; PFUT 110s on PFUT 698–101 [all after Garrison 2012]. Orinst. P 57062.

FIGURE 7.2 Façade of the tomb attributed to Xerxes I, Naqsh-e Rostam.

Achaemenids followed the same sort of Zoroastrian prohibitions as medieval Zoroastrians, such seals portray the officiants killing the animals with knifes, and some even feature a fire consuming an entire animal.80 Fire altars play a prominent role in many of the Persian seals and seal impressions.81 A number of seal impressions portray images of male figures standing to the left facing a fi re altar with an upward-tapering “stepped” bowl that holds a fire altar. The stepped altar appears at the end of a procession or receives the sacrifices of a single individual. Fire, signified by shapes such as inverted cones or semicircles marked with vertical lines or a small, interior cone, blazes forth from the top of these altars. The fire altars portrayed on the seals and sealings are similar to fragments of altars found at various sites in Parsa, including, most significantly, Pasargadae.82 The stereotyped image of the king of kings standing on a plinth before a blazing stepped altar on the rock-cut royal tombs underscores the centrality of fire altars in official Achaemenid ritual practice and religious visual vocabulary.83 Representatives of all of the lands effortlessly and willingly support the throne that sup-

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ports the king of kings. Taken with the archival, archaeological, and textual evidence, it is very likely that Darius I and his successors understood this iconic scene not simply as a symbolic representation but as a composite portrayal of the king’s place as the central officiant in a major sacrificial feast such as the šip or bakadaušiyam or a self-standing ritual of adoration rather than a separate “pure” Iranian fire cult. That the king ascended and was raised on a throne like the one portrayed in the relief is eminently possible.84 It is not inconsequential that later classical sources that mention the šip or mention sacrifices intended to evoke the šip specify that a fire or fire altars lay at the center of the ritual assembly. While altars holding blazing fires were very important, the Achaemenid seals attest to a wider repertoire of Achaemenid sacred architecture and ritual furnishing associated particularly with the court. When the crenellated tower appears alone, it does so strictly in scenes replete with royal iconography, such as date palms, paneled inscriptions, winged symbols, and attended by figures in royal dress.85 The figures that stand before the towers always treat them with reverence. Worshippers in

FIGURE 7.3 Horned crenellations, southwestern corner of the platform of Persepolis.

Persian courtly robes raise their right forearms and assume a pose that is similar to the kings on the royal tombs, often holding a flower similar to those held by Achaemenid kings elsewhere in Persepolis sculpture. The “stepped fire altars” and “towers” appear by themselves, however, and accompany each other where the figures perform ritual actions at a stepped altar that stands next to the tower. The Persian glyptic evidence does not show the officiants placing or pouring any of their offerings between the towers’ crenellations. If shown, such activity takes place at a fire altar in front of the tower. This might indicate that the tower altars functioned simply as a focus for the ritual or as a sacred object in and of themselves. While these seal images immediately bring to mind a range of representations of offering tables or altars from across ancient Western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, horned crenellation along the southeast edge of the Persepolis platform provides some of the closest parallels in terms of both design and chronology.86 As we will see, Persian palaces were treated, in effect, as sacred spaces, and it is not outside the realm of possibility that such daily or festive offerings took place within the palace precincts, in addition to those we know that took place in their proximity.87 Of course, the appearance of “towers” or “tower altars” on the seals brings to mind two Achaemenid towers in Parsa, the Zendan-e Solayman and the Ka’baye Zardosht, though such seals certainly are not portraits of them. The Achaemenid towers contrast with

FIGURE 7.4 The Zendan-e Solayman, Pasargadae.

the seal images with regard to their size relative to human scale and exterior features like stereobates and stairs leading to doorways. Neither tower bears evidence that they bore such crenellations in antiquity, marking a clear contrast with the structures portrayed on the seals. The images on the seals certainly are not meant to

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be portraits of the Zendan or Ka’ba; however, they did participate generally in the same wider architectural vocabulary of Persian royal and sacred power. The two towers were unique, set within the Persian heartland, and their patrons built them at two sites they intended to be deeply significant for the genesis and continuity of Persian kingship: Cyrus the Great’s palace complex at Pasargadae and the Achaemenid necropolis begun by Darius I at Naqsh-e Rostam near Persepolis. Darius I constructed the Ka’ba-ye Zardosht in careful imitation of the Zendan-e Solayman, though using more advanced masonry techniques, which have contributed to its superior state of preservation.88 The ashlar masonry towers, whose faces measured ca. 12.60 m high by 7.25 m wide, rest on a triple-stone plinth. They give the impression of having three stories, but the lower half of the tower is solid, while the upper half accommodated a single chamber measuring, in the case of the Ka’ba, 3.74 by 3.72 meters in area and 5.58 meters high.89 An imposing flight of steps on the north of the structures led to the elevated chamber. The lintel over the entrance with swooping “horns” perhaps recalls the crenellations on the seals as well as the wider visual vocabulary of sacred structures in Elamite culture. The doorways of the structures contained insets for double-leaved, stone doors similar to those on the Achaemenid rock-cut tombs. As suggested by the door fragment found at Pasargadae and the missing sill and door jambs of the Ka’ba, once these doors were closed and the doors had locked in place, they likely would have been broken open or had elements of the door frame removed to gain access.90 Neither the Zendan nor the Ka’ba stood alone. Both structures lay at the core of an ensemble of buildings, suggesting that they formed the focal point of a larger architectonic and ritual complex. Schmidt’s test trenches revealed a dense concentration of buildings around the Ka’ba-ye Zardosht, which he dated variously to the Achaemenid, Helllenistic, and Sasanian eras.91 Geomagnetic prospecting at Pasargadae indicates that the Zendan was the centerpiece of a larger complex.92 A 45-meter-wide stone structure appears to contain a series of parallel rectangular chambers similar to Persian treasuries, archives, or internal storage areas of the Persepolis fortifications. It was oriented on the same axis as the tower and rose ca. 30 meters from the rear of the Zendan. To the southeast, a rectangular enclosure with subsidiary structures flanked the Zendan and the stone structure. Excavations in the vicinity of Naqsh-e Rostam have revealed an early royal pavilion constructed about 500 meters from the Ka’ba-ye Zardosht,

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FIGURE 7.5 The Ka’ba-ye Zardosht, Naqsh-e Rostam.

recalling Pasargadae.93 This could indicate that the towers at Naqsh-e Rostam and Pasargadae hosted activities that the king of kings could participate in or publicly view, either from a distance or in short procession from these palaces or pavilions. The Ka’ba stood among a dense complex of structures and rituals at Naqsh-e Rostam relating to the site’s rock-cut tombs. From excavations of the platforms in front of the rock-cut tombs behind Persepolis and the evidence in the Persepolis archives, we can safely infer that structures meant to accommodate the tombs’ guardians lay before each of the tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam. This complex would have grown denser as each new tomb monument appeared along with its associated subsidiary structures. Although theories abound, the exact functions of the Ka’ba-ye Zardosht and Zendan-e Solayman remain unknown. While a number of scholars from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries assumed they were fire temples, a consensus has held for several decades that the towers’ patrons did not build them to contain an

ever-burning fire.94 Considering the fact that the stone doors did not allow easy access, it seems logical that the towers’ primary function was to contain or protect something, admitting access to their interior chambers only seldom. No matter what function scholars ascribe to them, most generally accept that they shared a similar purpose. If this is true, Darius I likely built the Ka’ba to allow Naqsh-e Rostam to accommodate the same activities that the Zendan hosted at Pasargadae. If one accepts that the towers on the seals relate in some way to the Zendan and Ka’ba, the seals might provide evidence that broadly relates to Persian ritual practice involving such structures.95 The sealings in the Persepolis archival corpus invariably portray the towers closed, if indeed their artisans intended to represent them with doors at all. It seems that manifesting their contents, if there were any, was not important. In the seal images, individuals or groups process to the towers, stand, or are seated in front of them. There they make offerings at a fi re altar located in close proximity to the structures. The figures appear directly before the towers or at a stepped fi re altar, and there raise their hands in reverence, pour or consume libations, or present or even kill a sacrificial animal. When the participants perform a ritual action they always do so before the tower, never inside or on top. While an officiant might have entered the Zendan and Ka’ba for other purposes, the seals suggest that their exterior façades were the main focal point of routine ritual activity, rather than their interior chambers. It is indeed tempting to view the Zendan as the centerpiece of the “sanctuary” (hieron) that Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes places at Pasargadae: A little after Darius had died, [Artaxerxes] set out for Pasargadae so that he might be initiated into the royal mysteries by the Persian priests. At that place there is a sanctuary of a warlike goddess, who might be compared to Athena. The initiate, passing into it, must take off his own robe and put on the one which Cyrus wore before he became king, and after eating a cake of preserved figs, chew some terebinth and drink a cup of sour milk. If they do anything else in addition to these things, it is unknown to others.96

The word hieron could refer either to a sanctuary precinct or perhaps to a specific structure, though in a vaguer sense than naos. Providing a little more context, the text goes on to relate that a courtier accused Artaxerxes II’s brother, Cyrus the Younger, of plotting to sneak into the sanctuary to assassinate the king during his initiation. Cyrus was accused of “planning to lie in wait in the sanctuary (en toˉi hieroˉi) and, when the king removed

his robe, attack and kill him.” The vague wording of the passage makes it possible that he simply entered the precinct, the Zendan itself (if indeed it was a part of this sanctuary), or a different structure within the surrounding complex.97 But given its centrality to the site, as well as the prominence of the towers in the Fratarakid coinage, it is indeed likely it played a role in the initiation, without necessarily functioning as a “temple” of Ana¯hita¯ in a Greco-Roman or Babylonian sense.98 No archaeological or textual evidence attests to what the chambers of these towers held. While they clearly were not built to contain a fi re, most of the other suggestions that scholarship has put forward are indeed tenable and should be kept as possibilities. The towers could have held some important object or set of objects, including royal initiation paraphernalia, a cult object, or, at a later date, even a figural statue of the type introduced by Artaxerxes II, even if they were not originally constructed for that purpose. In fact, none of these conjectures are mutually exclusive, but any attempt to defend one single interpretation should be reserved until the areas around the towers have been fully excavated, even though the present generation might not live to witness it. Whatever their exact function, it is clear that the Ka’ba and Zendan were unique. Though Persian towers have generated several reconstructive fictions, no structure like the Zendan or Ka’ba has been discovered at any of the other Achaemenid royal residences or provincial capitals.99. And while a handful of structures evoke such towers, as do certain sealings in the archival tables and some Anatolian tombs, we cannot securely speak of a widespread tradition of sacred tower architecture outside of Parsa at this time, although their prestige could have been interpolated into roughly similar structures both before and after the fall of the dynasty.100

Achaemenid Sacred Architecture outside of Persia At this point, the only sacred structure securely attached to an official Achaemenid context for which we have direct archaeological evidence of sacrifice is Dahan-e Gholayman, the preplanned Achaemenid city in Zranka (Ha¯mu ¯ n-e Helmand, eastern Iran), likely the provincial capital.101 At Dahan-e Gholayman, a large square structure (QN3), which measured 53.2 by 54.3 meters, contained a square central courtyard with three altars surrounded by four noncommunicating porticoes. The porticoes hosted ovens and large-scale cooking facilities that could accommodate the type of feasts associated

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FIGURE 7.6 Building QN3, Dahan-e

Gholayman. Courtesy Kourosh Mohammadkhani.

with “Persian” (though not necessarily Zoroastrian) religion as described in the fortification tablets. The north, east, and west porticoes sheltered a number of clay ovens for baking bread. In the structure’s second phase, the west portico contained large tanks used as large cooking pits, which were covered with greasy ashes mixed with crushed animal bones. The three central altars originally stood 7 meters high and were likely added in the second phase. In contrast to the Achaemenid fi re holders found at Pasargadae, or the ones portrayed on the royal tombs, these altars were hollow and contained the fire inside them in a manner not dissimilar from the smaller installations under the porticoes. The ritual activity generated a great deal of cooking detritus. The courtyard contained large quantities of ash mixed with burnt animal flesh and bones. This was plastered over in the refurbishment and accumulated again in later cultic activity. As the excavator stressed, these cultic installations used the same basic design as domestic kitchens in the city. The emphasis of earlier scholarship on the cultic activity that the site hosted contrasts with “orthodox” Zoroastrianism, which would not admit to the flames of a sacred fire anything but incense and a small portion of fat.102 Certainly, this structure hosted something quite different from an “orthodox” Zoroastrian cult of fi re, which only took form in the Sasanian period, but despite

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this, this archaeological evidence was often cited to interpret the cult that it hosted as non-Persian. Although it has traditionally been interpreted as a “non-Persian” cult site, it should be stressed that the sanctuary of Dahan-e Gholayman presents nothing that disagrees with the view of Persian religiosity provided in our most abundant and indigenous evidence, the Persepolis Fortification Tablets, which do not cohere with Boyce’s definition of orthodox Zoroastrianism either. The fact that the majority of the religious rituals mentioned in the Persepolis archives involved sacrifices of, and subsequent feasting on, bread, animals, and alcoholic beverages suggests that the activities that took place in the structure would not have been foreign to Persian religiosity. Given the close correspondences between palatial architecture at Persepolis and Dahan-e Gholayman, I would not be surprised if future excavations discovered similar ritual and architectural provisions at another major Achaemenid site, including Persepolis.103 In addition to structures securely attached to official patronage, or at least a Persian context, a few sites in Central Asia show evidence of cult activity that some have been eager to connect to Achaemenid fire temples. These include Köktepe, Kindyktepa, and Sangyrtepa in Uzbekistan, and Cheshme Shafa in Afghanistan.104 They date to the Achaemenid era, but are not securely attached to Achaemenid patronage, or neccessarily

Persian occupation. Moreover, they are highly heterogeneous in terms of their cultic and architectural features. Cheshme Shafa presents simply a roughly hewn altar fashioned from a monolith rolled down a hill. Köktepe preserves a masonry platform built on the site of a courtyard from a previous period. Marking even more of a contrast, Sangyrtepa was a square mud-brick structure with evidence of four wooden posts set in the main room, which preserved evidence of burning at a later stage. It was not built on a platform but on level earth marked with pits filled with sand, pebbles, ash, or bones, which the excavators compared to Vedic purification rituals. It has been argued that its flanking entrances vaguely reflect Achaemenid architecture, and the burning might relate to the clearer evidence at Kindyktepe and Tash-kʾirman Tepe, though this is highly speculative given Sangyrtepa’s state of preservation and disturbed stratigraphy. It is clear, however, that the structure in no way represents the emplacement of an official, empire-wide Achaemenid system of Zoroastrian temple architecture or cult. Kindyktepa preserved evidence of a fi re cult that is more reminiscent of late antique Zoroastrianism, and Kök Tepe, though less clear, also presents evidence of similar cultic activity though not necessarily architecture. Yet, significantly, clear comparanda do not come from officially sponsored structures in Achaemenid Persia, Media, or Mesopotamia, but rather from later sites in the eastern Iranian world stemming from local patronage. Kindyktepa’s basic conformation of a main cultic space, including a main room, a single side chamber, and evidence of pure ash, corresponds to the size and layout of cultic spaces that hosted fi re cults at the site of Tash-kʾirman Tepe in Uzbekistan (ancient Chorasmia), and the later site of Mele Hairam in Turmenistan (ancient Parthia). Tash-kʾirman Tepe is dated to the fourth century BCE by radiocarbon analysis, and Mele Hairam dates to the second century CE. They represent the earliest securely dated temples that unquestionably held fi re cult.105 While neither Kindyktepa nor Tashkʾirman Tepe was built with official Persian patronage, it is possible they reflect regional variations that participated in a wider eastern Iranian cultic tradition that continued to develop through the period of Achaemenid domination and, as evidenced by Mele Hairam, into the Seleucid and Parthian periods. Only in the late Sasanian era does relatively widespread archaeological evidence of cultic spaces dedicated to fi re cult in the western Iranian world appear. Though intriguing, these early temples’ developmental

relationship to later Sasanian architecture is, at this point, not entirely clear, and should remain open until new evidence comes to light that can clarify whether and in what way these developments are linked to the eastern Iranian world.106 It is possible that new excavations in these areas will shed more light on such cult sites and their connections to the west. However, at this point we can safely conclude that while there were very likely structures used for Iranian religious practices in eastern Iran, they owed their existence to regional developments rather than the introduction of an official Achaemenid temple cult of fire. It is quite possible that other local instantiations of fire cults developed in other regions of the empire with indigenous or settled Iranian populations, and that some of these involved architectural settings. Anatolia would be one of the more plausible candidates for where we might expect to find pre-Sasanian or even Achaemenid-period fi re cults and shrines given the textually attested persistence of these practices well into the Roman period, not to mention suggestive new archaeological discoveries. Indeed, a rubble platform with a fire pit found in the Persian layer of the site of Oluz Höyük in Pontus presents compelling parallels with evidence of fire cults from the Iranian east.107 Though it does not show evidence of official architecture or patronage, the site possibly provides an important attestation of Iranian cult practices that may been seen as a precursor to the range of post-Achaemenid Anatolian fi re cults attested in the classical literary sources.108 The variations among the types of sites, settings, and protocols attested in the textual sources and archaeological evidence from this region, some of which involve buildings and open-air sanctuaries, indicate that such structures stemmed from vernacular or regionally developed building traditions instituted locally to host such cults rather than representing products of a standard imperial architecture per se. As discussed above, the fire cult was one variation among many religious practices cultivated by Iranians throughout the empire, and among fi re cults, there seems to be a great variety of settings, some incorporating structures and some not. At this point in Zoroastrianism’s development these practices were neither uniform nor subject to a single “orthodox” definition nor performed according to a standard protocol, norms that were still contested well into the Sasanian period. Just as importantly the variation in the extant textual and archaeological evidence among sites across the empire, not to mention the lack of archaeological evidence of a direct Achaemenid courtly imprint,

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militates against interpreting these diverse fire cults as a direct outgrowth of an Achaemenid imperial architecture on, for example, the model of satrapal palaces like Karacˇamirli, Seleucid temple architecture, or, for that matter, Roman capitolia in the provinces and early Spanish colonial church architecture in the New World.109 While they do not reflect a grand tradition of Achaemenid imperially sponsored fire temples, it appears likely that they could be reflections of local responses to a similar set of ritual requirements for a fi re cult, either indigenous in the case of the eastern Iranian material, or in the case of Oluz Höyük, brought to Anatolia by Iranians adhering to a range of cultic practices who settled in villages constellated around satrapal centers.110

FIGURE 7.7 Chert mortars and pestles originally stored in

Persepolis’s Treasury.

The Persian Palace as Sacred Space As we adjust our definition of sacred architecture, new structures come into focus as Persian sacred spaces. Persian palaces and just as importantly their surrounding paradisal and funerary environments were created as massive ritual stages. While we might infer similar activies at Susa and Ecbatana, Persepolis has provided us with the most detailed archaeological evidence of the ritual complement of Persian palaces. Known primarily through the archival and sillographic sources, the offerings of a veritable army of priests and high officials staged spectacles of public piety that perennially enlivened the palace and its surrounding precincts with sacrifices great and small.111 In addition to public sacrifices, multiple streams of evidence allude to rituals performed by and directed toward a more elite priestly or aristocratic stratum. These could have taken place on the platform or within the private interior spaces of the palace. Although they were not found in a ritual context, the Oriental Institute discovered nearly three hundred green-chert mortars and pestles during their excavations.112 The excavators found a large quantity of them in the treasury, though many others were found smashed and scattered wherever the Macedonian looters had dumped them in the course of their pillaging, much like the vessels dedicated to service in other royal institutions, such as the royal table.113 These ritual implements were produced using a stereotyped design and formed a set accompanied by a round platter made of the same substance. Likely produced from materials mined in present-day Afghanistan, these implements bear archival inscriptions that show their careful transfer from regional treasuries to Persepolis in a way that coheres with stand-

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ard Achaemenid accounting procedures and extraction of resources.114 From their original publication, scholarship has associated these implements with the pressing of haoma, the legendary plant that was combined with milk and consumed in one of the most important ritual focal points of religious practice, as seen in the Avesta and in later Zoroastrianism.115 The inscriptions are typical of archival records; however, some appear to allude to their ritual context—“the [haoma-]crushing ceremony.”116 Although some are skeptical that the inscriptions on these objects recorded specific ritual performances, that they are ritual implements related to haoma preparation remains the most convincing functional interpretation and the only one grounded in other primary-source material. Such objects and ritual contexts would not necessarily be one and the same as later Zoroastrian rituals, yet they could reflect a roughly similar ritual praxis, an interpretation that finds corroboration in the sealings preserved in Achaemenid archival tablets. Sealings from the Persepolis archives feature such implements as a central focal point of ritual scenes and vividly illustrate how they might have played a role in the vast and varied Persepolitan ritual ecology.117 In such sealings, priestly rather than royal figures stand in front of a table with the mortar and pestle, which itself is set reverently before a blazing fire holder. In addition to being described as life-giving and intoxicating, the Avestan texts regularly describe haoma as green, semiotically tying the mortar and pestle to the substance.118 We can only speculate when, where, or if these implements were put into use. Were they distributed to priests for the performance of some early version of the Yasna, an elaborate daily liturgy that features the pressing of haoma, or were they reserved for the royal family’s own

FIGURE 7.8 View of the south façade of the tacara of Darius I, Persepolis.

use, or simply held to be distributed as a gift, like silver plate or textiles?119 In an intriguing suggestion Margaret Root points out that the porch that lay behind Persepolis’s great audience hall was coated with a green plaster. As the purple floors of privileged spaces within Susa and Persepolis suggest, the Achaemenids symbolically “color coded” the floors of their palaces.120 Root makes the intriguing suggestion that this porch was similarly chromatically charged, and may have been a space reserved for, or at times used for, such royally sponsored ritual performances.121 Other structures on the Persepolis platform could have hosted ritual activity, though here such arguments similarly rely on indirect evidence alone. While not functioning as simple illustrations or rigid “visual protocols,” Persepolis’s relief decoration was intended to reflect and comment on what occurred in the spaces it adorned. This is evident in Darius I’s private palace, the tacara. The façade of the tacara’s south adorsed stairways presents two symmetrical lines of Persian spearmen standing in profile facing toward a central inscription panel, a common motif on several other stairway façades. In contrast to this relatively common portrayal of military force, the

reliefs flanking the stairways portray beardless officials bearing vessels, wineskins, and a live lamb. For visitors privileged enough to climb these staircases, these reliefs provided a visual index to one of the structure’s primary ritual contexts. Similar figures decorated the parapets lining the entrance stairway in the palace of Xerxes and appear in glazed brick fragments recovered at the palace of Darius at Susa and the Shaur palace as well.122 The figures from these palaces have often been interpreted as servants bearing provisions for the royal table. Indeed, the spaces of the tacara, hadiš, and the Shaur palace are designed in such a way that would perfectly accommodate banqueting. Similar to the processions of dignitaries and soldiers portrayed in the reliefs of the great audience hall (the so-called apada¯na), these functionaries alternate between those wearing long “Persian” robes and the “Median” riding costume. However, their headgear marks them as belonging to a different class of functionary than a soldier or courtier. The tacara figures in Persian robes wear a high kyrbasia with the side flaps drawn about their necks and chins in a manner similar to representations of Persian priests in a variety of reliefs, such as those found at Dascylium in

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FIGURE 7.9 South stairway of the tacara of Darius I, Persepolis.

