The ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid kings: a walled terrace against the Mountain of Mercy, climbed by a double stair, carrying the Apadana, the Hundred-Column Hall and the palaces (every one a square hall of columns) above a town and a walled paradise on the plain.
Darius began Persepolis around 518 BC, and his inscription on the terrace wall says he built a fortress where none had stood. The terrace, about 450 by 300 m and some 12 m above the plain, is part cut rock and part built of great blocks, walled with towers along its edges and up the mountain behind. From the plain the Great Stairway rises in two flights of low steps that part and turn back to meet at the top, before the Gate of All Nations.
Beyond the gate every building follows one rule: a square hall filled with columns on a grid, a portico between corner towers, walls of mud brick, and stone kept for columns and frames. The Apadana has six by six columns, the Hundred-Column Hall ten by ten, the palaces of Darius and Xerxes smaller grids on raised platforms. Darius’s charter from Susa lists the materials and craftsmen gathered from every province, and the reliefs on the Apadana’s stairs show the same peoples bringing gifts.
Below the terrace lay the town of Parsa and the royal gardens, walled paradises of water channels and trees in straight rows, as Xenophon describes Cyrus the Younger’s at Sardis. The town and the garden are conjectural in layout; the roofs and walls of the halls, which burned when Alexander took the city in 330 BC, are restored. Click a building for its rule and its source.