46 Fun Facts About Persepolis

Persepolis was the ceremonial capital of which Persian dynasty?

The Achaemenids ran their empire day to day from other, older cities, which may be why the Greeks barely knew this one existed until an invading army reached it.

In which modern country is Persepolis?

Iran treats the ruins as a national emblem: their columns and carvings have been copied on stamps, carpets and bank buildings, and one of the country's biggest football clubs is called Persepolis.

What do Persepolis's clay tablets mostly record?

Wages and rations fill the tablets: grain, wine and silver handed out to craftsmen from across the empire, with new mothers given extra, twice as much for a boy as for a girl.

Which conqueror's army took Persepolis in 330 BC?

Alexander the Great, by one ancient account, called it 'the most hateful of the cities of Asia' and let his soldiers plunder everything but the palaces, which burned a few months later.

According to Plutarch and Diodorus, which courtesan urged the burning of Persepolis?

Thaïs is said to have thrown her torch right after the king's own; she was the companion of his general Ptolemy, the future ruler of Egypt.

What did the burning of Persepolis supposedly avenge?

The Persian destruction of Athens lay 150 years in the past, and one ancient account has a senior general object that the conqueror would only be burning what was now his own property.

Which festival have many scholars long argued Persepolis was built to celebrate?

Nowruz, the Persian New Year, falls at the spring equinox, and many scholars read the site's ceremonial carvings as a record of it; others reply that no text shows the festival being held there.

What does the Greek name Persepolis mean?

City of the Persians was a Greek coinage that the builders never used: they called the place by the same name as their homeland and their people.

Medieval Persians called the site Takht-e Jamshid, meaning what?

Throne of a mythical king: later Persians had forgotten who built the ruins, so they credited them to Jamshid, a legendary ruler whose demons were said to carry him about on his throne.

The winged, human-headed bulls guarding Persepolis's Gate of All Nations were borrowed from the art of which earlier empire?

Assyria's palace guardians were carved with five legs so that they looked right from both the front and the side; the Persian sculptors dropped the extra one.

Which Persian king founded Persepolis around 518 BC?

Darius I boasts in an inscription beside the original entrance that no fortress had stood on the spot before, and he credits the work to craftsmen from the many nations he ruled.

Which stone were the columns, stairways and doorframes of Persepolis cut from?

Grey limestone was used for the parts that still stand; the walls between were mostly mud brick and have crumbled, which is why the ruins are a forest of columns and doorways.

The terrace of Persepolis was partly built up and partly cut out of what?

A mountainside: the builders cut back the bedrock of a rocky spur, packed the hollows with boulders and rubble, and faced the whole with fitted blocks to make a platform of 125,000 square metres.

The Macedonians took the pass before Persepolis by a hidden path, echoing which earlier battle?

Thermopylae in reverse: this time Persians held the narrow pass against a Greek-led army, and a local guide is said to have shown the invaders the way round.

Plutarch says the treasure of Persepolis was carried away on 20,000 mules and 5,000 of which other animal?

Camels were needed because the vaults held two centuries of the kings' savings: another ancient writer puts the hoard at 120,000 talents, reckoned in silver.

Which animal combat is carved again and again on the stairways of Persepolis?

A lion attacking a bull recurs all over the site, almost like a coat of arms; it is often read as a sign from the heavens, with the lion standing for the sun.

A later Persian tradition says the conqueror who burned Persepolis also destroyed which treasure, written in gold ink on cow-skins?

The Zoroastrian scriptures are said to have burned in a priestly book written centuries later; ironically, the palace fire may have saved thousands of clay tablets by burying them under a fallen wall.

Which city, itself later eclipsed by Shiraz, rose beside the ruins of Persepolis and reused their stone?

Estakhr, five kilometres away, went on to be the home city of the Sasanian dynasty, and it resisted the Arab conquest so fiercely that many of its people were killed.

Which deity do the royal inscriptions at Persepolis thank as 'the greatest of the gods'?

Ahura Mazda is named in text after text, and the winged figure hovering over the king in the carvings was long taken for his image; many scholars now read it as a symbol of royal fortune.

The graphic novel Persepolis opens with its author's childhood during which upheaval?

The Islamic Revolution had toppled the Shah a year before the story opens in 1980, with its heroine aged ten, the child of politically active parents who had opposed him.

What was found in 2011 at Tol-e Ajori, 3 km west of Persepolis?

A gateway resembling Babylon's Ishtar Gate, with the same glazed-brick beasts, stood here; its excavators think it went up after Persia took Babylon in 539 BC and before work on the great terrace began.

What was the Apadana used for?

Official audiences of the King of Kings were held under a roof carried by 72 columns; only 13 still stood in modern times, though the ruins' old nickname, Forty Minarets, recalls a taller skyline.

Under the corners of the Apadana at Persepolis, excavators found a coin hoard and foundation tablets made of what?

Gold and silver plaques lay in stone boxes with a handful of coins beneath them, every coin foreign, probably because the empire had not yet begun striking its own.