Phrygia and Bünyan in Cappadocia, or on golden votive objects from the Oxus treasure; those wearing the riding costume cover their chins as well. Is this simply a mark of reverence and an effort to maintain purity for supplies destined for the king’s table, or should it imply a discretely religious ritual?123 S. Razmjou has argued for the latter contending that these reliefs illustrate preparations for sacrifices rather than banqueting, and even goes so far as to suggest that the tacara of Darius I and hadiš of Xerxes were built primarily to accommodate sacrifices.124 That these structures could have accommodated sacrifices is intriguing, and that the proposition is, I think, eminently possible. Yet, the supporting evidence no more calls for an exclusively religious function than it is does for an exclusively “palatial” one. The words tacara and hadiš when used elsewhere in royal inscriptions are indeed used to label all sorts of structures, including those that bear no resemblance at all to these structures, such as Darius I’s south complex at Susa.125 Words related to these Old Persian architectural terms in Old Armenian and Georgian are used most

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commonly as terms for palaces or banqueting halls, which are their valence in Parthian too.126 There is nothing in the reliefs that is incongruent with preparations for the royal table, a constant preoccupation in the Persepolis Fortification Tablets. The layout and internal organization of these structures perfectly accommodate the manner in which the king of kings feasted and reflect other descriptions of feasting as it occurred in tents: When the Persian kings dine, all their servants bathe and wear fi ne clothing while they attend them, and they spend almost half the day preparing the dinner. Some of those who eat with the king dine outside, and anyone who wishes can see them, while others eat with the king inside. But even they do not eat in his direct company: instead there are two rooms placed opposite one another and the king eats in one and his guests in another. The king sees them through a veil which hangs over the door, but they cannot see him.127

Xanthus’s Nereid monument offers a parallel portrayal of servants uniformly dressed in Iranian clothing attending to a banquet, perhaps reflecting Achaemenid courtly pro-

FIGURE 7.10 Achaemenid-period altar (encased in a modern reconstruction) before the Seleucid temple of Artemis, Sardis.

tocol imitated by a client.128 More importantly, within the Achaemenid center, it should not be forgotten that sacrifice and ritual banqueting are closely intertwined in all of our sources: sacrifice is always followed by consumption.129 As royal spaces, these structures were indeed “sacred spaces,” even if they were not temples in the sense that is familiar from other ancient Western Asian cultures.130

Sacred Places within Imperial Space Achaemenid authorities and Iranian settlers patronized local cults to the point that they became known as “particularly revered by the Persians,” with some even taking on aspects of Persian ritual practices. This is especially noticeable in prominent cults of goddesses near Persian satrapal courts, which experienced relatively heavy colonization, or in regions of key strategic importance for the Achaemenids.131 The Persian interest and participation in cults of Artemis at Ephesus and Sardis have received a great deal of attention, and provide a useful point of comparison for Cappadocia and Pon-

tus.132 Already in the Achaemenid period these cults became culturally complex, with Persian patronage and cultic participation altering the cult. These cults exhibit ritual performances as well as architectural forms that could be located in neither the Persian nor the local tradition entirely. For example, the stepped Achaemenidera altar of Artemis excavated at Sardis was neither a “normal” Persian form nor a Lydian one, but rather an outgrowth of the political and cultural dynamics of the Persian period.133 While they might not have founded new fi re temples, Berossus’s account of Artaxerxes II’s promotion of statues of Ana¯hita¯ mentioned earlier may suggest a large-scale strategy for appropriating local cults through patronage. The various Persian identities and Persian ritual practices that remained attached to local Artemises throughout Asia Minor may have resulted from this pattern of patronage, benefaction, and parallel worship rather than representing a more overt colonial implantation of new cults.134 Persian elites became thoroughly integrated both socially and culturally into the local communities where previously their ancestors settled as imperial colonists.

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In regions like Lydia and Caria, which were not ruled by one of these neo-Persian Hellenistic dynasties, men or even families with Iranian names appear in elite roles such as temple warden (neokoros). The temples that they served were not always dedicated to Iranian gods, nor did they bear the marks of an identification or assimilation with an Iranian deity. The temple of Artemis at Ephesus had an Iranian temple warden in 394 BCE, whose family appears to have continued in the role, bequeathing its name to the title of temple warden even after the family had become extinct.135 A mid-secondcentury CE inscription from Sardis copied decrees from the Achaemenid period that prohibit wardens of certain cults of Zeus from participating in the mysteries of other specifically named Anatolian gods. The elite devotee of this cult, Droaphernes, and its warden, Baradates, both have Iranian names, even if the cult itself is not clearly or necessarily identified as a Persian cult.136 The inscription includes a detail that is often mentioned without much comment: it states that Droaphernes dedicated a statue (andrias) to the cult of Zeus, providing an interesting personal counterpart to the evidence of official alterations of the non-Persian cult environments at Sardis.137 This evidence suggests not only that the Persians were interested in taking control of non-Greek sanctuaries for political purposes, but that the sanctuaries served as a focal point for genuine personal devotion. Such cultic and social participation did not always have to begin in the Achaemenid period. A wide variety of evidence attests to the fact that Persians worshipped at native sanctuaries in these regions in the Achaemenid period and were deeply involved in their administration. This provides important context to make sense of the considerable evidence of the longevity of Iranian or Iranian-influenced religious traditions in the Hellenistic period.138 The best-known examples of this phenomenon come from Amyzon in Caria, Ephesus, and Sardis. In one inscription from the sanctuary of Artemis at Amyzon an individual with an Iranian name, Bagadates, served as the temple warden (neokoros), and in another his descendant, who appears in a politically prominent position, was responsible for engraving a decree honoring ambassadors to Antiochus III.139 After the fall of the Achaemenids, such cultic and demographic characteristics persisted in many regions despite the disruptions of the Wars of the Successors, remaining particularly strong in Cappadocia, Pontus, and Lydia.140 Persian settlers and their progeny created new cult sites at distinctive natural features, as occurred with regularity in the Persepolis region. They ritually

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reinscribed the landscape, making mountains, lakes, and rivers newly visible as sacred sites even while appropriating ancient sites with a long history of devotion. The majority of the evidence comes from later periods and will be discussed in that context below. Such sites speak just as much to the persistence of Iranian identities among Iranian settler families and their political leveraging under the post-Achaemenid, Perso-Macedonian dynasts. While some bear the marks of later Mithradatid or Ariarathid patronage, most arose or persisted because of continued popular devotion, which began in the Achaemenid period. With central significance to Persian religiosity throughout the empire, mountains, rivers, and lakes became new focal points of Iranian religiosity in Cappadocia and Pontus as well. Like the great temples of Artemis at Ephesus and Sardis, these sites often held deep significance for the identities and religious traditions of local populations. Their newly created significance for Persian communities joined or sometimes even eclipsed that of their original cult, but on the whole they appear in the sources as neither fully Persian nor fully Anatolian. An evocative example is Lake Torrhebia at Hypaipa in Lydia, which was named after a local hero and held significance for the community’s pre-Persian identity. After the Achaemenid conquest it gained an association with the cult of Artemis Anaïtis. There is no evidence for a temple in the Achaemenid period and, considering the goddess’s connection with the waters, the lake itself might even have been the cult’s original focal point given its proximity to the site of the later Roman temple.141 A similar process unfolded at Marmara Gölü, known originally as Lake Gyge, whose name possibly derives from the Hittite and Luwian word for “grandfather,” perhaps alluding to its significance before the Achaemenid conquest.142 Like Lake Torrhebia, the Gygaean lake gained a cult of Artemis Anaïtis, and was known both by her cult epithet (Koloe) and as the “Anaïtic Lake.”143 A similar process occurred at several lakes and mountains in Pontus and Cappadocia. The important Cappadocian cults of Zeus Ouranos and Zeus Daciëus, focused on a mountain and lake, respectively, bear the marks of Persian appropriation if not foundation, as does the cult of Zeus Asbemios near Tyana and Ekecik Dag˘ı near Garsaoura, among other examples. These new Persian significances reshaped the ideational landscape of these Persian provinces even if they did not radically reshape the natural or built environment. Examples include not just the grand Ionian Greek temples but natural features

that caught the king’s attention while on royal progress or campaign, including pomegranates, trees, or bodies of water like the Strymon or Hellespont.144 In addition, the king could appropriate sites of cultural memory, such as Troy, through sacrifice. There Xerxes honored the Trojan “Athena,” using the supreme royal sacrifice, by performing the šip, while the Magi honored the heroes with libations of wine, treating them cultically as the frauuashis of the righteous Iranian departed.145 Persian cult identities or cultic significances appear to have existed side by side with the pre-Achaemenid cults in much the same way as they did at the cult of Artemis at Sardis. However, as environmental supports for Iranian religion outside of Iran, they were tied into a wider empire-wide network of Iranian religious landscapes. These acts were not benign, however, but had the potential to destabilize the experience of the surrounding population, incrementally alienating them from their landscape, which now served the imperial vision.

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This chapter has explored the range and variety of Persian sacred spaces as well as their role in Achaemenid dynastic and imperial ritual. Archaeological, archival, sigillographical, and textual evidence details a coherent repertoire of official Persian cult activities and sacred spaces. The most important and widespread of these were open-air sanctuaries. Within the provinces and in Parsa, paradises and palatial grounds accommodated cultic activity, and fire altars, tombs, and sacred towers served as ritual focuses. In addition, at satrapal capitals like Sardis or important regional sanctuaries like Ephesus, the Persians patronized local cult sites, be they open-air sanctuaries or temples. While we have vivid

evidence of a repertoire of Achaemenid cult activities performed at a variety of sacred spaces, at this point we cannot speak of a widespread, unified, and replicated tradition of official Persian temple architecture implanted throughout the Achaemenid Empire, let alone state-sponsored fire temples. This, of course, may change if further excavations yield more structures that correspond to known official sacred architecture, such as the towers or the altars within QN3’s courtyard at Dahan-e Gholayman. But rather than trying to fill the void with late antique forms or extrapolations from unique examples, we should concentrate on the considerable evidence we do have. Perhaps in this regard, one might speculate about whether their palace architecture, for which we have much more abundant and clear information, might provide an interpretive parallel. Like Persian royal and satrapal palaces, sacred architecture in the Achaemenid Empire varied even within the homeland. Local traditions and cults continued with only slight modifications in some provinces, while other regions appear to showcase structures that mimic features found in Parsa. While it would be ill advised to search for a single Achaemenid fire temple design that spread throughout the empire, as we will see, Persians’ religiosity left a deep and lasting impression on the lands of their former empire. We see this in the lingering memories of the dynasty’s grand sacrifices such as the šip, and evidence of their engagement with the sacred spaces of their empire, be they provincial mountains, lakes, or the temples of Ionia, Egypt, or Babylon.146 The Achaemenid heritage runs as a continuous and tenacious undercurrent in Iranian kingship even in the face of the dramatic changes the Seleucids introduced.

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The Seleucid Transformation of Iranian Sacred Spaces

After almost two decades of war following Alexander’s death, Western Asia again experienced a florescence of building with Seleucus I’s consolidation of his empire. Temple building played a key role in the Seleucids’ ambitious and successful program of claiming and reshaping the Achaemenid Empire’s political landscape.1 The dynasty systematically appropriated ancient cultic traditions by constructing new Seleucid temples for the cult even as they constructed innovative temples in their newly founded settlements. This pattern repeats across the empire, from the Oxus to Lydia, and even beyond its frontiers, with patronage at important sanctuaries in the old Greek world. Seeking to gain control of ancient cultic traditions at prestigious cities, the Seleucids built or rebuilt important sanctuaries, engaging what one might call the region’s “traditional” or “indigenous” forms. Uruk provides a ready example, where Seleucid officials rebuilt the Bit Resh sanctuary largely along traditional lines, as does Athens, where Antiochus IV sponsored the construction of the Temple of Olympian Zeus. However, even as the Seleucids engaged the “native” traditions of the old Greek world and Babylon in those regions, their newly founded fortresses and cities in Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau introduced sacred architecture that imposed a deeper Seleucid stamp. In this chapter I argue that in provinces without a deeply embedded tradition of temple architecture, or in their newly founded cities, the Seleucids introduced a new repertoire of temple architecture that deliberately blurred the lines between the Greco-Macedonian and Western Asian traditions.

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Discovering and Interpreting Seleucid Sacred Architecture Over the course of the last century, excavations of Seleucid settlements across Western Asia began to reveal temples whose ground plans and ornament revealed a similar range of features.2 These appeared at sites as far apart as Syria and the Oxus River valley in Bactria as an integral part of a wide range of fortresses, important regional cities, and metropolitan centers. These structures integrated ground plans stemming from Mesopotamian temple design and Iranian domestic architecture, but were decorated with Greek architectural ornament, sometimes in conjunction with Babylonian and Persian ornamental features. Scholars were at first surprised at these discoveries. The working interpretive paradigm of the Seleucids as colonial promoters of pure Hellenism dictated that the dynasty should build exclusively traditional Greek temple architecture in their newly founded cities. These temples were initially interpreted or simply dismissed as out-of-place and aberrant curiosities, products of a locally driven bricolage of Greek ornament and local architectural traditions. Since the temple architecture and ornament could not come from the Seleucids, scholarship looked in vain for their origin in “native” traditions or transplanted “ethnic” populations.3 Such approaches interpreted them as the residue of the idiosyncratic tastes of indigenous populations whose traditions still made themselves felt despite the civilizing influence of the Seleucids’ Hellenic imperial embrace. The most important Seleucid temples include Ai Khanum’s niched and extramural temples, the temple

FIGURE 8.1 Ground plans of Seleucid and post-Seleucid temples: 1. Niched Temple, 2. Extramural Temple, 3. Parthian temple of Artemis, Dura-Europus, 4. Parthian temple of Zeus Megistos, Dura-Europus, 5. Oxus temple, 6. Surkh Kotal, 7. Bit Resh, 8. Delberjin, 9. “Frataraka temple,” 10. Bard-e Neshanda, 12. Masjed-e Solayman. Adapted from Rapin 1992b.

dedicated to the River Oxus excavated at Takht-e Sangin, and the temple of the fortress at Jebel Khalid on the Euphrates, as well as a number of smaller structures, such as Temple A at Failaka and Ai Khanoum’s shrines. In addition, long after they fell out of Seleucid control, temples with similar features continued to be built and rebuilt in Seleucid settlements across the former empire. Although the settlements were now ruled by the Arsacids, a range of evidence indicates that where the temples remained intact in cities like Susa or Seleucia-on-the Tigris, Greco-Macedonian civic elites who traced their ancestry to original settler communities were responsible for building or maintaining many of the public monuments in their cities. For example, it is very likely that Seleucia-on-the-Tigris’s Greek elite rebuilt the temple adjoining the city’s theater, and their counterparts at Dura-Europus rebuilt the temple of Zeus Megistos, continuing or replicating the Seleucid architectural tradition. While we cannot use these temples as direct evidence of Seleucid architecture, they attest to its persistence. Just as importantly, Seleucid temple architecture deeply impacted the development of later Western and South Asian sacred architecture, detectable in structures as geographically diverse as direct-access Buddhist reliquary shrines in Gandhara and Roman temples in Syria.

These Seleucid temples were built on ground plans reminiscent of Mesopotamian sacred architecture and decorated with Greek architectural ornament.4 The ground plans themselves were used in Babylon and the Levant for centuries, though not throughout the Iranian plateau. This wasn’t the first time that Greek ornament had been combined with such ground plans. The Phoenician temple of Echmoun at Sidon even combines external Greek architectural features with a roughly similar ground plan.5 Only under the Seleucids do such temples appear from Syria to Bactria as an outgrowth of a single empire’s patronage. The grandest on the Iranian plateau, such as the Temple of the Oxus, incorporated façades reminiscent of Persian and Seleucid palatial architecture. The rectangular shape of their sanctuaries, with antechambers (pronaos) and a cult chamber (naos) either divided into multiple cult chambers or flanked with storage areas or “sacristies,” reflects, but does not fully replicate, the internal cultic spaces of varieties of Babylonian temples. Babylonian temples normally contained these cultic spaces within larger complexes rather than as centralized, freestanding structures. The exterior walls of these Seleucid temples often incorporated decorative niches, reflecting Babylonian treatments, though combined with Greek architectural

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FIGURE 8.2 Temple A, Ikaros (Failaka,

Kuwait). View from naos toward altar through portico with Ionic capitals and Persian bases. Courtesy Kuwait411.

ornament. Their columns, bases, and capitals could incorporate both Persian and Greek forms. Smaller temples and shrines reflected this official architectural style too. In the Persian Gulf, Iran, and Bactria, a few smaller structures appear, using traditional Greek architecture with Persian architectural elements integrated into the structure’s architectural members or ornament. The Ionic temple with Achaemenid-style bases of Ikaros’s Seleucid “Temple A” provides a good example of this phenomenon, as does the Seleucid shrine in the courtyard of the niched temple.6 Temple construction put a Seleucid royal imprint on the most important ancient cults of the empire as well as those of their newly founded cities. Through their ground plans, ornament, or both these imperially sponsored or sanctioned temples were intended to be unifying monuments for their communities, emplacing or, in many cases, replacing preexisting sanctuaries. While the evidence suggests the Seleucids played an instrumental role in the spread of these types of temples, this is not to argue that each community used or maintained all structures uniformly. Many of the temples bear the marks of repeated reconstructions, including the additions of new shrines and new cult images, as well as multiple rituals stemming from diverse religious traditions occurring side by side. The Seleucids, in effect, strategically created a ritual stage and spatial con-

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text that tied the settlement to the empire, but local populations tactically reinterpreted these spaces through ritual performances and remodeling, shaping them according to their needs, identities, and aspirations in the process.7 Seleucid official architecture in the east interpreted and standardized Greco-Macedonian, Babylonian, and Persian sacred and palatial forms to create something that transcended all previous and contemporary traditions of importance. In their newly founded or refounded Mesopotamian and Iranian fortresses and cities. like Jebel Khalid, Dura-Europus, Ikaros, Ai Khanum, Takht-e Sangin, and (likely) Seleucia-on-theTigris, the Seleucids introduced a new combination of architectural forms that had a long and lasting impact, especially in those regions that did not have a wellestablished or unified temple tradition, like the Iranian plateau. In other words, the Seleucids created a new architectural style from Babylonian, Persian, and Greek traditions to create a unifying focal point for both their Greco-Macedonian elites and preexisting populations.

Seleucid Temple Architecture in Eastern Iran The Seleucid temples of Bactria and their later GrecoBactrian reconstructions offer some of the most important evidence of Seleucid sacred architecture. A temple

Main Temple South Shrine

Gate

0

5

10

20 Meters

FIGURE 8.3 Seleucid-period plan of Ai Khanum’s Main Temple (later given a niched treatment in its Greco-Bactrian reconstruction). After J. Liger; Martinez-Séve 2014b, fig. 6.

reflecting this Seleucid official style stood as one of the architectural centerpieces of Antiochus I’s new city of Ai Khanum.8 The city’s main temple stood within the city’s palatial district (basileia) to the south of the monumental propylea of the palace. Known as the “Niched Temple” or “Temple with Niches” from the Babylonian-style niched treatment it received in a later rebuilding, the structure remained Ai Khanum’s only temple within the city walls and the primary sacred site for the life of the city. It opens to the southeast and was built on a southeast-northwest axis that conforms to the orientation of the city’s main thoroughfare. While it was only

fully enclosed behind precinct walls later in the city’s development, the city planners intended it to be part of the basilea. The structure’s three construction phases and multiple ceramic phases follow the history of the rest of the city.9 The temple was remodeled three times, largely with the same dimensions as the Seleucid temple, though with a more elaborate interior design and decorative scheme. The Seleucid temple was supported by a raised platform 24 meters square in size and accessible by a central stairway.The temple measured ca. 20 meters square, and its interior was divided into a vestibule (pronaos) and cult chamber (naos). The only trace of cult

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FIGURE 8.4 Archival photo of Ai Khanum’s Main Temple (the Niched Temple) during excavations. Courtesy Laurianne Martinez-Sève.

activity was a brick altar placed in the middle of the naos on which offerings were burned.10 No trace of a niche or base supporting a cult statue survived from the Seleucid temple, implying that an altar was the only focus for a cult, unless wall paintings or a lighter, portable, and more perishable wooden statue served as a cult image. The Niched Temple was rebuilt in the second half of the third century BCE. Coins of Diodotus II provide only the terminus post quem, and while it is conceivable the Diodotids took an early interest in the sanctuary, the rest of the city was substantially expanded only later, with Antiochus III’s occupation and thereafter.11 It is indeed possible that changes like the niched treatment reflect or respond to the influx of new ideas from Seleucia-on-the-Tigris that came in the wake of Antiochus III’s invasion. In addition to the walls’ decorative projections and recesses, a stepped crepis was added to the base of the exterior wall, and the naos was remodeled to include “sacristies” leading off the main cult chamber. The later phases introduced an interior design

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reflecting Babylonian traditions, with a shallow niche, 0.75 meters deep, and a bench, 1.07 meters wide.12 Three mud-brick bases placed in the vestibule near the door to the naos supported statues.13 Two supported statues made of clay and one of stucco, and were surrounded by some sort of frame or naiskos.14 The structure was remodeled once again in the great burst of building ca. 160 BCE that coincided with the reign of Eucratides I, when the temple was surrounded with a massive platform that covered the crepis, and a new entranceway was added.15 In the naos the remodelers added foundations and a plinth for a colossal, seated acrolithic cult statue.16 Only fragments of the cult statue survive, including a 0.27-meter-long left foot whose sandal bore the thunderbolt of Zeus, the only indication of the god who was celebrated in the sanctuary.17 The cult bench was built over and enlarged to .80 meters high and 1.70 meters wide, and a foundation hole for smaller statue to be installed was placed to the southwest of the main cult statue’s base. One can only speculate about whether the Seleucid temple housed the same god as the

FIGURE 8.5 Foot of the colossal cult statue from the Greco-Bactrian phase of the Niched Temple, Ai Khanum. Courtesy of the National Museum of Afghanistan and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

mid-second-century temple or whether the GrecoBactrian kings introduced a new cult. In the Seleucid phase, sanctuary precinct walls surrounded the temple, enclosing an area of approximately 60 meters square.18 This interior courtyard was artificially regularized with gravel fi ll, which created an incline for water from a water channel to flow from south to north. The Seleucid builders constructed a 7.60-meter-by-5-meter shrine on the south side of the courtyard on what was the highest point.19 Reflecting the mix of styles seen elsewhere in Seleucid official architecture, its wooden columns rested on Achaemenid-style plinth and torus bases. In the subsequent construction phase the shrine was moved to the north side. 20 This shrine was built on a ground plan that recalled the Seleucid stage of the funerary temple of Kineas and incorporated two columns supported by Attic-Ionic bases.21 Under Eucratides an interior portico was added to the sanctuary courtyard with mixed Greek and Persian bases.22 Traditional Greek temple architecture appears in only two structures dedicated to the cults of heroized or divinized dead: the sanctuary of the divinized city founder, Kineas, and that of another unknown individual and his relatives (mausolée au caveau de pierre), in my opinion

most likely that of a post-Seleucid, Greco-Bactrian ruler.23 The fact that these structures were built or rebuilt at roughly the same time as the city’s temples indicates that all architectural options were open to the builders. For whatever reason, patrons or the citizens of Ai Khanum deemed traditional Greek temple architecture appropriate for the funerary temene, and the “mixed” Seleucid official architecture appropriate for structures dedicated to the worship of gods. Much like major Seleucid palaces, the largest and most public structures utilized an official architecture that deliberately and harmoniously incorporated Greek, Babylonian, and Persian architectural features to create something quite new.24 Ai Khanum’s Extramural Temple was also built on a regularized Mesopotamian ground plan comparable to that of temples found at several other Seleucid foundations, both those of a Seleucid date such as Jebel Khalid and those likely rebuilt in accord with Seleucid precedents like Dura-Europus.25 The Extramural Temple, also known as the “Temple outside the Walls,” has not yet been published, and its dating is unclear, though its progression parallels that of the Niched Temple, as does its exterior decorative treatment and podium. The temple had two phases, with the second enlarging and elaborating the structure. The fi rst temple was 20.15 by

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FIGURE 8.6 View of the Oxus temple

(Takht-e Sangin, Tajikistan) looking west toward the naos. Courtesy British Embassy of Tajikistan.

15.80 meters and rested on a three-stepped 1.80-meterhigh podium with dimensions of 23.80 by 20.80 meters. A stepped entrance led to an open-air court with three cult chambers set to the south. The second temple, 35.50 by 20.50 meters, encased the first one. It too was raised on a podium and retained an open-air court, though its ground plan increases the number of chambers to nine. The two chambers flanking the central cult chamber communicated with their flanking rooms, though not the main cult chamber. The two chambers each extended south from side chambers on either side enclosing the court. In addition to being raised on a podium, it shared with the Niched Temple its exterior decorative recesses and projections. About 100 kilometers west of Ai Khanum, Soviet archaeologists excavated a grand temple at the site of Takht-e Sangin, which was the focal point of a surrounding settlement. 26 The temple was built at a site that was already settled in the Achaemenid era, albeit without a history of monumental construction. If a local cult existed at the site, which is likely, it was appropriated and enhanced as a part of Seleucid policy. The main temple, measuring about 51 by 51 meters, stood as the centerpiece of a fortified sanctuary dedicated to the main indigenous deity of the region: the deified Oxus River. The temple complex was built within a square bastioned curtain wall that parallels the fortified Seleucid sanctuary at Failaka, suggesting that the conception of these complexes related to a larger imperial “toolkit.”27

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The temple experienced multiple construction phases and evinces a rich cultic life that extended into the Kushan period. The temple itself faced the river and consisted of a centralized structure constructed of mud bricks with Greek architectural members in stone. The internal cultic layout of the Oxus temple functionally corresponds to the temples of Ai Khanum. However, befitting a more important sanctuary, it was larger and integrated complex features derived from palatial architecture. In place of an antechamber, a monumental hypostyle entranceway fronted the temple. A visitor would walk across an open forecourt to this hypostyle entranceway with eight columns reminiscent of the Seleucid palace at Ai Khanum. A central, square chamber with four columns lay beyond the hypostyle entranceway. The Oxus temple incorporated more elaborate sacristies off its forecourt and naos. These “L-shaped” corridors, on the north and south sides of the central chamber, stored votive dedications, as did “gamma-shaped” corridors leading from the antechamber and connecting to the forecourt. The manner in which these dedications were made corresponds to Greek cultic practices, though names associated with them are just as often Iranian as Greek.28 Clay sculptures portrayed the diademed heads of kings, a bearded figure wearing a kyrbasia, and a female figure wearing a flowing tunic.29 These chambers were filled with offerings and were walled off periodically as they filled up. The Oxus was long the recipient of devotion in

FIGURE 8.7 Plan of the phases of the Seleucid temple

at Jebel Khalid in comparison to Ai Khanum’s Extramural Temple (fi rst phase).

