Susa

Start with the ground under your feet. It is not quite soil and not quite stone. It is a pale, crumbled mixture of earth and broken mud brick, warm in the sun and fine as flour where people have walked. Look closely and you may see small fragments of fired clay scattered across the surface. Each one is a piece of a city that people lived in for thousands of years. You are standing on Susa, in the south-west of Iran.

Susa is one of the oldest continuously settled places on Earth. Archaeologists date the first town here to the fifth millennium before Christ, more than six thousand years ago. That means people were building homes on this spot before the first pyramids rose in Egypt. Over the centuries, each new generation built on top of the ruins of the last. The low hills around you are not natural. They are mounds of human settlement, layer upon layer, raised slowly by time.

The flat land around the site is the plain of Khuzestan. To the west and north, rivers come down from the Zagros Mountains and water this plain. That water is the reason Susa existed at all. It made farming possible in a hot, dry region. It also placed the city at a crossroads, between the lowlands of Mesopotamia to the west and the Iranian plateau to the east. Whoever held Susa held a door between two worlds.

For a very long period, Susa was a leading city of Elam. Elam was an ancient civilisation of south-western Iran, a rival and neighbour of Babylon and Assyria. Elamite kings ruled from here, wrote in their own language, and worshipped their own gods. Their story is less familiar to most visitors than the story of Egypt or Greece. Yet for many centuries Elam was a major power in this part of the world, and Susa was its heart.

Here is the first surprise. One of the most famous objects of the ancient world was found right here, in this soil. It is the tall black stone carved with the laws of Hammurabi, the Babylonian king. It was not made in Susa. An Elamite king carried it here as a trophy of war, taken from Babylonia in the twelfth century before Christ. French excavators dug it up at Susa in 1901. Today it stands in the Louvre in Paris.

Elam's power did not last forever. In the seventh century before Christ, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal attacked and destroyed Susa. His own inscriptions describe the sack in harsh terms, boasting of tombs opened and temples ruined. These are the words of a conqueror, so they may exaggerate. But the destruction was real. And yet, as so often in its long life, the city came back.

Its greatest revival came under the Persians. In the late sixth century before Christ, Darius the Great made Susa one of the royal capitals of the Achaemenid Empire. The Achaemenids were the first great Persian dynasty, and their empire stretched from Egypt to the edges of India. Darius built a vast palace here. He left an inscription describing how workers and materials came from many distant lands to build it. Susa became a meeting point for an entire empire.

The most impressive part of that palace was the Apadana, a great audience hall. Its roof rested on rows of tall stone columns. The tops of those columns were carved as pairs of kneeling bulls, back to back, which held the wooden roof beams between their heads. As you walk the palace area, look for the round stone column bases still lying on the ground. They mark where the forest of columns once stood. Try to imagine the height of the hall above them.

The walls of the palace were not plain. They were covered in glazed bricks in deep blue, green, yellow and white. Some panels showed rows of royal archers in long robes, holding spears. Others showed lions and winged creatures. Many of the best preserved panels are now in museums abroad, especially in Paris. But this is the second surprise: if you search the ground carefully, you may still notice small chips of coloured glaze in the dust.

Susa also holds a place in stories far beyond Iran. The Hebrew Bible calls the city Shushan. It is the setting of the Book of Esther, and the prophet Daniel is linked with it as well. Later, Alexander the Great came here after defeating the Persian Empire. In 324 BC, ancient writers say he held a mass wedding at Susa. He and many of his officers married Persian noblewomen in a single ceremony, as a symbol of joining two peoples.

Now turn your eyes to the large building with towers and walls on the high mound. It looks like a medieval European castle, and that is no accident. French archaeologists built it in the late nineteenth century as a fortified base for their excavations. The region was unsafe at the time, and they needed protection. Much of it was built with old bricks gathered from the ancient site itself. So the castle is part of Susa's story too, and part of the story of how archaeology was done.

From the edge of the mounds, you can see the modern town of Shush close by. Above its rooftops rises a white, tall, ribbed dome shaped like a pine cone. This is the shrine that local tradition holds to be the tomb of the prophet Daniel. The building you see is much later than Daniel's time. Still, it is a living place of visits and prayer, for Muslims and others alike. The ancient city and the modern town have never fully separated.

In 2015, UNESCO added Susa to its World Heritage List. The decision recognised the depth of its layers, from early villages to Elamite, Persian, Greek and later periods. Much of what made Susa famous now sits in museums far away. What remains here is quieter. It is earth, brick, column bases and wide sky. But it is also the one thing no museum can hold: the place itself, exactly where all of it happened.

Before you leave, stop for a moment and look across the mounds. Notice how the light changes the colour of the earth, from pale gold to soft brown. Listen to the wind moving over the open ground, and the distant sounds of the town. People stood near this spot and looked at this same horizon for more than six thousand years. As you walk back down, watch your step. Each fragment at your feet is part of that long story.