The palace architecture of the first world empire: vast square halls of slender stone columns under cedar roofs, double-bull capitals, and ceremonial terraces climbed by stairs carved with the peoples of the empire.
Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid empire in the 550s BC and within thirty years it stretched from the Aegean to the Indus. Its architecture was deliberately composite: the foundation inscriptions of Darius I at Susa list the materials and craftsmen brought from every province: cedar from Lebanon, gold from Sardis and Bactria, Ionian and Sardian stonecutters, Egyptian and Median goldsmiths, Babylonian brickmakers. From these the Persians made something new.
At Pasargadae Cyrus laid out palaces in gardens, pavilions with columned porticoes, and his own tomb: a small gabled chamber on six receding steps, severe and Greek-looking. Under Darius (522–486 BC) and Xerxes the royal centre moved to Persepolis, a terrace built out from the foot of a mountain and covered with halls. The greatest is the Apadana, the audience hall, begun around 515 BC: a square room about 60 m across with thirty-six columns, open porticoes of twelve more columns on three sides, and corner towers. The Hall of a Hundred Columns beside it is even larger in area.
The Persian column is the key to this architecture. It is extraordinarily tall and thin for stone (about twelve diameters) and widely spaced, because it carried not stone architraves but beams of cedar. It stands on a bell-shaped base, has a fluted shaft (an Ionian touch), and ends in a composite capital of palm leaves, vertical volutes and, uppermost, two kneeling bulls (or lions, griffins, or human-headed bulls) back to back, with a saddle between their necks for the main beam. Walls were of mud brick, plastered; doorways and windows were framed in stone with Egyptian cavetto cornices.
The decoration of Persepolis is an image of empire. Along the stairs of the Apadana, delegations from twenty-three subject nations climb in low relief, each in its own dress and bearing its own gifts, towards the king. Royal tombs were cut into the cliff at Naqsh-e Rustam with façades in the form of a palace portico. Alexander burned Persepolis in 330 BC, but the columned audience hall, the talar and the royal terrace reappear in Iranian palaces for two thousand years.