Bactria, and it is possible devotees venerated it in an open-air sanctuary, although we have no evidence the Achaemenids invested in anything like a temple at or near the site.30 A comparison with other Seleucid sites further west in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia suggests the Seleucids undertook a larger strategy of claiming ancient sanctuaries with temples across their empire.31 At sacred sites with evidence of occupation in the Persian period, the Seleucid footprint is much heavier and more deliberate than that of the Achaemenids and seems to have grown from a methodical effort to overshadow or obliterate any Persian connection.

Seleucid Temple Architecture in Syria and Mesopotamia Jebel Khalid provides our most important evidence of Seleucid sacred architecture in Syria. The Seleucid fortress at Jebel Khalid was not rebuilt after it fell out of the dynasty’s control, and because of this, its Seleucid architecture was left unscathed by the centuries of postSeleucid occupation and rebuilding that obscured or obliterated that of Dura-Europus and Seleucia.32 Jebel Khalid’s temple was located within the curtain walls of the fortress but, unlike the temple of Zeus Megistos or the Niched Temple, it did not rise by the palace or within a palatial precinct proper. 33 At 12.8 meters wide and 10 meters long on a side, the temple’s more modest scale reflects the smaller size of the settlement; however, its design and architectural elements mark it as an expression of official Seleucid architecture. The temple at Jebel Khalid was built within a precinct, which gained numer-

ous support structures in its later architectural history.34 Corresponding closely to the first phase of Ai Khanum’s Extramural Temple, the temple at Jebel Khalid was constructed with a vestibule and tripartite naos. Doric colonnades fronted its eastern and western façades, both of which supported a “pseudo-Doric” entablature. Even with their Mesopotamian ground plans, Greek architectural ornament dominated the exterior of the Seleucid temples at Jebel Khalid and (likely) Dura-Europus. In contrast, in the temples of Ai Khanum, at least in their later stages, the Greek ornamental features were juxtaposed to the Babylonian niched treatment. The post-Seleucid temples of Dura-Europus bear the marks of their architectural tradition. In the mid-second-century BCE the Seleucids transformed Dura-Europus from a fortress into an expansive walled city, a reinvestment that was likely a direct response to Parthian pressure. 35 The Seleucids laid out the city’s grid, raised its fortifications, and built its two palaces, the Strategeion and Citadel Palace. However, not all that the Seleucids planned was finished before the Parthians took the city (ca. 113 BCE). The Seleucids began the city’s fortification walls using ashlar masonry, but never completed them, switching instead to mud-brick construction as a time-saving strategy in the face of the rapid rise of the Parthian menace. 36 Dura-Europus’s grand city blocks remained substantially empty and were only gradually fi lled in over the course of the Parthian period. The expanded city very likely lacked a functioning temple, as any temple located within the original fortress would have been obliterated by the construction of the new Citadel Palace.

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Our earliest evidence of a temple at Dura-Europus is the so-called temple of Zeus Megistos. The temple of Zeus Megistos was built within a semirestricted official district that the original excavators termed the “Acropolis.” An inscription dating to 169/70 BCE records a dedication that the strateˉgos “Seleucus” made to Zeus Megistos in the area. 37 The temple rose to the south of the Strategeion palace on an elevated area that jutted out into the ravine that separated the second-century Seleucid city from the outcrop on which the Citadel Palace rose and which had previously been the site of Dura-Europus’s original late fourth-century citadel. Soundings under the Strategeion have secured a Seleucid date for this palace.38 Construction on the temple likely began after the Strategeion palace was built. 39 S. Downey’s and P. Leriche’s reexcavation of the temple at the end of the last century has refined our knowledge of its history. Although not conclusive, their findings seem to suggest that it was likely constructed after the Parthian conquest, though the two excavators have interpreted the findings somewhat divergently.40 The earliest foundation blocks of the temple share the same Seleucid masonry work as the Strategeion palace, which was built sometime in the early second century BCE; however, many of the blocks appear to have been recut, suggesting that they were originally a part of—or dressed for—a different structure. The reexcavation discovered that eastern foundations were partially built over an 8.5-meter-long wall constructed of gypsum ashlars laid on bedrock and packed red earth.41 This wall, whose blocks correspond roughly to those found in other Hellenistic structures at Dura-Europus, had served as a foundation course for an earlier Seleucid structure, whose purpose is unknown. Significantly, this wall was not in alignment with the mid-second-century Seleucid grid plan, suggesting that it very likely predated the city’s expansion. The fragmentary remains of spoliated Seleucid masonry found in later structures in the district as well as elsewhere in Dura-Europus may have come from one or more Seleucid-era temples originally, although none was well preserved or excavated in such a way as to yield conclusive evidence. Downey concedes that some sort of monumental Seleucid structure might have existed in the area before the Parthian construction of the temple.42 Leriche speculates that it is not outside the realm of possibility that these and other spoliated Seleucid-era masonry fragments found nearby might have come from, or were intended for, an earlier iteration of the temple of Zeus Megistos or the temple of Artemis, even if it was never completed.43

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The exact ground plan of the first temple of Zeus Megistos is unclear. The neat tripartite ground plan that Frank Hopkins descried in the earliest foundation blocks was partially derived by including paving from a later structure’s courtyard.44 While we must remain agnostic on the sanctuary’s tripartite organization, the earliest foundation blocks and later reconstructions indicate that it was laid out with a sanctuary preceded by a vestibule (naospronaos) as seen in the Seleucid temples at Ai Khanum and Jebel Khalid.45 At 22.90 by 24.65 meters, the temple was built on a scale roughly similar to those at Ai Khanum in its earliest phase, though with a slightly different proportion.46 The cut ashlars that paved the court of the later temple likely came from this original structure, as did stones found reused in other structures nearby.47 All in all, Dura-Europus’s earliest evidence of temple architecture suggests a Seleucid conception, if not Seleucid construction.48 In addition to its ground plan, the modular masonry of the temple of Zeus Megistos matches that used in the other second-century Seleucid prestige constructions. Wherever they might have originated, the fragments of Doric masonry found in the area evoke the austere pseudo-Doric features of the temple of Jebel Khalid. Moreover, the co-location of the temple within a palatial district corresponds to the restricted locations of the Niched Temple at Ai Khanum and the temple at Jebel Khalid. While the temple of Zeus Megistos was not built as early as the Yale excavation had concluded, it is indeed possible that a temple was planned as part of a larger complex during the Seleucid period but only brought to fruition later, a pattern that the development of the city’s agora parallels.

The Legacy of Seleucid Sacred Architecture The populations of cities founded by the Seleucids continued to build or rebuild temples based on the ground plans of Seleucid official temple architecture long after the cities themselves fell from Seleucid control. Ai Khanum’s original temples were rebuilt several times on similar ground plans after the city became the capital of the independent Kingdom of Bactria. At Seleucia-onthe-Tigris and Dura-Europus, Seleucid temple architecture influenced the cities’ later traditions of sacred architecture.49 Whether the cities’ temples were initiated in the Parthian period or not, it is now becoming clear that the Greco-Macedonian settlers were an important driver in the Parthian development of such cities as Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, Susa, and Dura-Europus. Much like maintaining the institution of the bouleˉ , it is

possible that the Greco-Macedonian population was responsible for bringing Dura-Europus’s earliest temples to completion even after the Parthian conquest.50 A similar phenomenon appears at Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, as suggested by the multiple phases of the temple excavated next to Tell ‘Umar, the city’s theater.51 As discussed in previous chapters, the theater was the central focal point of Greek political identity in the city, and it is likely that the theater’s temple shared this similar purpose. Indeed, the Macedonian populations remained the core of the urban elite, and the main temples of the city, which they were likely responsible for rebuilding, continued to be focal points for Macedonian identity into the Parthian period. Seleucid architecture offered a challenging departure point for the prestige architecture of the new Iranian empires that succeeded the dynasty.52 Newly built temples that emerged in the centuries following reflect the basic forms of those at Ai Khanum and Takht-e Sangin. This ground plan appears in the first-century BCE temple of Mohra Maliaran at Taxila, in present-day Pakistan. Here it served as a Buddhist direct-access reliquary shrine, providing a “cutting-edge” architectural adaptation to South Asian ritual tradition that had developed from different pathways.53 After the fall of the GrecoBactrian kingdom, the previous functions of Ai Khanum and its temples came to an end when the city was destroyed. However, despite coeval evidence of disruption and destructions, the temples of Takht-e Sangin and Delberjin were rebuilt several times under the Kushans on similar plans and flourished as important cult sites for centuries thereafter.54 The architectural tradition of Hellenistic Bactria reached the height of its postSeleucid development in Kushan official architecture. The Kushan sanctuary at Surkh Kotal, built between 128 and 132 CE, contained at its core a temple that departed from the architectural tradition begun by the Seleucids and mediated by the Greco-Bactrian kingdom.55 At this point, however, the earlier Seleucid ideas had been thoroughly transformed and taken in new directions.

Claiming Ancient Cults The first two generations of Seleucid kings put a heavy dynastic stamp on major regional cults across their empire, and introducing a temple was one of the main strategies of claiming locally important traditions and sites. In certain cases, Seleucid investment had the secondary purpose of overshadowing Achaemenid-era

patronage, while in others the Seleucids created new sanctuaries on virgin ground to augment their larger efforts to shift Western Asia’s topographies of power. We see evidence of this at sites both large and small. The Seleucids began work on grand new temples at such sanctuaries as that of Apollo at Didyma, the Letoön at Xanthus, and the sanctuary of the river Oxus at Takht-e Sangin, all sites with deep cultic histories.56 Claiming an older cult was indeed the purpose of the new Seleucid temples of Zeus of Baitokaike in the Syrian coastal mountains, Atargatis at Hierapolis-Bambyke, which replaced an earlier Phoenician temple, and the sanctuary of Zeus at Olba in Rough Cilicia.57 There is no evidence of any previous temple at Ai Khanum or in its vicinity, nor of any pre-Hellenistic sanctuary on the plain. It is possible that the acropolis could have witnessed open-air sacrifices before the Seleucids’ new building activities at the site, but at Ai Khanum the Seleucid temple introduced a new cultic focal point, which eventually became the dominant one for the immediate region. While it was located within a restricted precinct, the Seleucid architects of Jebel Khalid sited its temple over a natural cleft in the rock instead of placing it adjacent to the palace. Nicholas Wright has argued that it claimed a preexisting cult site whose cult had been celebrated locally without a temple. Archaeological and epigraphic evidence from the military settlement of Ikaros on Failaka might shed light on this process. An important settlement flourished on the island in the Bronze Age. An inscription dated to the early third century, and possibly originating from Tell Khazneh, the likely site of the pre-Seleucid sanctuary, mentions a dedication to Zeus Soter, Poseidon, and Artemis Soteira, which, along with archaeological material from the mound, suggests the Greco-Macedonian settlers engaged preexisting cult sites once the military installation was founded.58 The Seleucid temple was located at a different site than the earlier sanctuary, and epigraphic evidence indicates that it was deliberately moved. Another inscription, dated somewhere between 243 and 237, records that an official, Ikadion, carried out the orders of a king, unamed but most likely Seleucus II, to move the sanctuary of Artemis Soteira, a transfer originally planned by the king’s ancestors. This appears to correspond to the cult of Artemis Soteira’s new monumentalization under imperial auspices within the Seleucid fortress.59 The Seleucid sanctuary site yielded evidence of Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid pottery, but certainly did not host an Achaemenid temple. Though found on an island in the Persian Gulf,

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the workmanship of Temple A is nothing provincial. Like Jebel Khalid, it reflects direct imperial investment and architecture. As far as our limited evidence will allow us to conclude, very few of the ritual activities practiced in these newly founded Seleucid sanctuaries in Mesopotamia and Iran conform strictly to any single religious or cultural tradition, and after their establishment, local populations also worshipped at the imperial temples. This is certainly the case for their later GrecoBactrian, Parthian, and Roman iterations. The colossal cult statue that appeared in the last phase of Ai Khanum’s Niched Temple bore the thunderbolt of Zeus, and it is possible that the sanctuary was dedicated to Zeus throughout its life.60 No matter how culturally plural ritual praxis at the site might be, the temple itself was unequivocally associated with state power. The temple and the palace were the only two complexes that bore the marks of a deliberate, targeted destruction during the local revolt that ended the city’s life as a Greco-Bactrian capital.61 Yet, the temple and its surrounding court revealed evidence of multiple subsidiary cultic focal points in addition to the naiskoi. In the second and third stages numerous large and small mud-brick bases for altars or offering tables were placed before or against the temple.62 The sanctuary integrated water channels, and over thirty vases of a non-Greek shape were dug into the lower edge of the crepis in the second phase, a practice that was continued in the third phase. While the temple’s cult statue might have received veneration according to Greek ritual protocols, the libation jars hint at local Iranian religious practices applied to this new sacred site.63 P. Bernard and F. Grenet both argued that the libation vessels reflect pre-Zoroastrian Iranian ritual, with the former suggesting the water channels implied a cult of Ana¯hita¯ and the latter tying the libation pits to pre-Zoroastrian cultic veneration rendered to Mithra.64 Given the profusion of subsidiary shrines in the temple precinct, it is very likely that the temple came to be the focal point for the cults of multiple deities celebrated there, in addition to the temple’s primary one. Just as significantly it suggests that there was nothing contradictory about using Greco-Macedonian forms for venerating gods associated with an originally non-Greek cult.65 Bernard discovered no evidence associated with the Extramural Temple that provides a clue as to the nature of the deity or deities worshipped there. However, on the southwest edge of Ai Khanum’s acropolis excavators discovered a large stepped podium located in the center of a sanctuary courtyard. This platform has been com-

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pared to similar structures discovered in Bactria and Iran and associated with open-air worship as described in classical authors.66 While there was no lack of high places, this could be interpreted as placing a Seleucid mark on this type of religiosity. Despite past assertions, the Oxus temple at Takht-e Sangin did not host anything resembling a Zoroastrian, ever-burning fi re cult in the Seleucid era. Altars excavated in the front of the temple resembled Greek altars.67 The dedications correspond to Greek cultic practices, though names associated with them are just as often Iranian as Greek.68 Significantly, one of the diademed portrait heads found in the Oxus temple’s storage corridors evokes coin portraits of Seleucus I, reinforcing the sanctuary’s initial connections to the Seleucid court. It is even possible that these statues were once recipients of cult themselves but were deposited here after the periods of destruction that corresponded to the fi nal extinction of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom ca. 130 BCE. Given the abundance of the dedications at the temple, it was clearly a popular cult site for a very important god, and it remained a devotional focal point long after Seleucid and Greco-Bactrian power disappeared from the Oxus valley. Compared to the relatively clear and deliberate associations between Greek gods and local gods in the western portions of the Seleucid Empire, the evidence is equivocal in the Iranian world. An Aramaic document mentioning an “offering for the sanctuary/altar (*bagina) of Bel (zwtr’ ‘l bgn’ lbyl)” might attest to the worship of this god in late Achaemenid Bactria and possibly, though not necessarily, a temple, as other references using the Iranian word *bagina describe open-air sanctuaries.69 As Michael Shenkar has observed, it “is appealing to connect Bel from the Aramaic documents of the Achaemenian period, the ‘Zeus’ from Ai Khanum, and ¯ oromozdo to a continuous, uninterrupted the Kushan O tradition of worship of Ahura Mazda¯, who was merged with Bel and later Zeus in Bactria, spanning the Achaemenian and Kushan periods. However, the only definite image of Ahura Mazda¯ in Eastern Iran is the Kushan ¯ oromozdo.”70 The same could be said of our evidence O for the relationship between Mithra and Apollo during this period.71 While compelling, even the presence of Heracles at Bisotun does not offer unequivocal evidence of assimilation with the Iranian god Wahra¯ m (Av. Vərəθraγna-) in the Seleucid period, though it is highly likely given what we know about the cult in the Parthian period. Our fi rst explicit evidence duly appears under the Parthians, where it is the Arsacid king himself who

offers this identification in an inscription.72 While the cults and iconographies of Zeus and Apollo could invite associations with Iranian deities, clear and overt evidence of official cultic assimilation or use of Hellenistic iconographies does not appear under the Seleucids, but under the initiative of Iranian dynasties such as the Kushans and Arsacids or the Perso-Macedonian kings of Anatolia and Armenia. Taken all together, however, it is clear that Seleucid policies prepared the ground, and by the Arsacid period such iconographic multivalency was thoroughly integrated into the visual cultures of Western Asia.

Early Seleucid Manipulation of Babylonian Topographies and Traditions As their new empire-wide topography of power took form, the Seleucids and their agents also reshaped Babylonia’s ancient urban and religious traditions around this new imperial vision. Much like their Babylonian officials, the Seleucid kings operated in both the Babylonian and the Greek cultural and religious spheres. Here we must depart from earlier approaches, both those that understood the Seleucids to be largely uninterested in Babylon and those that emphasize that the Seleucids engaged Babylon in a wholly traditional manner. Despite the rhetoric of continuity that is pervasive in the Babylonian textual evidence, the Seleucids actively manipulated and reconfigured Babylonian traditions to support their new dynastic and imperial vision. Engaging both Mesopotamian and Hellenic templates, the Seleucids and their agents promoted a relationship with Babylonian tradition that reflected the Seleucid dynastic vision and reshaped the Babylonian sacred landscape around that vision.73 The Seleucids ordered restorations of temples and manifested themselves at the center of ancient religious rituals befitting a king at the region’s most important cult sites as well as specially designed spectacles, though, as we have seen, after Antiochus I, much of this royal patronage was symbolic, and the city’s ancient monuments and urban spaces declined in contrast to its new Greek structures, which were supported by its Greek civic elite.74 The most important ritual was the Babylonian New Year’s (Akı¯tu) festival.75 This festival represented an important and astutely deliberate point of contrast with the Persian kings, who, after Cyrus the Great, rarely if ever played a role in Babylonian religious ceremonies. We have no direct evidence attesting to the participation of an Achaemenid sovereign in the New Year’s fes-

tival, but after Cyrus even possible allusions to it no longer appear.76 While the Seleucids did not do so often, several texts attest or allude to the personal participation of the Seleucids in the New Year’s festival at moments when they needed Babylonian support, including by Antiochus I in 268 BCE, Antiochus II in 246/5, Seleucus III in 224, and Antiochus III in 204/5.77 The astronomical diaries provide a very matter-of-fact account of Antiochus I’s rebuilding of Esagila and support of regional cults: . . . 36’: the citizens of Babylon went out to Seleucia. That month, the satrap of Babylonia the fields which and been given in year 32 (= 280/79) at the command of the king for the sustenance of the people of Babylon, 37’: Nippur, and Cutha; bulls sheep and everything of the [cities] and religious centres at the command of the king before the citizens 38’: [. . .] . . . of “the house of the king” (i.e., royal treasury/property) he made. That year, a large number of bricks for the reconstruction of Esa[ngila] were moulded above Babylon and below Babylon [. . .]78

Such evidence might yield the impression of unbroken continuities; however, other texts describing special cult activities performed by or under the Seleucids demonstrate an integration of Macedonian ritual practices into Babylonian ritual traditions. Interpreting these fragmentary bits of evidence is challenging, but it would be a mistake to infer that all such examples of Seleucid royal participation simply juxtaposed two culturally discrete practices or represented passively arising colonial hybridity.79 In some instances, the kings deliberately integrated Macedonian elements to communicate a new message that could speak to multiple audiences, while in others native Babylonian customs were redirected or retooled to provide a Babylonian response to a larger empire-wide demand or trend. Consider, by way of example of the former, the following fragment, which describes a one-off spectacle that Antiochus I staged, ceremonially participating in rebuilding the Esagila: [. . .] to the Bab[ylonians] (of) [the assembly of Esa]gila he (Antiochos I) [gave] an offering on the ruin of Esagila they arranged. Upon the ruin of Esagila he fell. Oxen [and] an offering in the Greek fashion he made. The son of the king, his [troop]s, his wagons (and) Old Persian *Baga-a¯vahana-, ‘DwellingPlace of the gods.’ Movses Khorenats‘i 2.55 and 2.66. Russell 1988, 160; Hewsen 1988b. 102. Movses Khorenats‘i, 2.8, 2.12, 2.14, 2.40, and 2.49; Aghatangełos 10.777–91. 103. Petrosyan 2007, 176–77. 104. Aghatangełos 778, in Thomson 1976, 317. 105. Aghatangełos 779, in Thomson 1976, 318; for the other sites destroyed by Gregory, see Thomson 1976, 440 n. 65. 106. Aghatangełos 784, 785, 786, 790, 809; Thomson 1976, 323, 325, 325–27, 329. 107. Hakobyan correctly observes that Saint Gregory’s sequence of temple destruction in Aghatangełos is programmatic. However, no corroborating evidence whatsoever exists to support his assertion that the temple of Mihr was located at an entirely different site also called Bagayaricˇ, which he hazards, without evidence, was located “nine miles west of Thordan,” on the southern slope of Mt. Sepuh. This claim fits the sequence he reconstructed from the literary sources better but is blatantly contradicted by the archaeological evidence and the deep toponymic history of Pekeriç. Hakobyan 2012, 157; Sinclair 2011, 2:250. 108. Baris (*Bagaris): Strabo 11.14.14; “Basgoidariza”: Strabo 12.3.28; and *Bagarizaka: Ptolemy 5.13.4; Dandamaev 1976, 138. 109. Hewsen 1988c. 110. On these cult sites and the ruler cult, see below, chapter 11. 111. Sinisi 2008. 112. On the Armenian pantheon, see Petrosyan 2007. The parallels with the Orontid and Artaxiad cult were emphasized by Sarkissian (1968). On Aštišat: Garsoïan 1989, 449. 113. While his ruler cult did not long survive his death, private individuals built tumuli that imitated Antiochus I’s funerary monuments on a smaller scale. See Wagner 2000a, 17. 114. Boyce 1975b. 115. Trans. Boyce 1968, 47. 116. Movses Khorenats‘i 2.77, in Thomson 2006, 221. 117. The work of Nina Garsoïan and James Russell has been foundational in elucidating this problem: Garsoïan 1985; Russell 1988. 118. Aghatangełos 817–18, in Thomson 1976, 355, 491 n.1 §817.

119. Aghatangełos 836 (Thomson 1976); Hewsen 1988b; Russell 1988, 160. 120. Movses Khorenats‘i 3.67; in Thomson 2006, 347–40.

Part Three Opening 1. I define political temporality as both the politically effected construction of time and its impact on time as “it manifests itself in human experience.” Hoy 2009, xiii. On concepts of time in Iranian religions, particularly Zurwanism, see Rezania 2010. 2. Even if Seleucus I had planned it, it was Antiochus I who actually instituted the new Seleucid dynastic era. Strootman 2015b. According to Paul Kosmin, this may have been the first such system in history. 3. This is strikingly illustrated by Errington and Curtis’s graphic (2007, p. 54, table 1). Antony and Cleopatra also introduced a short-lived era, ca. 37/6 BCE, in response to the Arsacids and the military and ideological challenge they presented in the Levant. Not coincidentally, this is also the same time that the Arsacid era appears explicitly on Parthian coins (under Phraates IV, ca. 37–32 BCE). Strootman 2015b. 4. See chapter 12 on the Sasanian integration of the Achaemenid necropolis into their commemorative practices. 5. Cf. Tremlin 2006, 75–86. 6. Boyce 2000a; 2005, 6. 7. Yt. 13.49. 8. Of course, methodologically we have little evidence that the Achaemenids, early Arsacids, and the postsatrapal dynasties of Anatolia and Armenia constructed their cults with direct influence from, or reference to, the surviving Avestan texts or the Zoroastrian religious practices known to us from its late antique and medieval instantiation. However, what evidence we do have allows us to accept with confidence that many of these royal cultures and even their cults participated in or were influenced by related early Iranian religious currents, both precursors and parallel developments that coalesced in late antique Sasanian Zoroastrianism. 9. De Blois 1996; Boyce 2005. 10. De Blois 1996, 49; Kellens 2013, 555. The word appears as part of the proper name “Fravartiš” in Darius I’s Bisotun inscription. Schmitt 2014, 178. 11. Shaked 2004, document C4, line 45, and pp. 43–45; Henkelman 2008b, 533. 12. “Both the Cappadocian calendar and Elamite inscriptions from Persepolis use the equivalent of an Avestan term for the frauuaš· is of the aš· auuans (Av. aš· auna¯ m frauuaš· ina¯ m) and indicate a particular time dedicated to these beings. The calendar includes a month named for the frauuaš· is at the beginning of the year, and the Elamite texts record offerings made to them in the form Irdanapirrurtiš.” Rose 2015, 380.

Chapter Ten 1. Gnoli 1983; Skjaervø 1999. 2. The most important synthetic study of the archaeology of Zoroastrian funerary practices to date is Huff 2004a. See also Shahbazi 1987; Grenet 1989; Russell 1989; Kleiss 2015, 11–32. Wider context within the ancient world: Mehl 2009.