The coins buried beneath the Apadana at Persepolis include a type first struck by which famously wealthy king?

Croesus lost his kingdom of Lydia to the Persians, yet the conquerors kept striking his coin design: the buried pieces were fresh from a mint under Persian rule.

What do the Apadana staircase reliefs depict?

Peoples of the empire in traditional dress bringing gifts fill the stairway in 23 delegations, and an usher takes the leader of each one by the hand to bring the group before the king.

Who carved his name into Persepolis's Gate of All Nations in 1870, a year before his famous meeting in Africa?

Henry Morton Stanley cut 'New York Herald' beside his name, for the paper that had him touring the East; the following year he set off into Africa to find the missing David Livingstone.

By what other name is the Throne Hall known?

The Hundred-Columns Palace had ten rows of ten columns in a hall nearly 70 metres square, and its doorways are carved with the king on a throne held aloft by figures of his subject peoples.

Persepolis's founder lies in a cliff tomb at which nearby site?

Naqsh-e Rostam has four royal tombs cut high into one cliff, yet only one carries an inscription naming its owner; the other three are matched to kings by informed guesswork.

Inscriptions copied at Persepolis first unlocked which ancient script?

Cuneiform began to give way in 1802, when a young German teacher used the word for 'king', repeated in texts copied at the ruins, to work out the royal names around it.

What was staged at Persepolis in 1971?

The 2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire lodged its royal guests in a tent city beside the ruins, with a banquet catered by Maxim's of Paris, which shut its own doors for almost two weeks.

Which living things are slowly eating into the stone carvings at Persepolis?

Lichens grow into the stone itself and give off acids that dissolve it, pitting reliefs that fire and many centuries of weather had spared.

A dam finished in 2007 raised fears for Persepolis and, even more, for the tomb of which Persian king?

Cyrus the Great lies at Pasargadae, close to the new lake; engineers said both sites sat well above the waterline, while archaeologists feared the damp air from it would harm the ruins.

How is most of the animated film Persepolis presented, in keeping with the graphic novel it adapts?

In black and white, like the books: only the present-day scenes at a Paris airport are in colour, so the remembered story plays out as one long, stark flashback.

Who wrote the autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis?

Marjane Satrapi's memoir of growing up under censorship later ran into it abroad too: in 2014 it was among the ten books Americans most often tried to have removed from libraries and schools.

In which language was the graphic novel Persepolis written and first published?

French was the language of the author's schooling and of Paris, her adopted home, where a comics publisher brought the story out in four volumes from 2000 to 2003.

In which European city does the heroine of the graphic novel Persepolis spend four of her teenage years?

Vienna is where her parents sent her at 14 to keep an outspoken girl out of danger; she ended up sleeping rough there for months before going home to Tehran.

The 2007 film Persepolis was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar but lost to which Pixar film?

Ratatouille won, a comedy about a rat in a Paris kitchen beating a memoir of revolution; Persepolis had the consolation of a shared Jury Prize at the Cannes festival.

Which actress voices the heroine's mother in the original version of the film Persepolis?

Catherine Deneuve plays opposite her real daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, who voices the heroine, and both recorded their parts again for the English-language release.

Persepolis lies on the plain of Marvdasht in which province?

Fars is the old Persian homeland: the Greek form of its name gave the world 'Persia', and the Arabic form, with an F, gave the language its name, Farsi.

Persepolis went up alongside a sister palace, its likely model, in which older capital?

Susa's palace has travelled further than its sister: the best of its decoration was shipped abroad, and its glazed-brick frieze of royal archers now hangs in the Louvre.

Persepolis lies on a plain ringed by the southern end of which mountain range?

The Zagros had to be crossed to reach it: the Macedonian army fought its way through one of the few passes in the range in midwinter before marching on the city.

The spear-carrying guards carved in rows at Persepolis are often identified with which elite corps of the king's army?

The Immortals got their name, Herodotus says, because the corps was kept at exactly 10,000 men: any soldier who fell or sickened was replaced at once.

Although its kings spoke Persian, the clay tablets of Persepolis were mostly written in which older language?

Elamite was what the palace clerks wrote, whatever was spoken at court: among tens of thousands of tablets, just one in Old Persian has ever turned up.

In the graphic novel Persepolis, whom does the young heroine turn her back on after her uncle is executed?

God had been her comfort amid the upheaval, but when her beloved uncle is put to death as a supposed spy she sends him away, and her childhood innocence goes with him.

The American team that dug Persepolis in the 1930s took home a colossal stone bull's head now shown in which city?

Chicago's university ran the dig, and the head, from the portico of the Throne Hall, was its share when the finds were divided with the host government.

Plutarch describes the conqueror of Persepolis stopping to speak to a toppled statue of which king?

Xerxes, he asked the fallen statue, should I leave you lying there or set you up again? After a long silence, Plutarch says, he walked on and left it where it lay.