Persepolis: Discovery and Afterlife of a World Wonder

279 Pages·2012·43.5 MB·English

by  Ali Mousavi

Ali Mousavi
Persepolis

Ali Mousavi
Persepolis
Discovery and Afterlife
of a World Wonder
De Gruyter
ISBN978-1-61451-028-4
e-ISBN978-1-61451-033-8
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Coverimage:TheexcavationoftheeasternstaircaseoftheApadana,1932.
FromMostafavi’salbumofPersepolisdatedNovember1933.
Photo©theIranBastanMuseum(FIG.8.7)
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is the fruit of years of research, discussion, and learning from scholars, colleagues, and
friends in the vast field of Iranian studies. First and foremost I am grateful to my father, Mah-
moud Mousavi, for making available to me all of his information, reminiscences, and documents
from his years of work at Persepolis. I owe a particular debt to the mentorship of Guitty Azarpay
and David Stronach during my doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I am
grateful to Rémy Boucharlat for sharing his vast knowledge of the Achaemenid period during and
after my student years in Lyon. I express my gratitude to Abbas Alizadeh, Rémy Boucharlat, Ste-
fan Hauser, Michael Roaf, St John Simpson, Matthew Stolper, David Stronach, Alexandre Tour-
ovetz, and Josef Wiesehöfer, who read the first draft of this book and who made critical and con-
structive comments and corrections. I am also thankful to Chahryar Adle, Lindsay Allen,
Muhammad-Taqi Atai, Touraj Daryaee, James Goode, Heiko Krefter, John Larson, Mehdi Mou-
savi, and Hamid Zadeh, who generously shared with me their knowledge, experience, and acu-
men. I am indebted to Chahryar Adle for allowing me to use his aerial view of Persepolis and the
self-portrait of Luigi Pesce. I should thank Heiko Krefter, son of Friedrich Krefter, for giving me a
number of unpublished photographs from his father’s album and for sharing with me valuable
information kept in his father’s diary. My thanks are also due to Elmar Seibel who kindly lent me
a certain number of his photographs and engravings, particularly those taken by Hans-Wichart
von Busse at Persepolis. I am thankful to Kourosh Afhami and Wolfgang Gambke for granting
images of their virtual reconstruction. I should thank Matthew Stolper for granting permission to
publish an image of the Persepolis Fortification tablets, Rudabeh Shahbazi for permitting me to
publish the picture of her father, Ali-Shapur Shahbazi, and Mehdi Fathinezahd for the pictures
of his model of Persepolis. I am grafetul to Michiel Klein Swormink (Editorial Director of Huma-
nities), Mitchell Holthaus (Project Editor), Jens Lindenhain (designer) and staff at Walter de
Gruyter, for their patience and help in producing this book. I would also like to thank Daniel
Potts, who introduced me to the excellent publishing house of Walter de Gruyter. The Iran Heri-
tage Foundation awarded a grant for the purchase of photographs and reproduction rights.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following institutions for providing photographs and
allowing me to reproduce them: the Anjoman-e Āsār va Mafākher-e Melli (Tehran), the Berna-
dotte Library (Stockholm), Éditions Casterman (Bruxelles), Christie’s of London, the Ernst Herz-
feld Papers, the Archives of the Freer and Sackler, the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.
C.), the Iran Bastan Museum (now the National Museum of Iran, Tehran), the Istituto Italiano
per l’Africa et l’Oriente: IsIAO (Rome), the Historisches Museum (Hannover), the Marie-Thérèse
Ullens de Schooten collection, Museum of Fine Arts Library (Harvard, Cambridge), the Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago (Chicago), the Sāzman-e Asnād-e Melli (Tehran), and the
Staatliche Museen (Berlin).

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII
List of figures and plates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XI
Bibliographic abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XIX
Foreword by David Stronach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XXI
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
I Persepolis: A survey of the site, its chronology and function . . . . . . . . . 9
Thename . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Thecity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
TheconstructionsontheTerrace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
TheconstructionsoutsidetheTerrace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Problemsofchronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Thearchitecturalhistory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Functionandotherrelatedproblems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
II Persepolis in Flames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Textualevidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Archaeologicalevidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
TheburningofPersepolis:Facts,interpretations, andspeculations . . . . . . . 63
SubsequentdestructionsofPersepolis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
III From Parsa to Sad-Sotun: The Afterlife of Persepolis Begins . . . . . . . . . 73
Persepolisinthe“darkage” ofFars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
IV Takht-eJamshid:TheTransformationofaHistoricalSiteintoaMythicalSymbol 83
V In search of Persepolis: Western travellers’ explorations in Persia . . . . . . . 95
EarlyjourneystotheruinsofChelmenar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Thetravellersofthe Enlightenment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
VI Persepolisandthepuzzleofthecuneiforminscriptions . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Thequeryabouttheinscriptionsat Chelmenar:ChardinandtheRoyalSociety
ofEngland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Niebuhr’scopiesinEurope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
GrotefendandthedeciphermentofthePersepolitanscripts . . . . . . . . . . 120
VII The Nineteenth century and the emergence of archaeology . . . . . . . . . . 123
Thehuntforknowledgeandantiquities:Britishdiplomatsin questofsculptures 123
KerPorter,theromantictraveller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Othertravellers’ explorationsofPersepolisinearlyQajarIran . . . . . . . . . 131
IllustratingPersepolis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133