3. Stronach 1978, 24–41; 1997; Zournatzi 1993. 4. Arr. Anab. 6.29.5–7. 5. Boardman 2000, 53–57; Stronach 1978, 40–42; Nylander 1970, 95–99; Zournatzi 1993. 6. Lincoln 2006, esp. 221. 7. Henkelman 2008b, 441–43. 8. On the Persian paradise, see chapter 17. 9. Two secondary burials were found inside, though the original design had a single chamber. Bessac and Boucharlat 2010, 15–19. 10. Tilia 1978, 73. 11. Arguments evaluated in Bessac and Boucharlat 2010. 12. Henkelman 2003; Bessac and Boucharlat 2010. 13. Vanden Berghe 1964, 1989; Nylander 1966a; Shahbazi 1972. 14. Schmidt 1970, 3:80–90. 15. Members of the royal family might be interred with the king inside, but the tomb only directly memorialized the king of kings himself. See below. 16. Schmidt 1970, 3:80. 17. Perspicaciously observed by Root (2014, 6). 18. Schmidt 1970, 3:87. 19. These later tombs lack inscriptions and are identified from their relative wear and style. A final tomb, begun at Persepolis presumably for Darius III, was never finished. Schmidt 1970, 3:77–107. 20. One of the Achaemenid tombs is securely attributed to Darius I by its inscription. Schmidt attributed the others to Xerxes, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II on the basis of relative wear and style, though this dating is far from secure. Schmidt 1970, 3:79–107. 21. Hdt. 1.140; Strabo 14.3.20; Arr. Anab. 6.29.4–7; Grenet 1989. 22. Hutter 2009. 23. Arr. Anab. 6.29.7–8. Strabo (15.3–7) reflects what we know from the archival sources: that these sacrifices also served as a sort of maintenance stipend for the priests. 24. Studies of primary sources attesting to the institution of the royal tombs, cult, and their caretakers in Achaemenid times: Henkelman 2003; 2008b, 287–91, 429–32, 546; Tuplin 2008; Canepa 2010a; Panaino 2014, esp. 237–38. 25. The texts can use these words interchangeably. Henkelman 2003; 2008b, 287–91; Canepa 2010a. 26. Henkelman 2003, 139–40; NN 1848, lines 3–10, trans. Henkelman 2003, 104. “Issue 24 head of small cattle to them, Bakabadda cum suis who are making . . . . . . (at) the šumar of Cambyses and the woman Upanduš at Narezzaš.” NN 2174, lines 1–8. Arr. Anab. 29.1–11. 27. The officials are identified in Elamite as li-ip-te.ku-ik-tira, which has been associated with the Old Persian title vaçabara, “chamberlain.” Henkelman studies the phenomenon in four tablets: NN 1700, NN1848, NN2174, and Fort. 2512. Henkelman 2003, 117–29; Schmitt 2014, 273. For parallels in assigning priesthoods for the Seleucid royal cult, see below. 28. Ctesias, fr. 13.9; Henkelman 2003, 155 n. 101. 29. Sa¯mı¯ 1958, 58–60. 30. Sa¯mı¯ 1958, 59–60. 31. Sa¯mı¯ 1958, 60. 32. Grenet 1989.

NOTES

407

33. With earlier references: Dusinberre 2013b, 166. 34. Kleiss 1996a. The reconstruction in Hanfman et al. (1983, 103–4 and fig. 68) is very imaginative. 35. Shahbazi and others identified the patron, ‘Artima son of *Arziphius’ (Artima, son of Ǝrəzifiya) as a cousin of Cyrus the Younger. While we cannot know securely whether this specific identification is correct, questioning the patron’s “ethnic” identity (a problematic construct in and of itself) on the basis of his name or the external tomb architecture does not take our analysis very far. Such critiques are irrelevant, since he is clearly performing an Iranian cultural identity no matter his genetic background, nor the shape of the exterior façade. If the hypothesis Shahbazi espoused on the identity of the patron is correct, such a modest, yet culturally and religiously sophisticated monument would not be unexpected given its patron’s high status yet fall from a previously exalted station after his support of Cyrus the Younger. Anachronistic definitions of “Zoroastrianism” do not help either. Kuban 1996; Hülden 2006, 203–4, 302–3, 345–48; Shahbazi 1975, 114–16; 1987. A few more monuments with roughly similar interior arrangement have been identified: Borchhardt, Neumann, and Schulz 2003, 37 n. 70. 36. ʾstwdnh znhʾrtym brʾrzpy ʿbdʾh· r mn zym [. . .] [zy]lh. Shahbazi 1975, 114–16; 1987; Boyce 1982, 2:210–11. 37. ʾstwdnh znhʾrtym brʾrzpy ʿbdʾh· . 38. Huff 2004a. 39. Cahill 1988. 40. See below, chapter 7, on the towers. 41. Cahill 1988, 484. 42. Boyce 1993; Malandra 2006a. 43. Macridy 1913; Akurgal 1966; Bernard 1969a; Nollé 1992, 113–17. 44. Borchhardt 1968, 201–3. 45. Strabo 15.3.14. 46. A new reconstruction of a tomb at Dascylium would also participate in such a tradition. Karagöz 2007; Vanden Berghe 1989; Canepa 2010a. 47. App. Syr. 63. 48. Stewart 1993, 224–25; Collins 2009. 49. Alonso 2009, 293. Related is the sanctuary of the Seleucid divine dynastic founder, Apollo, also in Syria, at Daphne. 50. Stillwell 1941, 3:33–34; Hannestad and Potts 1990, 116. 51. A fragmentary inscription from Seleucia-Pieria records the annual priesthoods for the city, which include priests of the deceased Seleucid kings and the living king, indicating they received cultic devotion in the city; however, this reflects the ruler cult as established by Antiochus III. Unlike the Sema of Alexandria, the Nikatoreion of Seleucia-in-Pieria did not lay at the center of an empire-wide cult.See discussion in chapter 11; also OGIS 245; Cohen 2006, 128, 134 nn. 15 and 16). 52. Kosmin 2014a, 104–5. 53. Polyb. 31.9.3; Just. Epit. 39.1.6. 54. This is the interpretation that coheres most logically and elegantly with the available evidence. Krinzinger, Ruggendorfer, and Heinz 2001 [2002].

408

NOTES

55. Prochaska and Grillo 2010. 56. Francfort and Ligeron 1976, 39. See below. 57. Kosmin 2014a, 105. 58. Lyonnet 2012, 149. 59. Downey 1988b, 72; Bernard et al. 1973, 85–102. 60. Francfort and Ligeron 1976; Bernard 1975, 180–89; Mairs 2006, 77–81. 61. Dated on the basis of ceramics. Francfort and Ligeron 1976, 38. 62. Francfort and Liger hesitated to draw this conclusion, attempting to make the evidence conform with the scholarly consensus of the independence of Bactria when they were writing, which has progressed considerably since. Francfort and Ligeron 1976, 39; Holt 1999. As Mairs points out, it is significant that this was the sole structure that retained some continuity after the nomadic destruction of the city, with several later burials deposited after its conquest. Mairs 2006, 80. 63. Francfort and Ligeron 1976, 31. 64. Bernard 1975, 189. The temenos of Kineas: Mairs 2006, 66–76, 78. 65. Mairs 2014, 88. 66. Strab. 12.3.39; Fleischer 2009. 67. ὑπὲρ βασιλέως / Φαρνάκου / [Μη]τρόδωρος / [. . .]ιου φρουραρ- / [χή]σας [τὸ]ν βω- / [μ]ὸν καὶ [τ]ὸν / ἀνθεῶνα / θεοῖς. Anderson, Cumont, and Grégoire 1910, 114–15, no. 94; OGIS 1:573–75, no. 365. 68. Huff 2004a. 69. Lincoln 2003, esp. 142. 70. Fleischer 2009, 111. 71. After Pharnakes conquered Sinope and made it his royal residence, it is often assumed that Amaseia no longer hosted royal burials. Pompey deposited Mithridates VI’s remains in the “tombs of his ancestors,” but we do not learn what the character of these tombs were, and it is unclear whether this was actually in Sinope, as Plutarch, claims, or in Amaseia. Plut. Pomp. 42.3; App. Mith. 16.113; Dio Cass. 37.14.1; Fleischer 2009, 118; Højte 2009, esp. 123–24. 72. Diod. Sic. 31.21. 73. Polyb. 31.7.4. 74. See above, chapter 9. 75. Seen also in Lydia around Sardis: Hanfmann et al. 1983, fig. 2. 76. Durukan 2012, 109–13. 77. Berges 1998, 186–87; Durukan 2012, 109–13. 78. Akkaya 1991; Nollé and Berges 2000, 1:95–96; Berges 1998, 186–87. 79. Nollé and Berges 2000, 1:96. 80. Berges 1998, 186; Bryce 2012, 148–52. 81. On Seleucid Uruk, see above. For a survey of the literature on the Hellenistic tumuli in Anatolia, see Durukan 2012, 130–31. 82. Özgüç and Akok 1958, 139–48; Ug˘ur 2012, 40; Durukan 2012, 109–35. 83. Durukan 2012, 133; Ug˘ur 2012; Eskiog˘lu 1989. 84. Kızıltepe and Küçük Kızıltepe also have tumuli on them of a more moderate size, ca. 77–80 meters in diameter. 85. Kurt Bittel also came to this conclusion in a short field note in 1939. Bittel 1939, 548.

86. Some have speculated that its patron was Ariobarzanes I, who chose this location to set himself off from the Ariarathids, whom he replaced. Coindoz 1985; Casabonne 2009; Thierry seems to identify the tumulus as an often frequented cult site and posits repeated processions from it to Venasa, for which no evidence exists. A function as an altar or cult site is not mutually exclusive from a tomb, but it should be noted that the site’s surface and looters’ trenches reveal no evidence of sacrifice such as ashes and bones, which are preserved in abundance at remote sites of frequent sacrifice like Yassiçal. The lack of any other evidence of occupation makes it seem unlikely that this was the main sanctuary of such an important and long-lived cult as Zeus Venasa or tied to it by frequent procession. Instead, it resembles Nemrud Dag˘, site of Antiochus of Commagene’s tomb and short-lived funerary cult, which is similarly sterile. Thierry 2016. 87. Coindoz 1985, 2. 88. Surveyed in the context of Paphlagonia: Johnson 2010, 249–55. Moreover, I have observed slots cut into the living rock for the purpose of supporting stelae before several Hellenistic tumuli at Comana. 89. Such correspondences have also been noted in the dynastic and funerary cult instituted by Antiochus I of Commagene (discussed below). Bonatz 2007; Beckmann 2012. 90. Nollé and Berges 2000, 1:99 (no. 1 et al.). 91. Discussed in the context of the dynastic sanctuary in chapter 11. 92. Edition with earlier bibliography and variant modern toponyms: Lemaire 2000. 93. Lemaire et al. 2014, 323; Lipinsky 1978, 270. 94. Compare the tombs at Sofular, Kus¸kale, Mazıköy, and Maçar, among others. Thierry and Thierry 1963, 39–43 and 41 n. 12. 95. Russell 1986a. 96. Russell 1986a. 97. Russell 1988, 55. On the site, see chapter 5. 98. Russell 1988, 346. 99. Kropp 2013, 175–224. It has even been suggested that these tombs can be connected to later Armenian funerary towers and later circular Armenian martyria. While it might simply be a coincidence, they also resemble the later development of the tradition as manifest in the early Islamic tomb towers. Tirats’yan 2003b, 99–103. 100. Movses Khorenats‘i, 11.46, trans. Thomson 2006, 184. 101. Buzandaran 4.24, trans. Garsoïan 1989, 157. 102. Buzandaran 4.24, trans. Garsoïan 1989, 157. 103. Buzandaran 4.24, trans. Garsoïan 1989, 157; Aghatangełos 785; Movses Khorenats‘i 3.10 and 3.27; Sinclair 2011, 2:415. 104. Aghatangełos 785; Movses Khorenats‘i 2.12, 2.14. 105. Sinclair speculates that they were located on a site now occupied by several eleventh- through fourteenth-century tomb towers (kümbets) of the princes of the local Mangujakid dynasty, which occupy a site slightly northeast of the fortress. Sinclair 2011, 2:415. 106. Buzandaran 4.24. 107. Buzandaran 4.23; cf. Movses Khorenats‘i, 3.27; Agathangełos 785.

108. Buzandaran 4.24. 109. Plontke-Lüning 2007, 270–78; Russell 1988, 340. 110. Schmidt 1994, 35–41; Khatchatrian 1967. 111. These excavations, led by Hakob Simonyan of Yerevan State University, were not yet published when this book entered production; however, the results were announced by the excavator in a series of press releases (e.g., Institute for Armenian Studies 2016; Armenpress 2016). I thank Mkhitar Khachatryan for sharing with me his photos of the opening of the ossuaries and the excavations at the site. 112. Following a well-trod ideological and nationalistic path, some strands of Soviet scholarship argued for linear development from Urartian temples. Plontke-Lüning 2007, 277–78. 113. Khatchatrian 1967, 185. 114. Gandolfo 1982, 60–61, fig. 80. 115. See above. 116. Johnson 2010, 115–18, 247–55; Özgür 2009; Dusinberre 2013b, 145–51; Menghin and Parzinger 2007, 238–303; Hülden 2006, 131–35, esp. Hülden’s comments at 131 n. 177; Rice 2016; Henry and Kelp 2016. For recent excavations of Hellenistic tumuli at Safranbolu and Karabük in southwestern Paphlagonia, see Patacı and Lafl ı 2015. 117. See chapter 3 above.

Chapter Eleven 1. Sims-Williams and Cribb 1995/1996, 91; Huyse 2003, 180 n. 12; Grenet 1988; Hewsen 1988a, 1988b; Grenet 2015b, 140–41. 2. An overview: Schlumberger et al. (1983–1990, 139–52). See also Rosenfield 1967, 140–42; Sarkissian 1968; Schippmann 1971a; Colledge 1977, 47; Waldmann 1991, 149–56; Fussman 1989; Sims-Williams and Cribb 1995/1996, 75–142; Huyse 2003. 3. On the problem of cross-cultural interaction: Canepa 2010e. 4. While the king occupied an elevated position, and was honored in court ritual and after death at his tomb, this does not constitute a ruler cult that spread throughout the empire per se. Rollinger 2011. 5. Kuhrt 1992, esp. 48–52. 6. Kuhrt 1996. 7. Important contributions to this debate include Nock 1928; Rostovtzeff 1935; Bickerman 1938, 249–56; Cerfaux and Tondriau 1957; Taeger 1957–1960, 1:171–440; Nilsson 1961, 132–85; Habicht 1970; Sherwin-White 1983, 1984; Walbank 1984; Stewart 1993; Virgilio 2003, 87–130; Debord 2003; Van Nuffelen 2004; Chaniotis 2004; Schmitt 2005; Capdetrey 2007, 25–38, 167–89. See Caneva 2016 and the other papers in that volume for a recent appraisal of ruler cults in the wider Hellenistic world. 8. Strabo 17.1; Erskine 2002; Pfeiffer 2008. 9. Virgilio 2003, 110–18. 10. The Nikatoreion of Seleucia-Pieria, that is, the temenos in which Antiochus I buried Seleucus I, was a mausoleum and was not the genesis or center of an empire-wide cult like the Sema of Alexandria. App. Syr. 63. 11. Van Nuffelen 2004, 285.

NOTES

409

12. Virgilio 2003, 118–27. 13. Waterman 1931, 9–17; McDowell 1935, 258. McDowell, Mouterde, Rostovtzeff, and Hopkins each arrived at different dates and offered several reconstructions. The inscription is too fragmentary for any of these to be accepted conclusively. Along with the inscription, a fragmentary Hellenistic sima an Achaemenid-style column base were also discovered incorporated as spolia in the Parthian structure. Hopkins 1972, 21. This might suggest, at least indirectly, the presence of a destroyed Seleucid official structure. 14. Van Nuffelen 2004, 298–300. 15. Virgilio 2003, 94–96; Van Nuffelen 2004, 289. 16. Debord 2003, 284–85. 17. Van Nuffelen 2004, 292–93. 18. See the collections of documents in Virgilio 2003, 206–310 and Ma 1999, 284–372. 19. Debord 2003, 291–300; Virgilio 2003, 123; Van Nuffelen 2004, 278–85. 20. Eriza/Dodurga: Holleaux 1930; Ma 1999, 354–56. Laodikeia/Neha¯vand: Robert 1949, 1950; corrected edition: Virgilio 2003, 239–41. Kermanshah: Robert 1967; Van Nuffelen 2004, 278–85. 21. Debord 2003, 291–300; Virgilio 2003, 123; Van Nuffelen 2004, 278–85. 22. Rahbar and Alibaigi 2009. 23. Trans. Austin 2006, 360. 24. Robert 1949, 21. 25. Unfortunately no foundations have been discovered. Rahbar and Alibaigi 2009. 26. Bickerman 1938, 249–56; Walbank 1984, 96–97. 27. It has even been suggested that the statues of Gudea that Adad-na¯din-ah h eˉs arranged in his palace were intended ˘˘ to portray ancestors in dynastic sanctuary inspired by the Seleucid cult. If this was the purpose at all, influence from Arsacid and Hyspaosinid practices would be just as important. Radner 2005, 223. 28. Rougemont 2012, no. 151, p. 155. 29. See above, chapter 7, on Achaemenid sacred spaces. 30. Isidore of Charax, Parthian Stations 11.. 31. Shahbazi 1993. 32. There is still controversy over who were the first to introduce these titles. Da˛browa 2009, 2011, 2015; Gariboldi 2004b, 374. 33. Shayegan 2011, 140–50; Da˛browa 1998b. 34. Gariboldi 2004b, 375 and n. 40. 35. Philostr. VA 27. 36. Isidore of Charax, Parthian Stations 12; Dio Cass. 71.26 and 74.1; Hansman 1986. 37. Dio Cass. 71.26, 74.1; Hansman 1986. 38. Invernizzi 2001, 145. 39. Košelenko 1977, 57–64; Košelenko et al. 2002; Krašeninnikova and Pugacˇenkova 1964; Invernizzi and Lippolis 2008, 7 and 382. 40. Invernizzi and Lippolis 2008, 145–47. 41. Boyce implied that the Nisa documents specifically refer to fires dedicated for the soul of the king, using the phrase in the Sasanian inscriptions, pad ruwa¯ n, but the ostraka contain no direct mention of this phrase or such fires. Boyce 1986.

410

NOTES

42. Boyce 1986; Lukonin 1983, 694; Diakonoff and Livshits 2001: pryptykn, p. 200; mtrdtkn, p. 197; ‘rtbnwkn, pp. 185–86; gwtrzkn, p. 191. The Nisa documents mention “temples,” or better “sanctuaries” (‘yzny, a¯ yazanı¯ ), but these appear to be submitting rather than receiving tax revenues: no. 2301, p. 158; no. 2573, pp. 164–65. 43. For earlier bibliography and debates, see Canepa 2015b. For the history of discovery and scholarship of the region, see Kian and Messina 2015. 44. Messina and Kian 2014. 45. Canepa 2015a, 86–87. 46. Canepa 2015a, 86–88. 47. Canepa 2015a, 90–92. 48. Gignoux 1999; Hewson 1975. 49. Carrière argued that Movses’s mentions of the sanctuaries depend entirely on Agathangełos, which is not entirely the case, as Movses refers to these sanctuaries in new contexts with new, unrelated information. Carrière 1899. On the identification of Greek and Armenian dieties: Garitte 1946, 193–45. 50. Movses Khorenats‘i 2.8, trans. Thomson 2006, 141 n. 93. Movses’s chronology is quite confused, as he conflates the Orontid and Arsacid dynasties. He understands that Vałaršak (r. ca. end of the third/beginning of the second century BCE) was the fi rst Arsacid king of Armenia and the brother of the founder of the Arsacid dynasty (1.8, trans. 79). He then jumps to Artašeˉs I (188–61 BCE, founder of the Artaxiad dynasty), to whom, taking a page from Herodotus, he attributes the conquest of the Lydian king, Croesus (2.12, trans. 145–46). “Eruand II” (likely corresponding to Orontes IV) he portrays as a usurper, but an Arsacid nonetheless. He ascribes the origin of this king to “illicit intercourse,” between an unnamed animal and a horribly ugly, unmarried Arsacid woman (2.37, trans. 176). He then resumes the line with another Artašeˉs, for whom he invents a childhood exile narrative vaguely similar to that of Moses or Ardaxshir I (2.37–38, trans. 176–78). Huyse 2003, 179–82. 51. Movses Khorenats‘i 2.12, trans. Thomson 2006, 146. 52. The king transferred everything in the city except the sanctuary because he was concerned that the city could not be securely guarded when throngs of worshippers came to sacrifice. Movses Khorenats‘i 2.40, trans. Thomson 2006, 179. 53. Movses Khorenats‘i 2.40, trans. Thomson 2006, 179. 54. Movses Khorenats‘i 2.40, trans. Thomson 2006, 179. Compare Agathangełos, trans. Thomson 1976, 817–18, trans. 355, and 491 n. 1. 55. Movses Khorenats‘i 2.49, trans. Thomson 2006, 187. 56. Movses Khorenats‘i 2.12, trans. Thomson 2006, 146. 57. Movses Khorenats‘i 2.66, trans. Thomson 2006, 209. 58. Facella 2006, 277; cf. Sarkissian 1968, 287. 59. British Museum: (GR 1873.8–20.1). The nineteenthcentury excavator of the site found no trace of a traditional Greek temple, which possibly parallels the other Armenian sanctuaries. Mitford 1974. 60. The History of the Kings of K’art’li, trans. Thomson 1996, 36–38. For an excellent study of the textual sources within their larger Georgian and Iranian contexts, see Rapp 2003, 277–78; 2014, 142–65.

61. Petrosyan 2012b, esp. 272. 62. Trans. Rapp 2014, 147. 63. History of the Kings of K’art’li, trans. Thomson 1996, 77; Rapp 2003, 279, 294. 64. Kipiani 2011. 65. Indicative of a very rich aristocracy, the lower city of Armazi has also yielded several tombs with opulent grave goods. Apakidze et al. 2004, 89. 66. On the pantheon, see above, chapter 5. 67. Diod. Sic. 31.19a. 68. Diod. Sic. 31.19a, 22. 69. Facella 2006, 199–205. 70. In fact, the only other appearances of Ptolemaeus in the epigraphic evidence from Commagene, that is, the inscription from Gerger and the thirteenth ancestor stele from Nemrud Dag˘ı are highly damaged. Facella 2006, 201. 71. Brijder 2014, 63–67; Facella 2006, 205–24. 72. Brijder 2014, 53–57. 73. Crowther and Facella 2003. 74. Brijder 2014, 421–23. 75. Facella 2006, 230–36. 76. Antiochus I Theos, A and G. 77. Antiochus I Theos, SO 6. 78. N Nomos 50.97; Facella 2006, 251. 79. Rose forthcoming; Crowther and Facella 2003; Musti 1982; pace Waldmann’s strict separation between temeneˉ and hierotheˉsia. Facella 2006, 251–52. 80. Facella 2006, 250–97; Canepa 2007; Mittag 2004, 2011; Wagner 2000b; Waldmann 1991. 81. N Nomos, 161–91. At Arsameia-Nymphaios they are referred to as specifically female. A 141–2. 82. Crowther and Facella 2003, 41 n. 3. 83. Rose forthcoming, 6–7. 84. As worded in the inscription over the cave at Arsameia-on-the-Nymphaios, §§111–27. 85. Brijder 2014, 228. 86. Brijder 2014, 225. 87. Given that the god associated with Mithradates I’s theomorphic name was “born of the rock,” one can only speculate about whether such a cave would have been an appropriate resting place for this king. For hypotheses on the location of the tomb at Arsameia-on-the-Nymphaios, see Brijder 2014, 260–64. 88. Sinclair 2011, 2:250. 89. Brijder 2014, 286–90. 90. Brijder 2014, 291. 91. Brijder 2014, 268–83. On the evidence for the dating of the site, see Brijder 2014, 293–94. 92. Hoepfner 2000, 61–63; Brijder 2014, 268–80. 93. Brijder 2014, 268–80. 94. Brijder 2014, 270–71. 95. Facella 2006, 303–7. Blömer’s objections are unconvincing; the only other nonroyal tumuli he cites are smaller and date from the Roman period and lack the columns: Blömer 2008. 96. Strabo 16.2.3; Özgüç 2009, 41–46; Zorog˘lu 2000. 97. Özgüç 2009, e.g., pl. 111.242. Cf. Brijder 2014, 424–28. 98. In addition to the rescue excavation reports, the mosaics and frescoes were included in Bingöl 1997, 107–14.

