The palace is a compound of independent buildings (Ladiray 2013). Darius leveled the two hills to a constant 18 m above the plain (to be compared with the Persepolis retaining wall which was 12–14 m high). To extend the surface of the Apadana tell, the earth dug from the summit was moved to the slopes, creating a terrace. Walls and columns are set on a 10 m deep foundation made of gravel. The mudbrick walls rest on two courses of baked bricks. Stone is much less used than in Persepolis, for the mountains are 50 km away and most of the architecture belongs to the Mesopotamian tradition. Worked stone is restricted to bases, shafts, and capitals of columns. The stone bas‐reliefs are not used in Darius' palace; the walls of the courtyards of the residence made extensive use of siliceous glazed brick panels, now in the Louvre Museum. Many of them depict a file of guards, others show lions, griffins, and antithetical sphinxes. The colors include brown, light green, yellow, white, sometimes cobalt blue, usually with gray‐black outlines.
Inside the royal city the visitor first arrives at a building forming a monumental gate, called Propylaeum. It consists of two oblong contiguous rooms opening on two opposed porticoes with two square bases of columns. They bear an inscription in the name of Xerxes (XSa). The royal way then crosses the 14 m deep valley which separates the Ville Royale from the Apadana mound by a causeway bridge made of mudbrick boxes filled with earth. Here, the visitor is in front of the Gate of Darius.
The gate is a monumental building, 40 × 30 m, with a tetrastyle hall, like that of the All Countries Gate in Persepolis; it stands isolated from any other structure as in Persepolis. It is the symbolic passage between the outside and the inside of the palace. The gate is flanked by side rooms and stairwells leading to the roof. The square column bases bear an inscription in the name of Darius made by Xerxes (XSd). The passageway toward the palace was very likely flanked by two statues, of which only one was found in place. Apart from some fragments of at least two other statues previously found, this is the sole example of a human sculpture in the round so far known in the Achaemenid period. Originally, the statue was placed in Egypt, along the canal dug out by Darius (Yoyotte 2013: pp. 241–279). Later Xerxes brought it to Susa and placed the statue at the Gate that his father had left unfinished (Figure 94.8; cf. Chapter 94 Statuary and Relief).
The poorly preserved Apadana hall is very similar to the great hypostyle hall at Persepolis. A few column bases are not in place but their location is visible thanks to the stone foundation. The walls are marked only by the layout of the foundation trenches. Bull protomae of capitals also show the similarity with Persepolis. The column bases in the north part of the hall bore an inscription in situ of Artaxerxes II, who claims to have repaired this “Apadana” built by Darius and burned during the reign of his grandfather, Artaxerxes I. This is the only case in Achaemenid architecture where the term Apadana is directly associated with an existing building. The porticoes on three sides go out onto open space, while the fourth side consists of a series of rooms and especially a perpendicular passage leading to the residence, as in Persepolis.
To the south, Darius' residence occupies 4 ha, built on a totally non‐Persian plan but following Mesopotamian and Elamite traditions (Figure 15.6). The general scheme is organized around three main courtyards plus a small one (five courtyards in Nebuchadnezzar's palace in Babylon) that give light to the rooms and facilitate the circulation, as in the Mesopotamian palaces. The residence was entirely made of mudbrick on two courses of baked brick. The huge blocks in which are set the bronze doors' sockets are the only stone elements, often made of discarded column drums.
The reconstruction of the different parts and their function (Ladiray 2013: pp. 200–203; Perrot 2013: pp. 229–236) emphasizes increasingly controlled access from the eastern outer entrance toward the king's apartment opening on the western courtyard. The plan of the apartment with two parallel oblong rooms is a replica of the throne room in the Neo‐Assyrian palace at Nineveh, and later in Babylon. In Susa, at the rear side the king's bedroom is added. At both sides of the entrance to that small room were buried the famous foundation tablets, square stone slabs of 33 cm a side, inscribed on all six sides, one in Elamite (DSz) and the other in Babylonian (DSaa). The two texts differ from each other. Darius symbolically describes the contribution of all peoples of the empire to provide rough materials, to carry them from their origin to Susa, and to build the palace. Copies of these texts, the originals of which were not visible, and the fragments of the Old Persian version were found in stone and bricks in several areas of Susa (Vallat 2013: pp. 281–293). The other royal inscriptions mainly belong to Darius and Xerxes.
The other kings who left several inscriptions are Darius II and above all Artaxerxes II in the first half of the fifth century. Not only did he rebuild, or repair, the Apadana hall but he erected a new palace on the other bank of the Shaur river that extends over 4 ha. The main part is a columned hall of six rows of six stone column bases, with painted wooden shafts. In that hall were found the only so far known wall paintings depicting half‐size human figures. Amongst the pigments used, to be noted is the cinnabar for red. A few stone slabs showing small‐size servants similar to those carved on the reliefs of different buildings at Persepolis were found in that palace as well as at the southern tip of the Ville Royale (Boucharlat 2013: pp. 371–395).
Cult Places and Burial Customs
On these archeological remains, we are very poorly informed. We have an idea of several deities worshipped in this region from the contents of dozens of Persepolis tablets. They mention food to sanctuaries of Elamite, Babylonian, and Persian deities (Henkelman 2008). None of the corresponding places is known, but those places did exist, despite Herodotus I, 121 who had said that places of worship for the Persians were under the open sky.
Hypotheses have been put forward to recognize places of ritual ceremonies in some buildings of the Persepolis terrace, related to religion and/or to the dynastic cult, since the king is the intermediary between men and gods. This reinterpretation (Razmjou 2010: pp. 231–245) speculates that most buildings would be concerned, especially those called “palaces” by archeologists, given the representations of “offerings bearers,” who would be priests and servants bringing liquids and small animals for sacrifice. A single case of ritual seems convincing, near Darius' tačara. The western flight of stairs has been adapted to manage a small room containing a pool of 30 m2 and a small canal. Such an installation is suitable for ritual libations or liquid offerings.
Places for funeral ceremonies must have existed near royal tombs like that of Cyrus at Pasargadae. This is suggested, for example, by Arrian, who mentions one horse per month as a sacrifice to Cyrus (Arr. VI, 29.4–7). No installation is visible near the tomb in this unexcavated area, which has been severely disturbed. Four tablets from the Persepolis Fortification Archive mention sacrifices near installations called šumar (probably meaning grave), one for Cambyses, perhaps near Niriz, 100 km east of Persepolis (Henkelman 2003), another for a certain Hystaspes, who may be identified with some probability with the father of Darius. The latter building may be recognized in the platform halfway between Persepolis and Naqsh‐i Rustam, but the only related building there is a columned hall. The sacred area of barely excavated Naqsh‐i Rustam remains unknown; the only candidate there for a religious or funeral building is the Ka’ba‐ye Zardosht. This stone tower erected in front of the cliff is an exact replica of the Zendan‐i Solaiman tower at Pasargadae. The assumptions on the function of the two towers, which contain a very small room without windows in the upper part, have been brilliantly disputed – tomb or shrine? – without decisive argument. A third attractive but rather vague hypothesis is that the tower of Naqsh‐i Rustam was erected by Darius for preserving the royal insignia (Sancisi‐Weerdenburg 1983).
The only known graves of this period are the freestanding monument of Cyrus at Pasargadae, the rock‐cut graves of Darius and his three successors carved into the 60 m high cliff at Naqsh‐i Rustam, and the tombs of Artaxerxes II and III overlooking the Persepolis terrace. A cemetery excavated by E.F. Schmidt north of Persepolis contained dozens of individual burials in pits or in clay coffins, but they are usually dated to the late or rather the post‐Achaemenid