Palace of Darius in Susa

Listen first to the ground under your feet. It is soft and pale, almost powdery... packed earth and crumbled mudbrick, the colour of weak tea. The air here in the lowlands of Khuzestan, in southwestern Iran, is often heavy and warm. Around you lie low walls, stone column bases, and the outlines of rooms traced in the dust. It does not look like much at first. But you are standing inside one of the great royal houses of the ancient world.

This is the Palace of Darius at Susa. It was built by Darius the First, often called Darius the Great, a king of the Achaemenid dynasty. That was the ruling family of the first Persian Empire, which stretched from Egypt and the Aegean Sea to the edge of India. Work began in the late sixth century before Christ, soon after Darius took the throne. Susa became one of the empire's main capitals, a seat of government and a royal winter residence.

But Susa was already very old when Darius arrived. For thousands of years before him, this was a great city of Elam. Elam was an ancient kingdom of the southwestern plains, older than Persia itself. The mounds around you hold layer upon layer of earlier settlement. In other words, Darius did not build in an empty place. He built on top of a city with a deep past, and he wanted his palace to stand above all of it.

And it did stand above it, quite literally. The palace was raised on a great artificial terrace, built up high above the plain. From up here, the king could look out over the river valley and the town below. Visitors approached from below and climbed toward him. The height was a message. It told every traveller, envoy, and tax-bearer exactly where power lived.

Here is the first surprise. Darius left a written account of how this palace was built. It is known today as his foundation charter, and copies were found here in the ruins. In it, he lists where every material came from. Cedar wood came from Lebanon. Gold came from Sardis, in western Anatolia, and from Bactria, in Central Asia. Lapis lazuli and carnelian came from Sogdiana. Ivory came from Africa and from India.

The charter also names the workers. Babylonians made the baked bricks. Stonecutters came from Ionia, the Greek coast of Anatolia, and from Sardis. Medes and Egyptians worked the gold. Imagine the languages heard on this terrace while it was being built. The palace was not only a home for a king. It was a deliberate portrait of the whole empire, built by hands from every corner of it.

The living quarters followed a style common in Mesopotamia. Rooms were arranged around open courtyards, which brought light and air into the building. Walls were thick mudbrick, which helps keep interiors cooler in this hot climate. As you walk the site, try to see the outlines of those courtyards. Picture walls rising high above your head, plastered and painted, with doorways leading from one bright square to the next.

Beside the residence stood the Apadana, the great audience hall. It was a forest of stone columns, arranged in neat rows, holding up a roof of heavy timber. Each column ended at the top in a carved capital shaped like the front halves of two bulls, back to back. The beams rested between their heads. Here the king received foreign delegations. The scale of the hall was meant to make every visitor feel small.

Now the second surprise. Some of the most famous pieces from this palace are not here at all. In the 1880s, the French archaeologists Marcel and Jane Dieulafoy excavated at Susa. They found brilliant glazed brick panels showing lions, winged creatures, and a long line of royal archers in rich robes. Those panels, and a giant bull capital from the Apadana, travelled to Paris. Today they are displayed in the Louvre Museum.

The palace also suffered in its own time. Inscriptions record that the great hall burned during the reign of a later king, Artaxerxes the First. His grandson, Artaxerxes the Second, rebuilt it. He carved his own words onto some of the column bases, saying that he had restored what was lost. So the stones around you carry two layers of royal pride... the builder, and the restorer who came generations later.

In 1972, excavators made another remarkable find near the palace gate. It was a large stone statue of Darius himself, now missing its head. The statue was carved in Egypt, and its robe carries inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphs and in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script of Mesopotamia and Persia. Its base shows the peoples of the empire. Today this statue is kept at the National Museum of Iran in Tehran.

Susa also lives in older stories. The Book of Esther, in the Hebrew Bible, is set in Shushan, the palace. That is this city, under an older name. Not far from here, the town of Shush keeps a shrine that local tradition holds to be the tomb of the prophet Daniel. Its tall, ribbed conical dome is easy to spot. And on the nearby mound stands a castle built by French archaeologists in the late nineteenth century, partly from ancient bricks.

In 2015, Susa was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list. That recognition covers far more than this one palace. It covers the long story of a city that was Elamite, then Persian, then Greek, and much more after that. What you see here is only the top layer of a very deep record. Archaeologists still study these mounds today.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment. Look at the column bases nearest to you, and at the dusty floor where kings once walked. Notice the heat, the wide sky, the distant line of the castle on its hill. Bricks from this ground now sit in Paris and Tehran. But the terrace itself has never moved. As you walk back down, you follow the same slope that every envoy once climbed... only now, no one is waiting at the top.