On the palace within the wider context of first-century Roman client kings, see Kropp 2013, 197–210. 99. Sanders 1996; Jacobs 2002; Mittag 2011. 100. Nomos 36. While their dynastic sanctuaries were located elsewhere, an “altar of Ohrmazd” was located at the site of the tombs of Arsacid kings of Armenia at Ani. Agathangełos 785. According to Movses Khorenats‘i, a king named Tigran built an altar over the tomb of his brother at Bagawan, the site of the “Fire of Ohrmazd” where the Arsacid dynasty of Armenia would celebrate the New Year; trans. Thomson 1976, 2:55, trans., 195; 2:66, trans., 209. 101. Lütjen and Utecht 1991; S¸ahin 1991a, 1991b; Brijder 2014, 401–9, 413–14. 102. Brijder 2014, 413–20. 103. Brijder 2014, 314–81. 104. Brijder 2014, 200–400. 105. With bibliography on the Seleucid connection to Alexander: Jacobs 2011. 106. Other inscriptions before the plinths might record that the king’s philoi were also represented. Brijder 2014, 101. 107. Brijder 2014, 101. 108. Nomos 143. 109. The reconstruction accepted by Brijder (2014, 326– 33, 368–76). 110. Brijder 2014, 122–27. 111. Nomos 67. 112. Nomos 67–104. 113. Nomos 67 and 132. 114. While such hypotheses have long been discarded, it is important to stress the cult activities do not bear any resemblance to late antique Zoroastrian cult, nor should they be expected to. For that matter, they also do not recall the fire cults of “Lydians called Persians,” as described by Pausanias. Other than the prominence of the myrtle wand in the iconography of the gods, the cult does not reference the peculiar strictures of the Magi of Cappadocia as described by Strabo. Pace Waldmann 1991, 90–127; 1994. 115. Nomos 124. 116. I should emphasize that evidence of contemporary influence from the Iranian east on Antiochus I’s cult is not one and the same as evidence of the influence of the written Avesta and, still less, Zoroastrianism, even if they all developed from common roots. Jacobs 2011. 117. It is also possible that the date referenced the coronation of Mithradates; some have favored this, opining a personal horoscope would be too sensitive to display to the public, as one could predict the future based on it. In my opinion, this is precisely the reason Antiochus would display and disseminate this information. Crijns 2014. 118. N Nomos 29–30; Sanders 1996. 119. Kropp 2013, 1. See also Versluys 2017, 141–55 on this phenomenon. 120. While the topic lies outside the scope of this study, the dynastic sanctuaries of the Kushans also responded to Seleucid, Greco-Bactrian, and Arsacid precedents. See Canepa 2015b for analysis of the relationship of the Kushan sites to the western material, with particular attention to Surkh Kotal, Rabatak, and Mat. For Akchakhan-kala, Toprak

NOTES

411

Kale, and Khalchayan, see Betts et al. 2015, Rapoport 1991, Grenet 1986, and Pougatchenkova 1965. 121. Knauss 2006. 122. The Armenian historians even reference a common Central Asian origin for the Arsacids and the Kushans, and they understand that the royal families were blood relations; Movses Khorenats‘i 2.67, trans. Thomson 2006, 210 n. 478; Huyse 2003, 182–83. 123. Parthian: Sheldon 2006; Invernizzi 2006; Olbrycht 2003. Kushan: Benjamin 2006; Liu 2001. Critique of the nomadic thesis: Hauser 2005. 124. In the case of Armenia, Hellenistic influence grew in Armenia under Artašeˉs/Artaxias, who served as a satrap under the Seleucid kings, and Movses Khorenats‘i’s information becomes more specific when he speaks about the deeds of Artašeˉs. Other Hellenistic practices that he adapted, such as the introduction of the use of boundary stones, have been borne out archaeologically. Russell 1986b.

Chapter Twelve 1. Na¯ ma-ye Tansar 11–12, trans. Boyce 1968, 37. 2. The name “Sasan,” however, appears often in eastern Iran, even in magical material, where it appears to refer to a divinity. It is entirely possible that the family migrated from the east, given that they do not appear to have arisen from an old noble family in the region. The historical province extended beyond the confines of the modern province of Fars (Wiesehöfer 1999). 3. Daryaee 2009, 3–4; Al-Tabari (813–22, trans. 2–22) provides the most detailed story of the Sasanians’ rise and likely reflects the official narrative. Shahbazi 2005b. 4. Yarshater 1971, 1983b; Daryaee 1997, 2002b, 2010; Huyse 2006, 182–88. Shayegan 2011. 5. Wiesehöfer 2012: Strootman 2017. 6. Wiesehöfer 1996a, 41–43; 2012. 7. For an overview, see Haerinck and Overlaet 2008, 208– 9; Klose and Müseler 2008. For context, see Canepa 2017c; Strootman 2017. 8. An inscription on a Hellenistic-style bowl in the Getty refers to these rulers as da¯ ra¯ ya¯ naga¯ n (“of the lineage of Darius [I]”) and presents a rare non-numismatic piece of evidence of the persistent memory of the Achaemenids. Skjaervø 1997; Callieri 2007, 131. 9. De Jong 2003; Panaino 2003; Potts 2007. 10. Rendered by Greek historians as kyrbasia, reconstructed as Old Iranian *kurpa¯ sa (Shahbazi 2011). Some Greek sources refer to this satrapal headgear as the tiara apageˉs. Wiesehöfer 2007, 43. 11. Wiesehöfer 2007, 43. 12. Boyce and Grenet 1991, 3:116–18; Trümpelmann 1992, 52–55; Wiesehöfer 2012. 13. Alram 1986, pls. 17.533, 18.533–59, 19.560–63. 14. This is by far the most common reverse type in the Fratarakid coinage. Alram 1986, pls. 17.518–34, 17.545–47, 18.535–59, 19.560–67; de Morgan 1979, 277–81, figs. 340–51. Palace H in Persepolis preserves remains of post-Achaemenid crenellation that are very close to that on the roof of the tower on the reverses of the Fratarakid coinage. Gnoli 1989,

412

NOTES

124–25; Trümpelmann 1992, 53–54. Potts (2007) presents a useful historiographical overview of this debate as well as cogent evaluation of the scholarship and evidence. Haerinck and Overlaet (2008) argued that the images on the coins represent Greco-Roman-style open-air altars, such as the Ara Pacis. Despite Haerinck and Overlaet’s detailed argument, no archaeological evidence attests to such altars in Pars. 15. Wiesehöfer 2007, 43. 16. E.g., British Museum inv. 1856, 1201.1. 17. They exchanged the ancient title of frataraka¯ for that of “king” (ša¯ h), matching Arsacid conventions. Potts 2007, 276. The upheavals following Antiochus IV’s invasions of Egypt provide the backdrop to the Seleucids’ eventual loss of Pars. See Mittag 2006 for in-depth analysis of these events. 18. Potts 2007, 276; Wiesehöfer 2007, 45. 19. Alram 1986, nos. 564–86 (Group C); Garrison and Root 2001; Root 2008. 20. Herzfeld 1935, 46. This room yielded column bases and a large stone block that most likely served as a plinth for a statue. Schmidt 1953, 55–56; Schippmann 1971a, 177–82. Although the exact chronology of this building activity is unclear, Tilia’s excavations revealed extensive remodeling and spoliation. A great deal of material from Persepolis’s structures was incorporated into the Sasanian cities of Qasr Abu Nasr and Staxr as well as Fratarakid-to-Sasanian Staxr. Tilia 1972, 262–64, 291, 316; 1977, 74–75; Whitcomb 1985, 93–104, 220–21. Architectural members dispersed from the Dasht-e Gohar tomb appeared at Fratarakid and Sasanian sites. Tilia 1978, 85–88. 21. Schmidt 1953, 55–56. 22. Schmidt 1953, 1:51, figs. A–C; Shahbazi 1986; Choksy 1990a, 30–35; 1990b, 201–5. 23. Schmidt 1953, 1:50, fig. 16, no. 4. 24. Al-Mas’udi, Muruj al-dahab (de Meynard 1861–1877, 4: para. 1403 [4.77]). Although Boyce (1975c, 2012) argued this structure was built by the Achaemenids, without any archaeological evidence of the Achaemenid fire temple (or any other Achaemenid fire temple for that matter), the weight of the evidence suggests that it was created with spolia in Staxr or in a reoccupied part of Persepolis by the Fratarakids. This could also have arisen from the medieval author’s own interpretation of Persepolis as fire temple. 25. Huff 2004a; Potts 2004; Haerinck 1975. 26. Callieri 2007, 97. On the Seleucid temple, see above, chapter 8. 27. Huff 2004a, 596–602. 28. Canepa 2014. On the wider possibilities and problems relating to Parthian engagement with the Achaemenids, see Shayegan 1999; Fowler 2006. Harper (2006, 6 n. 9) cites Ghirshman (1976, pl. 41.6) as evidence of Parthian reuse of Achaemenid architectural members at Bard-e Neshanda; however, in his text, Ghirshman (1952, 8; 1976, 199–200) is clear that these were the same six column bases he discovered in the painted Sasanian room in Susa, not, as it appears in Harper’s text, from the Parthian level of Bard-e Neshanda. 29. The beginning of the Sasanian era occurred in 205/6, according to the Middle Persian inscription on the Stele of Bishabuhr dedicated to Shabuhr I. Frye 1984, 291–96; Wiesehöfer 1986; Schippmann 1990, 10–20.

30. Herzfeld 1941, 307–9; Schmidt 1953, 1: fig. 99a, b; Calmeyer 1976, 63–68, figs. 3, 4; Trümpelmann 1992, 53; Callieri 2003; 2007, 132–34. 31. Based on the numismatic evidence, the scholarly consensus is that these represent the early Sasanians; cf., e.g., these images with the headdress on the coins of Shabuhr (Alram 1986, pl. 22.653–55; Huff 2008a, 32–33). For an alternate interpretation, see Wiesehöfer 2007, 47. See Callieri 2003 for an account of earlier identifications of these figures. 32. Al-Tabari 816, trans. Bosworth 1999, 8–9. 33. al-Tabari 816, trans. Bosworth 1999, 8–9; Daryaee 2009, 4. 34. Huff 1971; Huff and Gignoux 1976, 134–36; Kröger 1982, 197–98; cf. Roaf 1998, 3–4. In earlier scholarship, the Great Palace was erroneously referred to as the Ateshkade (the Fire Temple), a name sometimes still encountered. 35. Although the Qalʿa-ye Dokhtar likely did not serve long as the official residence, considering the cracks and the much more convenient palace on the plain below, its presence on the canyon cliffs high above would have been disheartening to any invading army and awe inspiring to any entering the valley. Yazdgird III did, however, fortify it again against the Arabs at the end of the empire. Huff 2008a, 44. 36. Huff 2008a, 42–44. 37. For those on the Qalʿa-ye Dokhtar, see Canepa 2010d, fig. 5. 38. According to Huff (1969–1970; 1972, 536–40; 2008a, 47–49), the masonry techniques match contemporary Roman techniques, indicating this was not an Achaemenid construction as some have conjectured. 39. Huff 2008a, 54. The double Persepolitan entranceway also occurred in the Sasanian constructions at Kangavar. Azarnoush 1981, 2009. 40. The “lotus-petal lintel” (or the “cavetto cornice”) and the bull protome capital are not discussed by Ghirshman after his initial report. Salles and Ghirshman 1936. 41. Salles and Ghirshman 1936, 119–20. 42. On Roman sculptural, masonry, and mosaic techniques in his new city and Antioch, which the king of kings repeatedly sacked, see Canepa 2009, 43, 54, 174, 244 n. 119, 258 n. 18. 43. Analyzed in detail in Canepa 2009, ch. 4. 44. Schmidt 1970, 3:75, fig. 30, no. 23 [field no. 2.39]; Kröger 1982, 196–97. See below on the context. 45. One of the Achaemenid tombs is securely attributed to Darius I by its inscription. Schmidt (1970, 3:79–107) attributed the others to Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II on the basis of relative wear and style. The Elamite reliefs date to 1700 BCE and the eighth–ninth centuries BCE. Vanden Berghe 1983, 26–27, 66; Seidl 1986. In 1971, when the ground was leveled to accommodate Reza Shah’s “anniversary celebrations,” two minor reliefs of a lion and male figure were revealed. Roaf 1974. It is possible that more minor reliefs lie below ground level. The site also contains an unfinished relief, possibly started during Husraw II’s reprisal of the genre in the seventh century, on which an inscription was carved during the Qajar era. Nearby, there lies an Islamic shrine, the Emamzade Saf-e Mohammad. Stronach 1966, 217. 46. Choksy 2015, 396.

47. Several bear inscriptions dating them to the late-Sasanian and early Islamic periods. Trümpelmann 1992, 17–24; Dietrich Huff 1998, 2004a; Cereti and Gondet 2015. 48. The walls have been dated tentatively to the third century CE. Their semicircular bastions correspond to Sasanian fortifications and contrast with those of Achaemenid fortifications, though it is not inconceivable that they were built on earlier Fratarakid or even Achaemenid foundations. Kleiss 2001; Gropp 2004. 49. Schmidt 1970, 3:54–58; Schippmann 1971b; Kleiss 1976, 142–50; Trümpelmann 1992, 49–51. 50. Studies with this implication are summarized by Daryaee (2002a, 3–4). 51. Five reliefs are securely attributed to the king of kings (listed chronologically): Firuzabad (Ardaxshir-Xwarrah) I and II, Naqsh-e Rajab III, Naqsh-e Rostam I, and Salmas. Vanden Berghe 1983; Levit-Tawil 1993. Darabgerd coheres most closely with the themes of Shabuhr I’s reliefs; however, the crown matches one he shared with his father during their co-regency, rather than his normal regnal crown. 52. See Canepa 2009, 59–68 for in-depth analysis of this relief in the context of Roman-Sasanian competition. 53. Herrmann 1981, 151–60; Trümpelmann 1992, 62; Harper 2006, 15. 54. For valuable close analysis of sculptural forms and techniques at Persepolis, see Roaf 1983, 42 (for hands). 55. Henkelman 1995–1996, 284–86. 56. Pfeiler 1973; Shahbazi 2001, 66; Alram, Blet-LeMarquand, and Skjaervø 2007, 18–22. 57. This refers to the claims of the king of kings that Philip was forced to sue for peace, and, as part of the agreement, pay a lump sum of 500,000 denarii on the spot and a large annual indemnity. Rubin 1998, 178. In my opinion, MacDermot’s (1954) argument for identifying these emperors is still the most convincing. For a recent alternative view, see Overlaet 2009. 58. Shabuhr I created triumphal rock reliefs with similar compositions and ideas at several other sites and in other media. Alram, Blet-LeMarquand, and Skjaervø 2007; Canepa 2009, 68–71. 59. ŠKZ §51; emphasis added. For summary of the scholarship on the word dastgird informing my translation, see Gignoux 1994. 60. For a foundational study on the architecture of the structures, see Stronach 1967. 61. Nylander (1966a) concluded that the Zendan was constructed before the Kaʿba, since the Kaʿba made use of iron clamps to join its blocks, and the Zendan did not. The Zendan was likely built during the same period as the palaces of Pasargadae (ca. 540 BCE), and the Kaʿba, during the reign of Darius I, sometime after 520 BCE. Gropp 2004. 62. Stronach 1967, 287–88; Schmidt 1970, 3:34–49. As discussed above, the reverses of most of the Fratarakid coins portray coffered towers that appear strikingly similar to the profile of the Kaʿba. Stronach 1966, 226; Boyce 1989; Potts 2007. 63. Tilia 1974. 64. Choksy 1990a, 1990b; Potts 2007, 296–97. For a survey and excellent quality images of the coinage of the Fratarakas, see Klose and Müseler 2008.

NOTES

413

65. As he and others have observed, the remainder of largely unexcavated soil around Naqsh-e Rostam will provide the best evidence as to what occurred there for the Sasanian period as well as the Achaemenid era. Any attempts to defend one single interpretation should be reserved until the area has been fully excavated. Stronach 1967; Schmidt 1970, 3:53–58, fig. 23. 66. See Potts 2007 for an overview of the early literature. It should be noted that the Fratarakid coins do not attempt to portray fire emanating from the towers’ crenulations, within the structure, or anywhere else nearby. 67. The Middle Persian version is on the east wall, with the Parthian on the west and the Greek on the south. 68. KKZ §21, trans. MacKenzie 1999, MR 251 (emphasis and underlining original). 69. Skjaervø 1985. 70. Skjaervø 1985, 593–98. 71. Skjaervø 1985, 603. 72. Skjaervø 1985, 603. There are further parallels between Darius I’s inscriptions and many of Ardaxshir I’s statements stemming from later Pahlavi literature. Shahbazi 2001, 66–68. For orality in Sasanian culture in general, see Huyse 2008. 73. Evocatively laid forth in Skjaervø 1985 and Huyse 1990. 74. Huyse 1999, 33–50. 75. Huyse 1999, 33–34. See Huyse’s commentary (1999, 106) for the tradition of founding fires “for the sake of the soul” in later Zoroastrianism. 76. See chapter 10 above. For studies of primary sources attesting to the institution of the royal tombs, cult, and their caretakers in Achaemenid times, see Henkelman 2003; 2008a, 287–91, 429–32, 546; Tuplin 2008; Canepa 2010c. 77. Food offerings were, and continue to be, an important part of the Zoroastrian staomi ritual carried out for the spiritual benefit of souls, living and deceased. Kotwal and Choksy 2003. 78. KNRm; Huyse 1998, 112; Skjærvø 2011a. 79. KKZ §§2–3; KNRm §§6–7. 80. KKZ §3. 81. Shaki 1974; Skjaervø 1989, 1993. For a review of the literature, see Huyse 1998, 110–16. 82. “Ce passage montre que c’est une expression technique justement employée lors de la transmission de la direction des temples du Feu. . . . C’est la même operation entre Šahpuhr et Kardir qui est décrite dans l’inscription.” Humbach 1974, 204. Similar phrases occur in Bactrian contracts documenting the sale of secular property. Huyse 1998, 116 n. 41. 83. Schmidt 1970, 3:57. 84. Schmidt 1970, 3:54. 85. The north room measured 4.7 × 3.0 m and had at least one niche per wall, 85 cm from the ground, measuring 60–70 cm wide × 50 cm high × 25–30 cm deep. The south room, measuring 2.98 × 1.80 m, had a single niche 80 cm from the ground in the west and east walls and two niches in the south wall. They measured 50–62 cm wide × 45–50 cm high × 25–30 cm deep. Schmidt 1970, 3:54. 86. Huyse 1998, 115–16.

414

NOTES

87. Schmidt 1970, 3:54–58, 75, fig. 30, no. 23; Kröger 1982, 196–97. 88. Trümpelmann 1992, 31–41; Gropp 2004; Potts 2007, 289–91. 89. Huyse 1999, 33.1. 90. The medieval staomi ritual was carried out in an openair setting, in the outer precinct of a fire temple. Kotwal and Choksy 2003, 389–90. 91. Henning 1939; 1957, i. 92. Trümpelmann 1992, 42–43. 93. Henkelman 2003; 2008a, 287–91, 429–32, 546; Tuplin 2008, 317–86. The ritual celebration of the fires coheres well with the funerary (though not mortuary) function of the site, which would be carried out elsewhere. Huff 2004a, 595– 96. Any objection that Zoroastrians would not allow the coexistence of sacred fi res and royal human remains is anachronistic and ignores the weight of evidence at this and other ancient sites, as well as the Sasanians’ own less-thanorthodox royal ideology and cult. Daryaee 2008a. 94. Of their successors, Wahram II (276–293) was the most prolific patron, carving at least six and as many as eight reliefs. Weber 2009. Vanden Berghe (1983, 76–82) attributed as many as ten reliefs to this king; see also Shahbazi 1988. 95. Other than Naqsh-e Rostam 5 (Ohrmazd II), there is no solid consensus on the attribution of the “joust” scenes. Herrmann and Curtis 2002. Relief 7 is tentatively attributed to Wahram II. Vanden Berghe 1983, 77; Haerinck and Overlaet 2009, 532–33. 96. Gignoux 1991; MacKenzie 1999, MR 219. 97. See Weber 2009 for her inclusion in Wahram II’s reliefs. 98. Von Gall (1990, 30–36) argued that the patron of this relief was Wahram IV (388–399). His intricately argued yet idiosyncratic attributions based on an invented set of rules, including at the great ayva¯ n at Taq-e Bostan, have not been widely accepted. 99. For Ohrmazd II, see Herrmann and Howell 1977. Vanden Berghe (1983) attributes the unfinished relief to Shabuhr II. Another joust scene (Relief 3) is situated below the tomb attributed to Darius II. There is even less consensus on its patron; it has been attributed to Ohrmazd I (Trümpelmann 1992), Shabuhr II (Schmidt 1970), Wahram II (Vanden Berghe 1983), or to sometime in the fifth century (von Gall 1990). 100. An unfinished relief was prepared to the east of Narseh’s. Some assume this was the work of Narseh, though given its size, it could also be the work of Husraw II, who left many other colossal unfinished reliefs at some of the most prominent sites in the empire, such as at the Terash-e Farhad near Bisotun (Luschey 1996) and the great ayva¯ n at Taq-e Bostan (Movassat 2005). 101. Vanden Berghe 1983, 140. This motif appears in the crowns of the colossal creatures in Xerxes I’s “Gate of Nations” at Persepolis. 102. An astoˉda¯ n (Mid. Pers.) is a Zoroastrian ossuary meant to contain the bones of the deceased and prevent human remains from coming into contact with the elements. Schippmann 1971b; Trümpelmann 1992, 42–45. For important studies on Iranian mortuary techniques, see Shahbazi 1987; Huff 2004a.

103. Discovered in 1843 by H. Rawlinson and surveyed by E. Herzfeld in 1924, its inscriptions were published by Humbach and Skjaervø (1978–1983). The site has recently been reexplored by an Italian-Kurdish team led by C. Cereti. Faticoni 2006. 104. NPi 3.2, 3.8, 3.12, Humbach and Skjaervø 1978–1983. 105. NPi 3.2, 3.13, Humbach and Skjaervø 1978–1983. 106. Canepa 2009, 59–60. 107. Canepa 2009, 62–63. 108. NPi 4, A8.02–A15.02, trans. adapted from Skjærvø 1983, 28–29. See also NPi E5–8.06-cI-2.03. 109. Dealt with in depth in Shayegan 2011, 12–14; 2012, ch. 6. 110. Trümpelmann 1992, 47–48. Although it was originally understood by Ghirshman (1944–1945, 184) to be a Fratarakid construction from the third to fi rst century BCE, Huff (1975) proved its masonry techniques pointed to a Sasanian origin. 111. ŠPs-I. Back 1978, 281 and 492–494. Frye 1966, 85; Callieri 2011; Lukonin 1969, 129; Shahbazi 1977, 201. 112. ŠPs-II. Frye 1966, 87; Callieri 2007, 133–34.

Chapter Thirteen 1. See chapter 1. 2. Frendo 1985; Howard-Johnston 2004, 2010. 3. “(We worship the mighty Kavyan Glory) which came over / to Kauui Haosrauuah / with regard to his well-formed impetuousness, / with regard to his victoriousness created by Ahura (Mazda¯), / with regard to his overcoming superiority, / with regard to his well-issued order(s), / with regard to his unshakable order (s), / with regard to his irresistible order(s), / with regard to having defeated his enemies at one stroke.” Zamya¯ d Yašt 19.74, trans. Humbach and Ichaporia 1998, 147. 4. Shahbazi 1994, 2001; Khaleghi-Motlagh 1994. Cf. de Jong 2003. 5. See the introduction. 6. Yt. 19.66–67; Panaino 2013. 7. Boyce and Grenet 1991, 3:73 n. 29 8. The sacred area (QN 3) of the Achaemenid city of Dahan¯ ola¯ma¯n in Sista¯n provides evidence of something other e G than a Zoroastrian cult, as its altars were used to burn sacrificial animals. Gnoli 1993a. No continuities exist between known Achaemenid architecture and the pre-Achaemenid sites in Media and Chorasmia that are often cited as “protofire temples.” Choksy 2007; Shenkar 2007. 9. Grenet 2005, 33. 10. Yarshater 1983b, 383–87; Panaino 2015a, 239; Cereti 2015, 269–71. 11. GBd. 33.29–36. 12. Timus¸ 2015, 185–223, for Kay Husraw, see esp. 208–9. 13. Cf. the Achaemenids: Skjærvø 2005, 79–80. 14. NPi §89. I thank Andrea Piras for this observation. 15. Yt. 19.66–67; Grenet 2005, 2015a. Also known as Ušidarǝna; Gnoli 2003b. 16. Yt. 13.62, 13.28; Dk. 7.8.1; Gnoli 2003b. 17. Grenet 2008, 2015a. 18. Yt. 19.88–93; ed. Humback and Ichaporia 1998.. My translation responds to the commentaries and translations

of Humbach and Ichaporia, Hintze (1994), and Skjærvø (2012, 158–60). 19. GBd. TD2, 33.36–38. I thank Touraj Daryaee for sharing his unpublished edition of these sections, which incorporates DH 90.16–97.2, TD1 181.2–189.11 and TD2 211.3– 220.15. In this edition: 33.35–37. Cf. Daryaee 2013, 74. 20. Yt. 19.51 and 56–57; Christensen 1931, 22–23; Gnoli 1967, 10–12. 21. Grenet 2015a, 24. 22. Boyce suggested it possibly reflects a local oral tradition of the Avesta that stemmed from this region. Boyce and Grenet 1991, 3:123. 23. Sources collected and analyzed in Cereti 2015, 270–71. 24. Cf. Massey 2005, 140. 25. With potentially dire consequences, the waters of the lake have all but evaporated because of overexploitation of its tributaries for irrigation. Overview of the site: Ghanimati 2015. 26. Excavation history and history of scholarship on the site in Ghanimati 2001, 112–29. Much of the early archaeological data from these crucial early explorations was neither well recorded nor published. As a result, while we can offer broad conclusions, many specific problems of chronology will likely remain open questions. 27. Ghanimati 2000, 140. Gullini’s methodologies and assertion that the site exhibited multiple phases starting in the Achaemenid era had been roundly rejected even before the C14 tests. Gullini 1964; Tucci 1966; Schippmann 1971a, 60–70. 28. Unfortunately, Ghanimati did not publish her C14 data according to accepted scholarly conventions. In addition to lacking the laboratory analysis number, she did not specify whether she was reporting the Conventional Radiocarbon Age (CRA) in her report or how the results were calibrated (assumed here) with the calibration data set used. It would be useful if these could be published, since calibrated dates change with advances in radiocarbon calibration data. Ghanimati 2001, 138–39. 29. Ghanimati 2000, 141. When Ghanimati published her article in 2000, these results were to appear in the Journal of Sa¯ zma¯ n-e Mı¯ ra¯ s-e Farhangı¯ -e Kešvar; however, as of now they remain unpublished, and it appears there are no current plans to publish them. The only details of these investigations currently available come from Ghanimati’s 2001 dissertation, 2000 article, and 2015 EIrO entry. 30. Ghanimati 2001, 139. 31. Ghanimati 2000, 140–41. On its wider context of the archaeology of Iranian pilgrimage, see Grenet 2010. 32. Ghanimati 2001, 196–97. 33. Huff 1990. 34. Gullini 1964, 283; Schippmann 1971a, 64–65. Similarly, the idea of a two adorsed stairways leading to the upper level in the first period came from Herzfeld’s conjecture, now considered to be false. Herzfeld 1935, pl. IX. 35. Stein simply surveyed the temple, and Herzfeld only dug out the remains of the fire holder. Stein 1928, 911–12; Herzfeld 1935, 66–67; 1941, 301–2. 36. For the earlier scholarship on the painting and sculptural program, see Ghanimati 2015.

NOTES

415

37. Kröger 1982, 35, 74, 133, 185, 226, 247, 267. 38. Kawami 1987, 17–18; Ghanimati 2015. 39. Herzfeld Archive, neg. no. 1173; Kawami 1987, 18; Ghanimati 2015. 40. Herzfeld Archive, neg. no. 1173; Kawami 1987, 18; Canepa 2014. 41. Engel 2012. 42. These were documented by Stein and Herzfeld, with a few fragments coming to light in the later twentieth century. This stylistic similarity even led some early interpreters to posit that the site was originally a Buddhist monastery, a fallacy that is still sometimes repeated by those relying on their earlier studies. For an entry into the literature and description, see Ghanimati 2015. 43. Ghanimati 2015. 44. Kawami 1987, 25–50. 45. Azarpay 1981, 84. Analyzed in detail: Kawami 1987, 25–50. 46. Herzfeld, 1941, 294–95; Kawami 1987, 28; Ghanimati 2015; Canepa 2015f. 47. Herzfeld (1935, 73) understood that they came from the same period, which has been borne out in later studies. Kawami 1987, 22, 26; Ghanimati 2000, 2015. An older attempt to date the painting remains according to Gullini’s levels: Faccena 1981. A recent attempt to date the paintings to the Hellenistic era despite Ghanimati’s careful architectural analysis and the C14 evidence: Bivar 2003. C14 tests of materials from the Painted Gallery’s ceiling date the structure between 80 and 240 CE (+/- 50), and its architectural features and building techniques narrow this range to the early Sasanian era. The C14 tests do allow for a late Parthian date, a possibility that would depend on a revision of our understanding of the development of Iranian architecture. The dating should be revisited if substantial new discoveries from the Parthian era in eastern Iran come to light, indicating that the above-mentioned architectural features anticipate Sasanian architecture. 48. Betts et al. 2015. For context, see Minardi 2015. 49. Herzfeld Archive, neg. nos. 4019 and 4022; 1929 sketchbook, p. 35; Kawami 1987, figs. 10–12; Shenkar 2014, 155–58. 50. Göbl 1984, 169–70; Jongeward and Cribb 2014, 264– 67, 282–84, 292–94, and 299–300. Cf. the painted terra-cotta panels portraying Oešo/S´ iva in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. nos. 2000.42.3 and 2000.42.4. 51. Herzfeld Archive, neg. nos. 4012 and 4023. Kawami follows Herzfeld in identifying this as a mace, though the upper portion was so damaged and indistinct that it cannot be discerned clearly. Kawami 1987, 30–31 and figs. 12 and 13. 52. Göbl 1984, 167–68, 170; Jongeward and Cribb 2014, 274–76; Shenkar 2014, 119–28. 53. Herzfeld Archive, color slide 8225, neg. no. 6336; Kawami 1987, fig. 14. 54. Shenkar 2014, 161–63; Jongeward and Cribb 2014, 285–86. 55. Herzfeld Archive, 1929 sketchbook, p. 30; Kawami 1987, fig. 16; Göbl 1984, 166, 170; Jongeward and Cribb 2014, 272–74; Shenkar 2014, 99–102. 56. Herzfeld Archive, 1929 sketchbook, p. 45; Kawami 1987, fig. 18.

416

NOTES

57. De Waele 2004. 58. Herzfeld Archive, FSA A.6 05.0354; Kawami 1987, 42–44, figs 19 and 20. 59. Stein 1928, 915–21; Kawami 1987, 26; Ghanimati 2015. 60. Yt. 5.33–35, 15.23–24; Yt. 9.7–8; Vd. 1.18; Tafaz˙ z˙ olı¯ 1999. 61. Yt. 19.92. 62. Faccena 1981. 63. Kawami 1987, 19; Ghanimati 2000, 145. 64. Shenkar 2008. 65. SKZ §§2–3. On the larger context of Sasanian Iran’s relationship with these regions, see Payne 2014 and Rezakhani 2016, 2017. 66. Cereti 2010. For the wider debate on the origins, identity, and history of the Huns, see Rezakhani 2017; de la Vassière 2014; Errington and Curtis 2007, 85–102. For the new prominence of Turan in late Sasanian ideology, see Wieshöfer 2010 and Payne 2014. 67. ZWY 4.58–59. 68. Dk. 9.21–23; PRDD 48.2–17; Aya¯ ga¯ r ¯ı Zareˉra¯ n, passim; GBd 33. 69. Dk. 7.5.1; PRDD 47.20–25, 48.10–16; GBd. 33.30; Dk. 7.9.3; SdBd. 35.21–25. 70. Rahbar 1997, 1998, 2004, 2008; Azarpay 1997; Gignoux 1998, 2008; Callieri 2014, 93–99 and 107–8. 71. Potts 2014, 137; Callieri 2014. 72. Priscus frr. 2.35–38; 9.3.1–10; 11.2.627. 73. Payne 2014, 287. 74. Joshua Stylites 10; Schindel 2004, 415–16. 75. Procop. Pers. 1.3.17–18. 76. Procop. Pers. 1.3.17.18–25; Cereti 2010, 59–72. 77. Schindel estimates that the amount of silver Peroz paid would have been equivalent to ca. 1,200 Roman pounds, which pales by comparison to the 11,000 pounds of gold that Husraw II demanded from Justinian as terms for concluding hostilities in 532. Schindel 2004, 416; Payne 2014, 287. 78. Alram 2002, 2004. 79. Bundahišn 18.8; Za¯ dspram 3.84–86. With the other Pahlavi sources: Molé 1963, 452–59. While some of these traditions reflect actual changes that occurred in antiquity, others were the result of discursive manipulation alone, either in antiquity or centuries later under Zoroastrianism’s subjection under Islam; Boyce and Grenet 1991, 3:69–77; Humbach and Ichaporia 1998, 11–13, 20–21. 80. Yima: Bundahišn 18.10. Wı¯šta¯spa: Bundahišn 18.11 and 14. Kauui Haosrawah: Bundahišn 18.12; Deˉnkard 7.1.39, ed. Sanjana (1874–1928, 13.15); Meˉnoˉg ¯ı xrad 2.95; Pahl. Rivayat 48.42; Mas’udı¯, Moru ¯ ǰ 1402; Boyce 1983a, 1983b, 1983c; Boyce and Grenet 1991, 3: 72–80. ˉ ra¯ nšahr 38, ed. Daryaee 2002c, 15. 81. Šahresta¯ nı¯ha ¯ı E 82. Molé 1963, 452–59. 83. Boyce 1975c, 459–65; 1982, 2:216–31; Boyce and Grenet 1991, 3:74. 84. Cereti 2004, 15–16. 85. While there are several allusions in primary, secondary and tertiary sources to the toponym of Ganzak (the settlement in one way or another associated with Adur-

¯ durba¯daga¯n, not one Gushnasp), as well as its province of A can even indirectly attest to the existence of a cult before the Parthian era. Literary sources collected in Schippmann 1971a, 310–29. Seals incorporating proper names with aspects of the fires: Gignoux 1986, 27, 29–37, 40, 45, 51, 54, 56, 58 61–65, 83–84, 86–87, 91–94, 97, 105–6, 108–15, 119, 124–28, 136–37, 140, 147, 154, 158, 169, 172–80, 182–83, 186, 188, 190, 192, 194; 2003, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 50, 58; Gyselen 1989, 79–80, 83, fig. 9, 113, 116, 119; 2003b, 127; Cereti 2004, 21 n. 92. Acts of the Persian Martyrs: Jullien 2007, 82, 89. 86. Burzeˉn is the Parthian form of Mid. Pers. burzı¯ n. Boyce’s hypothesis that the fires were named after their founders is critiqued by Pourshariati (2008, 364). 87. Bundahišn 9.21: reˉwand koˉf pad xwara¯ sa¯ n keˉ-š a¯ dur ¯ı burzı¯ nmihr pad-iš nišı¯ neˉd or simply the place that was its present abode; Bundahišn: 9.37: reˉwand ku ¯ ma¯ n ¯ı a¯ dur ¯ı burzı¯ nmihr. Cereti 2004, 26–28; 2007. According to Boyce, this specific gloss could be attributed to an intervention in the Parthian period. Boyce 1983a. 88. Bundahišn 18.14. 89. Candidate sites for Burzen-Mihr (all largely unexcavated) include (1) a spur of the New-Shabuhr Mountains in a district once known as Raeˉuuant in Khorasan, with a village called Borzı¯na¯n, and (2) Mt. Mehr, next to a village called Mehr; Schippmann 1971a, 23–30; Boyce 1983a; Cereti 2004, 17 n. 40; Bundahišn 18.11. 90. Pourshariati 2008, 361–65; Yarshater 1983b, 377–78. 91. The priests of Adur Gushnasp would likely have actively collaborated in this process as well. Boyce 1983a; Boyce and Grenet 1991, 3:73–80. Summarized in Boyce 2001, 123–25. 92. Bundahišn 18.10. 93. Cf. Yt. 19.46–50; Bundahišn 18.10. 94. Ebn al-Faqih, 246; Gottheil 1894, 45; Schippmann 1971a, 86–94; Boyce 1983b. 95. The Sasanian site of Kariyan in present-day Fars is counted among the candidate sites for Adur Farnbag. See Cha¯verdi and Kaim 2012; Jackson 1921. For Burzen-Mihr, see above. 96. Henning von der Osten and Naumann 1961; Naumann et al. 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965; Naumann, Huff, and Schnyder 1975; Naumann 1977. For earlier bibliography and cogent synthesis: Huff 2002. 97. Yt. 5.49–50. 98. Yt. 9.17–23; 17.37–49. 99. Bundahišn 18.12; Meˉnoˉg ¯ı xrad 27.59–63; Tarik_-e Sista¯ n, 35–36; Boyce 1983c; for other Islamic sources: Abka’i-Khavar2000, 233–34. 100. Dk. 7.1.39–40. ˇ aeˉcˇasta¯: Darmesteter 1893, 101. Avestan references to C 208. 102. Naumann, Huff, and Schnyder 1975, 138–42, 184; Huff 2002. 103. Boyce and Grenet 1991, 3:71 n. 17. 104. Ebn al-Faqih, 246; Gottheil 1894, 45. 105. Ptol. Geog. 6.2.12; Herzfeld 1935, 71–72; Boyce and Grenet 1991, 3:74–75. 106. Boyce 1983b. See also Tardieu 1998.

107. Naumann, Huff, and Schnyder 1975, 164–68. 108. Naumann, Huff, and Schnyder 1975, 164–68. 109. Huff 2002. 110. Naumann, Huff, and Schnyder 1975, 165–66; Huff 2002. The design of the fortifications is similar to that at Darband in the Caucasus, again linked with sixth-century construction, although one must be cautious not to circularly base one on the other; Huff 2002; Kleiss 2001. On Husraw I’s campaign of legitimation: Daryaee 2002–2003. 111. Gyselen 2003b, 138. Recent discussion of the function of the ground plans: Kaim 2004, 323–32; for earlier bibliography: Huff 2002. 112. Procop. Pers. 2.24.1. Literary sources collected in Schippmann 1971a, 309–25. 113. Naumann, Huff, and Schnyder 1975, 110–18; Grenet 2010, 170–72. 114. According to Huff, these were simple mud-brick structures to the west of the northern forecourt; Huff 2002. 115. Ebn al-Faqih, 286; trans. Gottheil 1894, 44–45; Boyce and Grenet 1991, 3:75 n. 41, 79. 116. Boyce 1983c. For the probable ancient itinerary and road system: Kleiss 1977, esp. sec. 2, “Die sasanidische Königsweg von Ktesiphon zum Takht-i Suleiman,” 141–46. 117. Husraw II dismounted once he had seen the dome of the sanctuary, to walk the rest of the way; ŠN 9.135.2128. A certain strain of the tradition claims the kings made the whole trip on foot; Ibn K_urda¯beh 119; Abka’i-Khavari 2000, 115. 118. Yt. 5.49–50; Canepa 2009, 13–16. ¯ orar, 359–60; Tabarı¯, 864–66 (Tabarı¯, tr. 119. T_a’a¯lebı¯, G · · 93–99); Bal’ami, ed. Ba¯ha¯r, 942. 120. ŠN 9.135.2130–136.2131; Abka’i-Khavari 2000, 234. 121. Canepa 2009, 7–8, 13–17. 122. Kawami 1987, 20–24. 123. GBd. 18.11; Zd. 11.8; Masʿu ¯ dı¯, Moru ¯ j 1402; Boyce 1983b. While purely speculative at this point, the site of Akchakhan-kala (ca. third century CE–second century CE) would be a candidate site for a major sanctuary in Xwarazm, if not the “original” sanctuary of Adur Farnbag. I thank Frantz Grenet for bringing this to my attention. Betts et al. 2015. ˉ ra¯ nšahr 38; Ta¯ rik_-e Sista¯ n, pp. 35–37, 124. Šahresta¯ nı¯ha¯ ¯ı E trans. Gold, 1–4. de Blois 2000; Daryaee 2008b. 125. El-Ali 1968–1969, 422–33; Savant 2013.

Part Four Opening 1. For a survey of sites and monuments, see Kleiss 2015. 2. Cf. Pollock 2006, 67 and 567–74.

Chapter Fourteen 1. DSf §1.H. 2. nai̯ ba-: DSe §5.C; DSi §2.C; XPa §3.D-H; XPg §1.D; XPh §5.L; XV §3.E. fraša-: DSa §2.D; DSf §7.J and §14.B-C; DSj §3.E; DSo §2.C; DSz 14.B-C. Cf. Yt. 19.10–11; Y. 30.9 and 34.15. Explored in depth by Skjærvø (1999, 56–58) and Lincoln (2012, 200–220, 372–74). 3. For relatively recent introductions and entries into the literature on the Achaemenid palace, see Perrot 2013c and

NOTES

417

Root 2014 (esp. 38 n. 2, which constitutes an impressive and nearly exhaustive historiographical essay in and of itself). 4. Boucharlat 2013c; Amiet 2010; Perrot 2013a, 458–60; Stronach 2001. 5. Persepolis, tacara: Schmidt 1953, 159, 222; Treasury: 159, 3 n. 2, 42, 159, 182, 199, 215. In addition, a palatial structure to the south of the terrace yielded similar elements: 40, 55, 159. Babylon: Koldewey and Wetzel 1931, 120; 1932, 46–47; Schmidt 1953, 28; Haerinck 1973, 114; Stoops and Stoops 1994; Ambers and Simpson 2005, 9; Lippolis 2009, 48. Discussed or illustrated in several contributions to Perrot (2013c, 71, 154–55, 173 192, 200, 203, 368, 380, 390, 426, and 429). On the green-colored floor at Persepolis and its possible ritual connotations, see chapter 7 above. 6. Knapton, S· arra¯f, and Curtis 2001, 114. On this, see below, chapter 2. 7. Brown 1997; Knapton, S· arra¯f, and Curtis 2001, 114. On the Arsacid construction, see below. 8. Knapton, S· arra¯f, and Curtis 2001, 113. 9. viθam, “house,” appears in some translations as “palace,” though it does not appear in any inscriptions that link it to any specific structure. It has the connotation of “household,” “royal house,” or “court” instead of a referring to a physical structure. Schmitt 2014, 281. 10. Schmitt 2014, 93, 109. 11. DSf and DSd. 12. A2Sd; Vallat 1979, 148. 13. The only term that all three inscriptions appear to have used in common is the word paradai̯ da, “paradise.” See chapter 17. 14. A 2Ha, A 2Hb, and A 2Sa. Kent reconstructed the word in an inscription he attributed to Darius II (D2b); however, he did so by fitting together two fragments that were actually from separate objects, and then supplied the term from Artaxerxes II’s A 2Hb inscription. The inscriptions from the two objects have since been separated, and the reconstruction rejected. Schmitt 1999, 63; 2009, 185–86; 2014, 132; Janda 2009, 146. On the basis of this reconstruction, Ghirshman even proposed that Darius II built a second “small apadana” at the site where de Mecquenem hints the fragments might have originated. Ghirshman 1964, 143–44; pace Stronach 1985a, 433–44; Muscarella 1992, esp. 218 n. 9. 15. Knapton, S· arra¯f, and Curtis 2001, 113. 16. Elamite: h.ha-ba-da-na; Babylonian: ap-pa-da-an. Schmitt 1999, 77; Janda 2009, 148. 17. Henkelman advocates jettisoning the term with good reason; however, I think it is too deeply entrenched in scholarship for this to be successful. Henkelman 2012, 951–52. 18. éap-pa-dan; Sachs, Hunger, et al. 1988–2014, 2: no. 86 (87 BC), “Flake,” line 11, pp. 460–61. On the tent, see below. 19. Dan. 11.45; Janda 2009, 149. On the date, see Kosmin 2014a, 161, 327 n. 88. 20. Apada¯ na also appears in Talmudic Aramaic, Palmyrene, and Syriac. Janda 2009, 149. On the Armenian and Georgian material, see below. 21. For the toponyms in the Nisa archive and attestations in the Semitic languages, see Hackl, Jacobs, and Weber 2010, 1:166. On the “Tacˇar Mayri” in Arsacid Armenia and toponyms deriving from “paradise,” see below.

418

NOTES

22. Boucharlat 2013b, 508–9. 23. Boucharlat 2011. For a recent consideration of the palace and its irrigation systems, see Grob 2017. 24. Strabo 15.3.2; Ladiray 2013, 140–42; Boucharlat 2009. 25. Ladiray 2013, 147. 26. Ladiray 2013, 159, 168–77. 27. Yoyotte 2013. 28. Ladiray 2013, 179. 29. Perrot 2013d, 211. 30. Perrot 2013e, 189–91. 31. As argued by Huff (1999b, 2008b). 32. Perrot 2013d, 226. 33. Perrot 2013d, 229. 34. Gasche 2011, 181 n. 19; Perrot 2013d, 224–27. 35. The presence of vaults is still debated. Perrot 2013d. 36. Discussed further below. 37. Gasche 1991. 38. Boucharlat 2009. 39. Boucharlat and Labrousse1979. See below, chapter 17. 40. In nomenclature of the excavation report: the Südburg, the Hauptburg, and the Sommerpalast. Gasche 2013a. 41. Kuhrt 2001. 42. Koldewey 1925, 112–13. 43. La Farina 2012. 44. The Haupthof, Mittelhof, and Osthof in the original excavation reports. Gasche 2013a, 445–46. 45. The Westhof and Anbauhof. 46. The “salle à quatre saillants,” as it often appears in literature, continuing Ghirshman’s nomenclature. 47. Gasche 2013a, 446. 48. Gasche 2013a, 447–48; 2013b. Amiet 2010. The Hauptburg and the Sommerpalast outside the walls also present courts leading on an axis to two large rectangular halls with four pilasters as well, though whether these are Achaemenid additions or not is unclear. 49. In this regard, Gasche’s additional argument assigning this architectural form to Elam, as originally proposed by Ghirshman, is extraneous to the larger problem of the dating and sequence of the construction of the palace. Cultural ascription too is the basis of the objections to an Achaemenid date in La Farina 2012. 50. Rollinger 2013, 142–49. 51. Joseph. Ap. 1.52 = Berossus fr. 9a; Rollinger 2013, 143. 52. Koldewey and Wetzel 1931, 1:120–25; La Farina 2010; Haerinck 1997, 28–29. 53. Haerinck 1997. 54. Boucharlat 2013c, 426–27. 55. Wetzel, Schmidt, and Mallwitz 1957, pl. 13; Gasche 2013a, 448; 2013b, 116. 56. Stoops and Stoops 1994. 57. Mousavi 2012, 10–12. 58. Schmidt 1953, 1:62–63. 59. Mousavi 2012, 14–15. 60. DPf, trans. Lincoln 2012, 183. 61. See below. 62. Root 2015, 16. 63. Henkelman 2012, 946. 64. Root 2015, 28–29. See below, chapter 7.

65. Nagel 2013. 66. Lincoln 2012, 46–51, 183–86. 67. For historiographical context on these approaches, see Wiesehöfer 2009. For the background and implications of this within the history of religions, see Lincoln 2012, 171. 68. Root 2015, 22. 69. XPa §3; Schmitt 2009, 153–54. On the “theology of vision” that manifests “the Good” in Persian royal imperial discourse, see Skjærvø 1999, 55–58 and Lincoln 2012, 180– 83, 191–93. 70. Tehran: 4116; Schmidt 1953, 70, 79, figs. 42 a-b, 43. 71. Persepolis, Room 16: Schmidt 1953, fig. 87 D-E; 1957, 52–53, pl. 21a; Root 2010. 72. Root 2010; Ellis 1968. 73. DSf §13 in Old Persian, §12 in Elamite, and §27 in Babylonian. With earlier bibliography: Schmitt 2009, 14–15. 74. Vallat 2013, 282. 75. It measures 22.5 by 26.5 cm. Paris, Louvre Sb 2787 76. DSf §§1–10. 77. Henkelman 2008b, 235 n. 517; Schmitt 2014, 176. 78. DSf §§7–14. 79. DNb §1.B; XPl §1.B. 80. Lincoln 2012, 473. 81. Yt. 30.9; Skjærvø 1999, 57.

Chapter Fifteen 1. As made vividly clear in both Strootman 2007, 52–53 and Kosmin 2014a, 142–80. 2. Kosmin 2014a, 223. 3. See chapter 3 below. 4. “Unfortunately, our excavations have shown that except in parts of the north and south slopes, the periphery of the citadel has fallen downhill, while on the central and southern peaks the desperate Early Byzantine builders rooted out every single stone and scraped down to conglomerate rock.” Hanfmann et al. 1983, 115. 5. On the Seleucid reconstruction of the Achaemenid palace: Haerinck 1973, 115 n. 26: “Remarquons ici que le portique du palais a subi un changement pendant l’époque séleucide. A l’époque achéménide, il s’y trouvaient quatre colonnes sur plinthes carrées avec tore non décoré. Les Séleucides se contentaient de deux colonnes qu’il ont placées plutôt au milieu du portique. . . . Pourtant ils n’ont pas changé de bases et en ont réutilisé deux d’époque achéménide.” 6. Wetzel, Schmidt, and Mallwitz 1957, 24–25, 46–47. 7. Wetzel, Schmidt, and Mallwitz 1957, 23c and d; cf. Valtz 2007, 136, fig. 3. 8. Schmidt 1941, 828–29; Kuhrt 1996, 46; 2001; Wetzel, Schmidt, and Mallwitz 1957, 26. 9. Jeppesen 1989, 24–62. On Ai Khanum, see below. Seleucia-Tigris, Susa/Seleucia-Eulaios and Babylon have yielded reused Achaemenid column bases in post-Achaemenid contexts, and structures that may have been Seleucid or have Seleucid layers; Hopkins 1972, 21; Dieulafoy 1890–1892, 4:411–19. The courtyard of the Temple with Niches at Ai Khanum also featured mixed Persian/Greek columns: Bernard 1970, 333, figs. 24, 25, 26, 28.

10. For explorations within the wider context of Hellenistic palace architecture, see Nielsen 1999, 112–29; Kopasacheili 2011. 11. Harmans¸ah 2014a, 157–88. 12. As discussed above, it is possible that Ecbatana might have had such a structure and, if so, the Seleucids continued to utilize it. However, the “Perserbau” in the palace of Babylon, which Kuhrt erroneously calls an apada¯ na, did not share the ground plan of the great audience hall at Persepolis and Susa. Rather, it was a small private palace with a single entrance portico. The Seleucids modified it, reducing the number of columns to two; Haerinck 1973, 115 n. 26. 13. Held 2002, 236. 14. Held 2002, 236. For the wider Hellenistic context: Strootman 2014, 54–90. 15. Invernizzi 1993, esp. 243–44. 16. Houghton and Lorber 2002, 1.1:151–58 and 466–67. 17. Bernard 1976b, esp. 249–57; Rapin et al. 1992, 8:267– 79; Martinez-Sève 2014b, 270–74. 18. Great room (room 3): Bernard et al. 1973, 1:50–53, 68–69, 189–93. Reception rooms (room 6 and 9): Bernard 1967, 319; 1968, 269–71. Seen also in one of the residential spaces: Bernard 1976a, 291. 19. Veuve et al. 1987, 6:52–56 ; Martinez-Sève 2014b, 270. 20. The concept is present in the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian palace, but the forms more closely relate to the Persian palaces. Bernard et al. 1973, 1:118–20. 21. Guillaume et al. 1983, 2:44–45. 22. Bernard et al. 1973, 1:18–25; Bernard 1967, 316. 23. Bernard et al. 1973, 1:19–21, 28–31, 119, figs. 1, 4, 5; Bernard 1976b, esp. 249–57. 24. Though with caution regarding the dating scheme based on formal comparisons: Bernard et al. 1973, 1:37–49. 25. It resembles a “Rhodian” peristyle court, and if it was designed as such, it would predate any such feature in the Mediterranean. Bernard et al. 1973, 1:17–61, 37; Nielsen 1999, 127–28. 26. Illustrated in Held 2002, fig. 6, though with the theater erroneously attributed to the Parthian period. 27. Lecuyot 1993; Gasche 2011. Final publication: Lecuyot et al. 2013. 28. Bernard 1976b, 249–57. 29. As Bernard conjectured, they likely adopted local dining traditions, instead of using the Greek kline; Bernard 1981, 118. 30. Rapin et al. 1992, 274–78; Martinez-Sève 2014b, 281. On Parthian Nisa, see chapters 4 and 11. 31. Bernard, Besenval, and Marquis 2006, esp. figs. 10–11; Besenval and Marquis 2008; Fouache, Marquis, and Besenval 2009. 32. Besenval and Marquis 2008, 977–79; Fouache, Marquis, and Besenval 2009, 1019–21. 33. For a clear exposition of the new chronology of Dura, see Leriche 2011, 29. 34. The ashlars of the new palace show the same workmanship as those from the fortification walls on the citadel. Foundations of the original stronghold were discovered underneath. The architectural decoration is similar to the Strategeion, and it is likely that they were built at the same

NOTES

419

time. Leriche2011, 32–33; Leriche, Gelin, Gharbi, and Yon 1997. 35. Downey 1985; 1986, 33; 1988a. 36. Clarke 2001, 2003; Radt 2011. The palace at Nippur was subjected to a range of wild attributions: Fisher 1904; Hilprecht 1903, 337; Marquand 1905; Peters 1905. Hopkins (1972, 32–35) attempts to assign it to the Parthian period, which is not in itself impossible with more information; however, his argument for doing so rests only on the porticoed hall’s affinity with Achaemenid architecture and was evidently not aware of the evidence at Ai Khanum. Colledge 1987, 148; Nielsen 1999, 121–24. 37. E.g., Martinez-Sève 2002, fig. 5a. 38. While I see such a phenomenon taking distinctive form only after Antiochus III’s failed effort to reconquer Bactria, Mairs characterizes the style of building here and in Ai Khanum as “Greco-Bactrian architectural vernacular.” Mairs 2011, 79–80. 39. Jebel Khalid offers the best-documented example: such as Jebel Khalid’s room 3 with its altar. Clarke 2003, 10–11; Leriche 2012, 23. 40. Surveyed in Llewellyn-Jones 2013, 88–92. 41. Xen. Cyr. 8.3–4, 8–9, 13–14. Alexander himself appears to have continued such a protocol. Polyaenus, Strat. 4.3.24. 42. Chares, FGrH 125 F 4 = Ath. 538b–9a. 43. Athen. 12.539d-f, trans. Olson 2010, 143. 44. ‘appadənô: Daniel 11:45; Polyb. 8.15–20; discussed by Kosmin (2014a, 158–57, 326 nn. 81 and 84). 45. Bernard 1976a, esp. 288–93; Rapin et al. 1992, 8:267– 79; Lecuyot 1993; Lecuyot in Lecuyot et al. 2013, 9:193–207. 46. Bernard 1968; 1969b, 272–76; 1970, 310–16; 1971, 406–14; 1974, 281–87; Lecuyot 1993, 32–33. 47. Herzfeld 1941, 283–86. 48. H ¯ kemı¯ 1990. ·a 49. Kleiss 1985; Rahbar 1999. 50. Dieulafoy 1890–1892, 4:411–19. On the historiographical context: Canepa 2013b, 319–20. 51. The trabeated, porticoed entranceway did not disappear. Several structures from the late Parthian and Sasanian periods attest to the continued importance of this ancient form. It appears, for example, in a second-century CE house in Susa and the mid-fourth-century CE Sasanian “manor house” (or fire temple) at Ha¯jı¯a¯ba¯d. The portico remains an important feature of Safavid architecture as well. Gasche 2002; 2011, 182–83; Grabar 1987; Keall 1974. 52. Wright 1991; Gasche 1999. 53. Cellerino 2007; Keall 1970, 54 n. 1; Manasseh 1931; Van Ingen 1939, 6 n. 2. Note the level numbers of the American excavations and Italian excavations do not correspond: Messina 2010, fig. 19, p. 22. 54. Manasseh 1931, 17–28; Van Ingen 1939, plan 1; Keall 1974, 124. 55. Manasseh 1931, 22, figs. 6a–b, pl. 11, fig. 1; Yeivin 1931, pl. 2, figs. 1–3. 56. Keall 1974, 126. 57. Gasche 2011, 182–83. 58. Besenval 1984, 1:136–37. 59. Huff 2008b; Reuther 1938, 493.

420

NOTES

60. Andrae and Lenzen 1933 [1967], 25–54. 61. Andrae and Lenzen 1933 [1967], 26. 62. Hauser 2011, 133. 63. Andrae and Lenzen 1933 [1967], 83–84. 64. Andrae and Lenzen 1933 [1967], 51–52; Kose 1998, 357–58. 65. Kose 1998, 356–73. 66. Keall 1970, 48–49. 67. Keall 1970, 37. 68. For recent assessments of Hatra’s history and archaeology, see the contributions collected in Dirven 2013. Problems in chronology are discussed in Ricciardi and Peruzzetto 2013. 69. Gregoratti 2013; Aggoula 1994. 70. Andrae 1912, 118; Downey 1988b, 161. 71. Benseval 1984, 1:135–36. 72. Reuther 1938, 493; Huff 2008b.

Chapter Sixteen 1. Discussed in depth in Canepa 2009, 2015c. 2. Bahrani 2014, xx. 3. Callieri 2014, 39–72; Hoffmann 2008; Huff 1999b, 2008b; Reuther 1938. 4. Callieri 2014, 48–62. 5. New archaeological material overturning Bier’s arguments for a purely Islamic date: Ali-Reza Askari Cha¯verdi 2011; Bier 1993. Critique of the original identification of the central complex at Bishapur as a palace: Azarnoush 1987; 1994, 82–88. Critique of Hajjiabad as a palace/manor house, and hypothesis that the palace at Bishapur lay outside the walls at the Qal’ah-ye Dokhtor: Callieri 2009. 6. Yaʿqu ¯ bı¯, Bolda¯ n, 321; Keall 1987; Morony 2009. On Dastagerd, see below. 7. Morony 1984, 76–77; Meinecke 1996. 8. Azarnoush 1981, 2009; Huff 2004b; Callieri 2014, 57–59. Muslim geographers collected in Schwarz 1896, 494–97. 9. Kühnel and Wachtsmuth 1933, fig. 5. 10. Besenval 1984, 1:147–48. 11. Huff 2008b. 12. Literary and archaeological evidence reviewed in Keall 1987. See also Hoffmann 2008, 104–6. 13. Hoffman 2008, 98–107; Benseval 1984, 1:146–47. 14. Hauser 2007b, 477. 15. Theoph. Chron. 320. Arabic sources collected in Streck 1900–1901, 255–62; Bruno 1966. 16. Reuther 1929, 441. 17. Reuther 1929; Grabar 1987. 18. Reuther 1929, 442 and pl. 3. 19. This is perhaps reflected in the Muslim commander Sa’d’s use of the two palaces after the conquest: he resided at the White Palace but used the T· a¯q as the mosque. 20. Al-Khat.¯ı b al-Baghda¯dı¯ 1966, 1:130–31; T· abarı¯ 3.320, trans. Kennedy 1990, 3–5; al-‘Uyu ¯ n, 256; el-Ali 1968–1969, 428–29. On this and the wider phenomenon of Sasanian topographies and materials in the foundation and foundation myths of Baghdad, see Antrim 2012, 60; Savant 2013. 21. Streck 1900–1901, 255–62.

22. T· abarı¯ 2.2443, trans. Juynbol 1989, 23 and 30; Shalem 1994. 23. Qazwı¯nı¯, Atha¯ r al bila¯ d 2.304; Morony 1984, 432. 24. T· abarı¯ 1.2452, trans. Bosworth 1999, 32; T_aʿa¯lebi, ¯ orar, 699. G 25. Kahnt and Knorr 1986, 76. Cf. Hinz 1970, 65–66; Bosworth 1999, 32 n. 103. 26. See below. 27. KSM/KNRm §§32–34. Gignoux 1991, 92. 28. Niz∙ a¯m al-Mulk, Siya¯ sat-na¯ ma 44.25, trans. Darke 1960, 201. 29. T· abarı¯ 1059 and 1065, trans. Bosworth 1999, 396, 406. 30. Ps.-Ja¯h· iz∙ , 23–24, trans. Pellat 1954, 51–52; cf. Carile 2003. 31. L’Orange 1953. 32. Canepa 2009, 139–41. 33. Ps.-Ja¯h· iz∙ , 56–57, trans. Pellat 1954, 56–57; Mas’u ¯ dı¯, Muru ¯ j 2.158, trans. de Meynard 1861–1877, vol. 4; Christensen 1936, 44. See Kayanid King Kay-Husraw referenced in ŠN, trans. Bertels 1960–1971, 5.382.2472; 5.386.2542; 5.387.2563–64; 5.390.2607; 5.390.2610; see Kayanid King Lohra¯sp referenced in ŠN 6.56.757 and many similar passages; Abka’i-Khavari 2000, 78, 179. 34. Siyasatnamah, 14. 35. T· abarı¯ 5.2446, trans. Bosworth 1999, 13:26. 36. T· abarı¯ 2:2476; Shalem 1994, 78. 37. Lib. Ep. 331.1, trans. Lee 1993, 168. 38. Theoph. Simok. 4.2.7–8, trans. Whitby 1988, 106. 39. Canepa 2009, 195–96. 40. Göbl 1971, 7; Mosig-Walburg 2011. 41. Gnoli 1996, 1999; Compareti 2006; Shenkar 2014, 131–40. 42. The coinage of several post-Sasanian dynasts in Pars and Sogdiana portray these creatures on their coins, even accompanying them with the legends related to Royal Glory, though this would have been unnecessary for the late antique courtly viewer. Gyselen 2009, 158–61; Compareti 2006; Daryaee 2015. 43. Winnicott 2005, 140–48; Iacono 2010, 67–88. 44. This expression and inculcation of hierarchy through space is captured in, among other places, Ps.-Ja¯h· iz∙ 23–24, trans. Pellat 1954, 51–52. See Canepa 2009, 142–43. 45. The gift of a robe to mark one’s place in the courtly hierarchy is captured in an anecdote from Niz∙ a¯m al-Mulk, Siya¯sat-na¯ma, 44.24–26, trans. Darke 1960, 209–11. For more on sartorial marks of distinction, such as diadems and belts, and their courtly context, see Canepa 2009, 185–86, 190–91. 46. Fa¯ rsna¯ ma: Le Strange 1921, 97; trans. Canepa 2010b, 131–32. 47. Cf. “Making a small-scale version of an object or person, and then experiencing that miniature (playing with, thinking about, imagining, manipulating, holding, hiding, displaying, breaking, discarding) has unusual effects on the person experiencing the object made small. At a physical level a person handling a miniature gains subtle empowerment and strengthening: in relation to what is represented in small-scale, one is made to feel larger in size and advanced in hierarchical position; a soothing sense of wellbeing follows.” Bailey 2014, 29.

48. Winnicott 2005, 1. 49. Cf. “Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar.” Klee 1920, 28. 50. Ša¯ h-na¯ ma, ed. Khaleghi, 8.272.3545–281.3635; (Mos¯ orar, 698–99; Balʿamı¯ cow) 9.220.3518–225.3609; T_aʿa¯lebi, G Taı¯ rı¯kh, trans. Zotenberg 1867–1874, 2:304; Nikephorus, Breviarium, trans. Mango 1990, 56, 57; Cedr. 721. 51. GBd. 13.1–14. 52. This later legacy is explored in depth in Anderson 2017. 53. Lehmann 1945; Herzfeld 1920; Saxl 1923; Ackerman 1937; Pope 1933, 1953; L’Orange 1953, 18–27; Ringbom 1951, 68–75; Melikian-Chirvani 1991; Flood 1999. Herzfeld, Ackerman, and Pope sought the Takht-e Taqdis in portrayals of architectural fantasies or enthronement scenes in the Klimova and Qazvin plates and the bronze salver in Berlin. These claims were later met with deserved skepticism, not least because all objects were later proven to be post-Sasanian. See Harper’s (1979, 49 n. 62) assessment of the earlier literature. More recently, and more productively, the tradition of the Takht-e Taqdis has been dealt with in the context of the Sasanians’ legacy in later western medieval and Islamic artistic and intellectual traditions. Borgehammar 2009; Iafrate 2015, 184–201; Anderson 2017, 1–43. 54. Herzfeld 1920. While I have always resisted localizing the Takht-e Taqdis at Takht-e Solayman, in The Two Eyes of the Earth I accepted that the medieval sources attestation of a dome could be trusted. For reasons outlined above, I no longer think the evidence supports this. Canepa 2009, 146–47. 55. Liutprand of Cremona. 56. Procop. Pers. 2.24.2; History of Mar Aba, §13, trans. Braun 1915, 232. This event is visible in the archaeological record. Takht-e Solayman experienced a devastating manmade destruction followed by a short-lived and materially poor reoccupation and attempt at reconstruction thereafter. Huff 2002. 57. Nikephorus 12.41–49, trans. Mango 1990, 57. 58. The source text ends with events in the year 641 CE. Mango 1990, 14; Howard-Johnston 1994; 1999, 8–14, 39–44. 59. Chronographia Tripertia, ed. De Boor 1883–1885, 2.190; Sternbach 1900, 68; Borgehammar 2009, 164. 60. While I agree with Borgehammar that Cedrenus does not represent the seventh-century material, the toponym Thebarmais, where Theophanes locates the temple, is unquestionably one and the same as Adur Gushnasp/Takht-e Solayman. His treatment of the western transmission and development of the theme of the hubris of Husraw is sound, as is his critique of Herzfeld’s conflation of sites, yet Borgehammar’s claim that “scholars have found it hard to locate the Gazakos and Thebarmais of Theophanes, geographically, because there are several candidates for the former and none for the later,” is simply not true, nor is his claim that archaeological evidence is lacking for a seventh-century destruction at Takht-e Solayman. Theophanes (307–308) very accurately treats the fire temple as separate from the town (Ganzak). Borgehammar 2009, 164 n. 62; Huff 2002. 61. It is possible that Nicephorus describes the central ˇca¯ ha¯ r t.a¯ q of the temple proper, though it seems unlikely that the Sasanians would invest in a system to produce artificial

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rain over a site where one of the most holy fires of Iran was enthroned even for temporary veneration. 62. Mas’u ¯ dı¯, Tanbih, 95. Other medieval geographers and travelers remarked on the imposing buildings of the palace as well as the cult. Ya¯qut (Bolda¯ n 4.272) understood it to be the palace of Kay Husraw. The later Persian poetic tradition remembers the site’s palace as a place of incredible beauty. Sources collected in Gottheil 1894; Schippmann 1971a, 320– 25; and Melikian-Chirvani 1991. ¯ orar, 698–99. I thank Margaret Graves for 63. T_aʿa¯lebi, G her help in translating this passage. 64. Ša¯ h-na¯ ma, ed. Khaleghi, 8.272.3545–8.281.3636; (Moscow) 9.220.3519; trans. Levy 1967. 65. The accounts of Ferdowsi and Tha’alebi were based on the lost Arabic adaptations of the Xwada¯ y-na¯ mag. Herzfeld suggested that this enumeration of treasures was an adaptation and plays off the various South Asian traditions of the sapta ratnani (“seven jewels”), which were the signs of a cakravartin. Herzfeld 1920, 2 n. 7. However, this sevenfold enumeration is deeply engrained in Iranian culture, from the Avesta through the Book of Kings. Shahbazi 2002, 2003. 66. Echoing the ideology of Husraw II, the kings of Rome are indeed present, having been integrated into Iranian royal genealogy, and do not stand as an entirely separate, foreign tradition. The Turanian kings are absent, only present through allusion to past demonic destructions of evil usurpers. 67. Ša¯ h-na¯ ma, ed. Khaleghi, 8.276.3587; (Moscow) 9.222.3560. Herzenberg 2011, 212. Herzfeld claimed the royal cubit was five times larger. Herzfeld 1920, 1. 68. At Persepolis a cubit (Old Pers. arašni-; cf. Av. araθni-) has been reconstructed using masons’ marks to ca. 52.1–52.2 cm. This corresponds roughly to the standard Arabic cubit (ad_ -d_ ira¯ ʿ al-šarʿiyya), which was ca. 49.8 cm and reformed in the Abbasid period to ca. 48.25 cm. A “royal cubit” (d_ ira¯ ʿ almalik) in Abbasid Iran was ca. 66.5 cm, which seems to correspond to, if not derive from, the Sasanian royal cubit (Mid. ˉ ra¯ nšahr Pers. ša¯ h-a¯ rešn) that is used in the Šahresta¯ nı¯ha¯ ¯ı E (§20), and, if we credit it, by Ferdowsi (New Pers. ša¯ h-a¯ raš). From the eleventh to the seventeenth century the a¯ raš had expanded to 64 cm and the “royal cubit” to 95 cm. In Zoroastrian literature, a normal cubit (Av. fra¯ ra¯ θni-, Mid. Pers. fra¯ ra¯ st) has been reconstructed as ca. 45.72 cm, which appears to preserve the Attic measurements introduced by the Seleucids, which is not surprising given the impact that the Seleucid era also had on Zoroastrian calculations of time. Henning 1942, 235–36; Roaf 1978; Hinz 1970, 54–62; 2012; Kahnt and Knorr 1986, 67; Iafrate 2015, 189 n. 69. 69. “Justinian provided Chosroes son of Kabades with Greek marble, building experts, and craftsmen skilled in ceilings, and . . . a palace situated close to Ctesiphon was constructed for Chosroes with Roman expertise.” Theoph. Simok. 5.6.10, trans. Whitby 1988, 240. 70. Ktesiphon I, fig. 13; Kröger 1982, 20; discussed along with its stucco finds, 18–37. 71. Reuther 1929, 443–46; Kröger 1982, 19–20. 72. Kröger 1982, 20. 73. Reuther 1929, 446. 74. Reuther, 1929, 445; Kröger 1982, 19–20.

422

NOTES

75. Ktesiphon I, fig. 13; Reuther 1929, 443; Kröger 1982, 20–21; discussed along with its stucco finds, 18–37. 76. Ktesiphon I, 25; Kröger 1982, 21. 77. Ktesiphon I, 25; Kröger 1982, 21. 78. Reuther 1929, 445. 79. Ša¯ h-na¯ ma, ed. Khaleghi, 8.273.3546; (Moscow) 9.220.3519. Cf. trans. Levy 1967, 383. 80. Steingass 1892, 48. In addition to Husraw I’s hippodrome at Weh-Andiog-Husraw, Heraclius’s army found a “hippodrome” at Husraw II’s estate at Beklal. Theoph. Simok. 320. 81. Niz∙ a¯m al-Mulk, Siya¯ sat-na¯ ma 44.25, trans. Darke 1960, 210. The Book of Kings places this episode in a walled garden, similarly close by the audience hall. 82. Ša¯ h-na¯ ma, ed. Khaleghi, 8.278.3600–3610. 83. Ša¯ h-na¯ ma, ed. Khaleghi, 8.278.3600. 84. Antioch Malal. 13.30; Dohrn-van Rossum 1996, 27–28. 85. Diels 1917. Further, Bäbler and Schomberg 2010. 86. On the continued importance of clocks within medieval Constantinople, see Anderson 2014. 87. Cassiodorus, Var. 1.45; Fragaki 2012, 233. 88. Hill 1974, 247–48. Al-Jazari’s clock also featured mechanical musicians. While these are not featured in the clock, they are not foreign to late antique and early medieval court technologies. 89. Ibn al-Razzaz al Jazari, trans. Hill 1974, 18. 90. Sources collected and evaluated in Sommerlechner 2003. An analysis of the later medieval textual and visual tradition: Baert 2004. Analysis of the Exaltatio Crucis: Borgehammar 2009. 91. Strategius, Capture of Jerusalem, trans. Garitte 1960. 92. AWN 5.3; 7.1–3; 9.1–4; 11.1–16; 14.7–10 and 17–20; 15.1–22. Cf. Vd. 19.31; Aog. 12; GBd. 2.4–13; 3.7–16. See below for the cosmological context. 93. KSM/KNRm §§32–34. Reconstructed text and concordances prepared by Gignoux 1991, 92. I thank Andrea Piras for calling my attention to the significance of this passage. Skjærvø 2011a. 94. Panaino 2004a; Gariboldi 2004a. 95. For the wider context and precursors of this intermediate state, see Panaino 2003; 2007, esp. 117–20. 96. On various modes of “knowing” imperial power, see Canepa 2015c. ¯ t_ a¯ r, pp. 215–18 and 222; Ps.-Ja¯hiz 146–50, 97. Bı¯ru ¯ nı¯, A · ∙ 157–58, and 159–63; trans. Pellat 1954, 165–69, 176–77, and 179–82. 98. Ps.-Ja¯h· iz∙ , 145–60 and 159–60, trans. Pellat 1954, 165– 69 and 179–80. Christensen 1936, 408. 99. See the following chapter. ¯ t_ a¯ r, p. 222; trans., p. 207; Cristoforetti 2013. 100. Biruni, A ¯ t_ a¯ r, p. 223; trans., p. 208. 101. Biruni, A ¯ t_ a¯ r, trans. pp. 207–8. 102. Biruni, A 103. Ps.-Ja¯h· ez∙ , Keta¯ b al-ta¯ j, pp. 159–61; trans. Pellat 1954, pp. 179–80. However, the texts that describe or allude to such events give the impression that it unfolded as ritual display and public confirmation of the king’s just nature rather than an event that might actually yield true challenges to the king’s legitimacy. de Jong 2004, 359.

104. This tradition appears primarily in the medieval sources. For the wider context, see Azarnouche 2012, 36–37. 105. In addition to alluding to xwarrah, the so-called korymbos is the most consistent and overt marker of solar symbolism. In certain issues Shabuhr II introduces double or triple borders on reverses, and Shabuhr III’s crown sometimes includes a crescent. Gariboldi 2004a, 42–43. 106. Carter 2015, cat. 88, pp. 316–17. 107. This king’s pearl earring was famous throughout the late antique world. Procop. Pers. 1.4.14; Walker 2015, esp. 157; on its celestial symbolism in Manichaeism, see 176–77. 108. For example, in the seal of Peroz the king is he “who increased anew the xwarrah of the gods” (yazada¯ n noˉg xwarrah abzu ¯ d), while the coins of Husraw II simply declare he has “increased the xwarrah” (xwarrah abzu ¯ d). On the wide linguistic precedents for increasing a divine or royal attribute “anew,” see Skjærvø 2003, 283 n. 1; Panaino 2009, 246. 109. Panaino 1995; Daryaee 1997. 110. Dealt with in depth with regard to the Roman Empire in Canepa 2009. For its impact in the visual cultures of Central Asia, see Stark 2015; Gasparini 2014. 111. Alram et al. 2013. 112. Dealt with in detail in Canepa 2009. 113. Menander Protector, fr. 6.11.177–83, trans. Blockley 1985, 63; Amm. Marc. 17.5.3; Theoph. Simok. 4.8.5. This is retrojected onto Arsacid titulature too. Movses Khorenats’i 1.9, 3.17, 3.26, 3.42, 3.51; Huyse 2006, 193; Panaino 2004a, 561–62; 2009. In addition to historical texts, which seem to reproduce official letters rather faithfully, the later, more grandiose Sasanian titulature is imprinted on many other genres and literatures, both in Iran and in the Roman Empire. For example, the following lines of Ibn Khurdadbih are attributed to Husraw II’s court poet and musician, Ba¯rbad: “The Caesar is like unto the moon and the Kha¯qa¯n to the sun. My lord is like unto the cloud all-powerful: at will he veils the moon and at will the sun.” Trans. Lazard 1975, 605. 114. For example, his entry bistax, which he defi nes as “a king among the Persians,” is derived not from an Old Persian word, but from Mid. Pers. bida¯ xš, a title for a marcher governor or “toparch” that appears under both the Parthians and the Sasanians. 115. Ho kateˉsterismenos topos. Persai de tas basileious skeˉnas kai aulas, hoˉn ta kalummata kuklotereˉ, ouranous . . . “Round ceilings” or “coverings” (kalummata kuklotereˉ) could just as easily be interpreted as “vaulted” as “domed.” Latte 1966, 797; L’Orange 1953, 22. 116. Peter Chrysologus, Sermo 120 (Patrologia Latina 52:527); Panaino 2003, 208. 117. Flavius Corippus, In laudem Iustini Augusti Minoris 30, trans. Cameron 1976, 85. 118. Canepa 2009, 29–30. 119. Procop. Goth. 8.19.11–15. 120. Agathias, Hist. 2.28.1–32.5. On the introduction of patronage of philosophers as a competitive endeavor: Priscianus, Solutiones eorum de quibus dubitavit Chosroes Persarum rex (Answers to questions posed by Kosrow, king of the Persians); Quicherat 1853; Walker 2002; 2006, 172–77; Watts 2005.

121. Nallino 1922; Panaino 1996; 1998, 161–17; 2015a, 249–52, 255–56. 122. Pingree 1997, 26–40; Panaino 2015a, 251. 123. Cf. Ramirez-Weaver 2014. 124. “Through an immersive state in which our attention is totally focused on the artistic virtual world, we can fully deploy our simulative resources, letting our defensive guard against reality slip for a while. Our pleasure for art is likely also driven by this sense of safe intimacy with a world we not only imagine, but also literally embody.” Gallese 2011. 125. KAP 3.4–7; 4.6–7. These include both astrologers (Mid. Pers. axtara¯ ma¯ r, staroˉšmar) and soothsayers and diviners (kunda¯ g, keˉd). Tafaz˙ z˙ olı¯ 1987; Panaino 2015a, 250. 126. T· abari 1009–13. 127. T· abari 1058–60; Yaʿqubi, Taʾrik_, 1:196. 128. Mas’u ¯ dı¯, Tanbih, 95. 129. T· abari 1.1011, trans. Bosworth 1999, 332. 130. Nero: Suet. Ner. 31.2; Septimius Severus: Cass. Dio 77.11.1. 131. The examples collected in Flood 1999 and Grabar 1990 from medieval and early modern Mediterranean and Western Asian architecture and literature vividly illustrate the persistent influence of this aspect of Sasanian court culture. Strangely, Grabar’s treatment of the “dome of the heavens” bypassed Sasanian Iran. Betraying a surprising and unfortunate lack of understanding of Islamic culture’s deep debt to Sasanian Iran, Grabar argued that these architectural, intellectual, and royal traditions in Islam were directly inspired by Nero’s Domus Aurea, as “the Muslim world maintained until the Renaissance a purer classical tradition than the Christian realm. 132. Fowden 2004. 133. Nezami Ganjavi 30.77–91, trans. Meisami 1995, 101–2.

Chapter Seventeen 1. Jerome, In Isaiam 5.14 (Migne, PL 24, col. 59). 2. Lincoln 2012, 3–19. 3. Wilber 1979; Pinder-Wilson 1976; Gignoux 1983; Shahbazi 2004a. Literature on the medieval and early modern Persian gardens surveyed in Gharipour 2013, 2–6. 4. In this regard and quite problematically, passages from the Hellenica or Cyropaedia of Xenophon have been particularly influential in forming both ancient and modern authors’ expectations of the constituent elements of a paradise, often serving as a link between the Achaemenid and Sasanian material. Xen. Hell. 4.1.11 and 31; Cyr. 1.3.14; 1.4.5.11; 4.14; 8.6.12 and 38; Anab. 1.4.10. 5. Lincoln 2012, 3–19; Hultgård 2000; Tuplin 1996. 6. Its orthographic errors could have been the work of a less skilled engraver; however, many of the departures from expected spelling (like using a long a¯ for a short a to indicate the masculine accusative singular) likely reflect changes in the Old Persian language as it moved toward Middle Persian. Schmitt 1999, 59–118, esp. 80–85; 2014, 225; Panaino 2012b. Scholarship has explained the variation of the word, *pairi. daiza, that yielded Greek paradeisos as coming from Median, though (like most other “attestations” of Median) without

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much evidence or justification. Given its heavy religious and ideological connotations, it is worth considering whether *pairi.daiza (if it was indeed a separate word) instead reflects some sort of engagement with Avestan pairi.daeˉza ([good or bad] “enclosure”), as an ideologically charged neologism. Werba 2006, 282 n. 103. On these methodological issues, see Canepa 2017b. 7. Lecoq 1990, 210. 8. Tuplin’s thorough study, which collects and evaluates them in relation to the Persian evidence, provides the most comprehensive synthesis of the evidence up to its date of publication. Tuplin 1996. 9. Lists of fruit trees; PFa 33; guards: PF 1946, PT 38, PF 1815. Tablets mentioning paradises in the Persepolis area: PF 144–58; Briant 2002, 442–44. 10. Plut. Vit. Artax., 25.1–2. 11. Tuplin 1996, 95–96, 111–14. 12. This important fact is clearly established by Tuplin (1996, 95–97). Henkelman’s intensive study of the Persepolis Fortification Tablets has confirmed this in the primary sources and reinforced this picture. Henkelman 2008b. 13. Lincoln 2012. 14. Stronach 1978; Boucharlat 2003. 15. Boucharlat 2002; 2011; 2013b, 508–9. Overview of the site: Stronach and Gopnik 2009. 16. Arr. 6.29; Strabo 16.3.7. 17. Boucharlat 2002, 282. On the open-air sanctuary, see chapter 4. 18. Boucharlat and Labrousse 1979, 53; Boucharlat 2013a, 394–95. Gondet 2014b. 19. Boucharlat 2013a, 393–95. 20. Boucharlat 2013a, 391–92. 21. Schmitt 1999, 82; Werba 2006, 282 n. 103. 22. Weissbach 1937, 651; Werba 2006, 282 n. 103. 23. Herrenschmidt 2000, 506–8; Schmitt 1999, 82; 2014, 197. While he questions the earlier interpretations, Schmitt ends up still translating this phrase as “in [my] lifetime.” 24. Yt. 19.11. See Humbach and Ichaporia’s commentary on Yašt 19’s frequently encountered phrase, yatirista paiti ˜ usǝhišta˛n / jasa¯ t juuaiioˉ amǝrǝxtiš / daθaite frašǝm vasna aŋhu, ˜ “when the dead will rise again, indestructibility [will come] to the living [juuaiioˉ], and existence will be made wondrous in value.” Humbach and Ichaporia 1998, 87–88. 25. Lincoln 2012, 366–74. See chapter 14 for this theme informing the significance of Persian palaces. 26. On the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and their historicity, see Bichler and Rollinger 2005; Rollinger 2013a; pace Dalley 2013. 27. Pasargadae: Arr. Anab. 3.18.10 and 6.29.4.7; Strabo 15.3.7; Babylon: Arr. Anab. 7.25; Tuplin 1996, 102; Reade 2000, esp. 199–200. 28. Boucharlat, De Schacht, and Gondet 2012; Cha¯verdi, Askari, Callieri, and Gondet 2013; Gondet 2014b. 29. E.g., Xen. Oec. 4.20–25. Plut. Artax. 25.1; Velázquez Muñoz 2011. 30. Xen. Oec. 4.20; Arr. Anab. 4.29.4; Strabo 15.3.7. 31. Karimian, Sarfaraz, and Ebrahimi 2011. 32. Fahliyun: Potts, Cha¯verdi, McRae et al. 2007; Potts 2008. Other candidate sites: Velázquez Muñoz 2011, 170–71.

424

NOTES

33. It might have previously belonged to Cambyses and been part of Teispid family domains assigned to her by Darius I. Henkelman and Kleber 2007, 166–69. 34. Hdt. 3.120, 126; 6.33; Thuc. 1.129.1; Xen. Hell. 4.1.15; Weiskopf 1994. For the wider context within Achaemenid Anatolia, see Dusinberre 2013b, 54–59. 35. The fi ndings of the excavations are reviewed in Erdog˘an 2007; Kaptan 2002. 36. Bakır 2003, 2006. 37. Kelainai: Xen. Anab. 1.2.7–9; Daskyleion: Xen. Hell. 4.1.15–16; Sardis: Xen. Oec. 4.20–24; Vitr. 2.8.10. 38. Tuplin 1996, 100–102. 39. Tuplin 1996, 101. See below. 40. Knauss, Gagošidze, and Babaev 2013; Babaev and Knauss 2010; Babaev, Mehnert, and Knauss 2009; Babaev, Gagošidze, and Knauss 2007. 41. Knauss, Gagošidze, and Babaev 2013, 25–26. 42. Khatchadourian 2016, 149. 43. Fauth 1979. See Lincoln’s critique of Jan Bremmer: Bremmer 1999, 2008; Lincoln 2012, 9. 44. Lincoln 2012, 19. 45. On the original Achaemenid significances of this and related terms, see Lincoln 2012, 68–69. 46. This is made evident in the various synthetic studies, such as Tuplin 1996 and Fauth 1979. 47. Diod. Sic. 18.39, 19.12; Arr. Succ. fr. 1.30–38. 48. Tuplin 1996, 110–11. 49. Kosmin 2014a, 195–96. 50. Hultgård 2000, 23–24. 51. Arr. Anab. 7.25.3. 52. Jos. Ant. 10.220; Ap. 1.128; Reade 2000, 199–200. 53. Sachs, Hunger, et al. 1988–2014, vol. 2, no. 187, Rev. line 12, pp. 330–33. 54. Curt. 7.2.22 and 29. 55. Plut. Vit. Demetr. 50.1–2. 56. Cohen 2006, 94–96. 57. Ptolemy 5.14.16; Cohen, 2006, 116. 58. Meaning the šip sacrifice, on which see chapter 4. Phylarchus = Polyaenus, Strat. 5.15. 59. Hopkins 1972, 118–23; Negro Ponzi 1968/1969; Invernizzi 1994b. 60. Downey 1988b, 60–63. 61. Early speculation on the function of the ensemble sud: Bernard 1971, esp. 386–88; Thoraval and Liger in Bernard et al. 1980, 44–45. 62. Bernard et al. 1980, 45. 63. Bernard et al. 1980, 45. 64. Bernard et al. 1980, 45. 65. Bernard 1971, 386–88. 66. Bernard 1971, 388. 67. Julian, Misop. 346 B-D. 68. Strabo 16.2.6. 69. Kropp 2013, 373–76. 70. Weber 2010, 2:496–97. 71. Dandamayev 1992, 32–33. 72. BH · WTʾZNH MN KRMʾ [2] ʾwzbry ZYB sygbyš 3 prdyz QRY H m XI III III, Weber 2010, no. 741, p. 541. · 73. Tebtunis Papyri 5.93 and 99; 24.42–43; Hultgård 2000, 24.

74. Philostratus 1.37. 75. Herodian 4.11.9. 76. Suet. Cal. 5. 77. Garsoïan 1976, 10.28–30; cf. ŠKZ §24. 78. Hackl, Jacobs, and Weber 2010, 3:320, no. H 112. 79. App. Mith. 84. 80. Strabo 12.3.30 and 38. 81. Strabo 12.3.30. 82. App. Mith. 104.485. 83. App. Mith. 82. 84. Garsoïan 1976, 28–29 n. 53. On hunting and participation in Iranian culture more generally in late antique Armenia and Georgia, see above, chapter 5. 85. Buzandaran 3.8; Movses Khorenats’i 3.8. 86. This recalls the Achaemenid-era hunting reserve in Sogdiana destroyed by Alexander. Curt. 8.1.11–13. 87. Xosrov invested his nobles with robes of honor and precious metal vessels, as befits an Iranian king. Ps.-Sebeos 32. 88. They name regions such as Media, Pars, and Iraq and cities such as Staxr, Esfahan, and Ctesiphon as well as summer retreats in Dinawar near Kangavar and Nehavand, Dastagerd, and H ¯ n. Kasheff 1987. · olwa 89. For example, Bremmer 1999. 90. Hultgård 2000, 21. 91. ŠKZ §§43.10 and 50.12. 92. Representative examples in the memory of the ŠN 7.340 and 9.211. 93. Jer. In Isaiam 5.14. Migne Pat. Lat. 24. Col. 159. 94. Amm. Marc. 24.5.1–3, trans. Rolfe 1939, 2:449. 95. Zos. 3.23, trans. Ridley 1982, 62. 96. It should be noted that for rhetorical effect, Libanius claims all palaces were burned. Lib. Or. 18.243, trans. Norman 1969–1977, 1:443. 97. History of Mar Aba, §29, trans. Braun 1915, 211. Braun translates Syriac beth sepré as a proper name, “Vogelhaus.” Cf. Fiey 1967b, 28. ˉ ra¯ nšahr 20, trans. Daryaee 2002c, 98. Šahresta¯ nı¯ha¯ ¯ı E 19–29, 19. 99. Sauer et al. 2013. 100. T· abarı¯ 1.1043. Anonymous Guidi 24, trans. Nöldeke 1893, 29. See also the Armenian tradition: Ps.-Sebeos, trans. Thomson and Howard-Johnston 1999, 109; Movses Daskhurants‘i, trans. Dowsett 1961, 90–92. 101. Shalem 1994, 78; Morony 1988. 102. T· abarı¯ 1.2452, trans., 13: 32. 103. Some of these have been associated with ruins, which alas were largely undocumented before their destruction. Dastagerd: Agnew 1920; Sarre and Herzfeld 1920, 2:88. 104. Most notably, Yaqut and Qazvini understood that the great hunter Wahram V had built a palace in the region ¯ n, the remains of whose throne room and gardens of H · olwa could still be seen. Yaqut C 7.354; Qazvini 2.302.23, Schwarz 1896, 693. 105. Callieri 2012, 158. 106. Callieri 2012, 158. 107. Morony 1986; Klier 2008. 108. Mitchell 1959. 109. “In [Kanga¯var] ist ein wunderbares Bauwerk und festgefügte Säulen.” Ibn al Fakih 227.22; 255.12; 267.2, trans.

Schwarz 1896, 495. “Dort ist ein Schloß aus Haustein, von Säulen getragen, mit wunderbarer Arbeit.” Muqaddası¯, 393.16. 110. Huff 2004b, 402. 111. Ibn al-Faqih and Muqadessi; Schwarz 1896, 495. 112. “Der Thronsaal der Chosroen ist in Gips und Ziegeln erbaut und überragt das Dorf; an der Rückseite des Thronsaals sind Zimmer.” Ibn Rosteh 167.2, trans. Schwarz 1896, 495; cf. trans. Wiet 1955, 193: “Le palais des Sassanides, bâti en briques et plâtre, domine le village; il comprend plusieurs chambres.” 113. Adapted from Schwarz 1896, 494. Qazvı¯nı¯ also remarks on its fine masonry work. 114. T· abarı¯ 5.2649. 115. Schmidt 1940, 80, pl. 96. Negative no. AE 757. 116. Taq-e Bostan I, II, and III, respectively. On the identification of the figures in Taq-e Bostan I: Trümpelmann 1975; Azarpay 1982, 184; Shahbazi 1977; Azarnoush 1986, 219–24. On the relationship to Sasanian relations with South Asia: Carter 1981; on the relief’s relationship to Roman-Sasanian competition: Canepa 2009, 108–9. 117. Callieri 2006, 341, and fig. 9. 118. Ghirshman and later Vanden Berghe argued that Bishabuhr VI, which depicts a Sasanian king enthroned in triumph over more than one group of people, portrays Shabuhr II, although the unfinished state of the relief, especially the king’s crown, makes it difficult to fully prove this. Vanden Berghe argued that it was a triumph over the Romans, though the figures’ clothes and hair not to mention the fact that they present the king of kings with an elephant make Ghirshman’s argument seem more likely. Ghirshman 1950a; 1971, 79–88; Vanden Berghe 1980. Other bibliography and interpretations discussed in Herrmann 1981, 32–38. 119. Vanden Berghe 1983, 92, 145. A new view: Overlaet 2011. 120. The various debates in the scholarship on date and attribution are admirably dealt with in Movassat 2005, 9–18. 121. Canepa 2009, 139. 122. Ebrahimi and Qasrian 2016. 123. Kleiss 1996c; Luschey 2013. 124. Luschey 1974, 2013. 125. Luschey 2013; Ebrahimi and Qasrian 2016. 126. Schwarz 1896, 485–87; Luschey 2013. 127. Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, trans. Davis 2007, 810–11. 128. Theoph. 321. 129. Theoph. 6118, trans. Mango and Scott, 1997, 451. 130. Rich 1836, 2:253–56. Sarre and Herzfeld 1920, 2:76–93. 131. Agnew 1920; Sarre and Herzfeld 1920, 2:88. Adams 1965. 132. The Zinden, he argued, should be considered some unknown site, and since he could not discern the further extent of the walls, he suggested it was an unfi nished monument. Schippmann 1969. 133. Actually noted by Schippmann himself (1969, 46 n. 17): Ibn Rostah 163.21. 134. Sources complied in Le Strange 1905, 62. 135. T· abarı¯ 1.2450and 1.2473, trans. 13:29 and 53.

NOTES

425

136. “King [Husraw II] wished to build a convent to Shirin his wife, in the country of [Holwan].” Thomas of Marga, The Book of Governors, trans. Budge 1893, 2:80–82; Bedjan 1895, 306; Jullien 2006, 170; 2015. See also Schilling 2008, 277–76 n. 196 on the construction of churches near palaces for Husraw II’s wives. ˇ aha¯r Qa¯pu 137. The function of the C ¯ is still unclear. Predictably a palace and a fi re temple have been the two most common interpretations since de Morgan’s and Bell’s publications, though a church has also been put forward. Schmidt 1978; Bier 1993; Huff 2011. 138. Reuther 1938, 540–43; Hoffman 2008, 72–84. 139. Mousavi 2008. 140. Hoffmann 2008, 168. 141. De Morgan 1897, 341–60; Bell 1914, 44–54. 142. There are several more omitted here whose descriptions lack any significant detail; what all visitors seem to agree on, however, is that it was unbelievably hot and the village was a horrible place to visit. Rich 1836; Ritter 1840; Fraser 1840, 1842; Jones 1849; Bellew 1874; Bird 1891; Zetland 1904; Griscom 1921. 143. Zetland 1904, 111. 144. Moradi (2012) has published a brief report on some of these explorations. He reported that he discovered as unstratified or surface finds, a few fragments of glazed pottery, which he compares to Samara ware. In addition, he studied a number of unstratified brick fragments, “taken from various parts of the paradise,” including the area around the ayva¯ n. He assigned the bricks to the Abbasid period through thermoluminescent dating (without documentation) and through the presence of ceramics with a yellow glaze found in some, which he associates with Samara ware. He implies that these bricks came from the fallen vault of the ayva¯ n, and if the dating was correct, this would indeed suggest that this structure was built (or rebuilt) in the Abbasid period (p. 329). I cannot judge whether or not the bricks were found in such a way that would suggest that they were used in the vault, and the entire area has now been completely cleared. 145. De Morgan 1897, 4.2:343. 146. “Le reste du terre-plein qui est situé à 5 mètres audessus du sol des jardins est massif.” de Morgan 1897, 4.2:344 ; cf. fig. 206. During her visit, Bell observed: “The central part [of the palace] is raised above the plain by means of a solid platform of earth some 3 metres high.” Bell 1914, 44. Reuther states that the platform was 8 meters high, but does not cite his source. Reuther 1938, 540. 147. Kangavar’s monumental entranceway faces south, as does the Great Ayvan at Taq-e Bostan. 148. De Morgan 1897, 4.2:342–43. 149. De Morgan 1897, 4.2:343, pl. 40.

426

NOTES

150. Jones 1849, 148–49; Ibn al-Faqih 158.14; Qazvini 2.296.5, trans. Schwarz 1896, 690, 692. 151. This is the case, for example, with the large columns de Morgan documents flanking the main ayvanayvan. Bell clearly states that she found evidence of these columns even if their disturbed state did not allow her to discern a ground plan and reconstruct them in her plan. De Morgan 1897, 4.2:347–48 and fig. 209; Bell 1914, 45. 152. Reuther 1938, fig. 154; Bier 1993, 58. 153. Damgaard 2013. 154. Damgaard 2013, 283. 155. Moradi 2012, 325–29. 156. Collected in Schwarz 1896, 689–93. In addition, see Ducène 2009, 65–66. 157. C’est une bourgade située en plaine, entourée d’une muraille en pierre. On y voit une immense salle d’audience, bâtie en briques et plâtre, que flanquent tout autour des chambres communiquantes et dont les portes donnent accès à la salle centrale. L’estrade est dallée en marbre.” Trans. Wiet 1955, 191. 158. Kröger 1982, fig. 88; Moradi (2012, 330–31) catalogues these stucco finds as “Islamic.” He appears to have been unaware of the larger corpus of Sasanian stucco and Kröger’s foundational study. The intact stucco he documented on pp. 330–31 (Persian pagination) also corresponds to late Sasanian stucco, including a pattern inset with alternating fleur de lis’ and double-inset diamonds framing a ring, which resemble motifs at Tell al-Dhabaʿi (pls. 2.2 and 3.1), Qasr Bint al-Qadi (pl. 12.5), Umm az-Zaʿatir (Kröger 1982, pls. 20.7–8, 24.1), and Nizamabad (Kröger 1982, pl. 64.3 and 65.1 and 3). 159. Bell Archive, Q133–140. 160. Bier 1993; Huff 2011. 161. Reuther 1938, 540; Hoffman 2008, 79. 162. Huff 2011; cf. Schmidt 1978. 163. Jones 1857, esp. 147. 164. Jones 1857, 148. 165. De Morgan 1897, 4.2:353. 166. Ibn al-Faqih, trans. Schwarz 1896, 692. 167. Qazwini 1.154.25, trans. Schwarz 1896, 692. 168. Trans. adapted from Schwarz 1896, 692. ¯ h Mustawfı¯ of Qazwı¯n, Nuzhat-al-Qulu ¯ b, 169. H · amd-Alla §5, trans. Le Strange 2014, 4:50. 170. De Morgan 1897, 4.2:357–60. 171. Azarnoush 1981, 2009. 172. The features of the entranceway appear to have been more clearly visible at Hawsh Kuri, given its superior state of preservation. De Morgan 1897, 4.2:341; Bell 1914, 44–54. 173. Reuther 1938, 543. 174. Collected in Schwarz 1896, 693. 175. Cha¯verdi 2011; pace Bier 1986, 1993.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bibliographic abbreviations follow those of the American Journal of Archaeology and Encyclopaedia Iranica where possible. The following abbreviations are also used. ACSS:

Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia

AdCL:

Atti dei Convegni Lincei

AI:

Acta Iranica

AMIT:

Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan

AMS:

Asia Minor Studien

AnatSt:

Anatolian Studies

AO:

Ars Orientalis

BAI:

Bulletin of the Asia Institute

BEFEO:

Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient

CDAFI:

Cahiers de la Délégation Archéologique Française en Iran

EIrO:

Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, www.iranicaonline .org

IranCauc:

Iran and the Caucasus

JA:

Journal Asiatique

KKZ:

Kartir, Ka‘ba-ye Zardošt inscription

KNRb:

Kartir, Naqš-e Rajab inscription

KNRm:

Kartir, Naqš-e Rostam inscription

KSM:

Kartir, Sar Mašhad inscription

LCL:

Loeb Classical Library

MDAFA:

Mémoires de la Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan

MdM:

Monografie di Mesopotamia

OeO:

Oriens et Occidens

OIP:

Oriental Institute Publications

P-bH:

Patma-banasirakan Handes

ProBritAc:

Proceedings of the British Academy

RÉArm:

Revue des Études Arméniennes

SAA:

Silk Road Art and Archaeology

ŠKZ:

Ša¯buhr I, Naqš-e Rostam inscription

StudIr:

Studia Iranica

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