1.
Achaemenid architecture
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Achaemenid architecture is academically classified under Parsian Architecture in terms of its style and design. With the advent of the second Persian Empire, the Sassanid dynasty, revived Achaemenid tradition by construction of dedicated to fire. Persepolis, would take 100 years to complete and would finally be ransacked, despite having ruled over much of the ancient world, Cyrus the Great would design a tomb that depicts extreme simplicity and modesty when compared to those of other ancient kings and rulers. After his death, Cyrus the Greats remains were interred in his city of Pasargadae. The roof of the edifice and indeed the structure, is an elongated limestone pediment, the inside of the edifice is occupied by a small chamber a few feet in width and height, and around ten feet deep. It was inside this chamber where the bed and coffin of Cyrus the Great would have been situated, the edifice has a pediment roof possessing the same length and width dimensions as the edifice itself. Around the tomb were a series of columns, the structure which they supported is no longer present. There was originally a golden coffin inside the mausoleum, resting on a table with golden supports, the magi were a group of on-site Zoroastrian observers, located in their separate but attached structure possibly a caravanserai, paid and cared for by the Achaemenid state. The magi were placed in charge of maintenance and also prevention of theft, when Alexander reached the tomb, he was horrified by the manner in which the tomb was treated, and questioned the Magi and put them to court. Regardless, Alexander the Great ordered Aristobulus of Cassandreia to improve the tombs condition, the tomb was originally ornamented with an inscription that, according to Strabo, stated, O man. I am Cyrus the Great, who gave the Persians an empire and was the king of Asia, grudge me not therefore this monument. The edifice has survived the test of time for some 2,500 years, the Persians renamed the tomb, and presented it to the invading army as the tomb of King Solomons mother. It is likely that the inscription was lost at this time, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last official monarch of Persia, during his 2,500 year celebration of the Persian Empire paid significant homage to the Achaemenid kings and specially Cyrus the Great. Just as Alexander the Great before him, the Shah of Iran wanted to appeal to Cyruss legacy to legitimize his own rule by extension, Shah of Iran however was generally interested in protection of imperial historical artifacts. There are allegations of the tomb being in danger of damage from the construction of the Sivand Dam on river Polvar and water related damage, united Nations recognizes the tomb of Cyrus the Great and Pasargadae as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Persepolis is the Latinized version of the Old Persian name, Parsa literally meaning the city of Persians, another spectacular achievement of the Achaemenids, Persepolis became one of the four capitals of the empire. Initiated by Darius the Great around 518 B. C. E, persepoliss prestige and grand riches were well known in the ancient world, and it was best described by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus as the richest city under the sun. Today the archaeological remnants of this opulent city are about 70 kilometers northeast of the modern Iranian city of Shiraz, in the Pars province
2.
Old Persian
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The Old Persian language is one of the two directly attested Old Iranian languages. Old Persian appears primarily in the inscriptions, clay tablets, recent research into the vast Persepolis Fortification Archive at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago have unearthed Old Persian tablets. This new text shows that the Old Persian language was a language in use for practical recording. As a written language, Old Persian is attested in royal Achaemenid inscriptions and it is an Iranian language and as such a member of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. The oldest known written in Old Persian is from the Behistun Inscriptions. Old Persian is one of the oldest Indo-European languages which is attested in original texts, the oldest date of use of Old Persian as a spoken language is not precisely known. Their language, Old Persian, became the language of the Achaemenid kings. In these records of the 9th century BCE, Parsuwash are first mentioned in the area of Lake Urmia in the records of Shalmaneser III. The exact identity of the Parsuwash is not known for certain and he relates that the Armenian people spoke a language that to his ear sounded like the language of the Persians. Old Persian belongs to the Iranian language family which is a branch of the Indo-Iranian language family, the common ancestors of Indo-Iranians came from Central Asia sometime in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. The former are the languages in that group which have left written original texts while Median is known mostly from loanwords in Old Persian. Old Persian subsequently evolved into Middle Persian, which is in turn the ancestor of New Persian. Unlike the other languages and dialects, ancient and modern, of the Iranian group such as Avestan, Parthian, Soghdian, Kurdish, Pashto, Old, Middle and New Persian represent one and the same language at three states of its history. It had its origin in Fars and is differentiated by dialectical features, Middle Persian, also sometimes called Pahlavi, is a direct continuation of old Persian, and was used as the written official language of the country. Comparison of the evolution at each stage of the shows great simplification in grammar. However, New Persian is a descendent of Middle and Old Persian. Old Persian presumably has a Median language substrate, the Median element is readily identifiable because it did not share in the developments that were peculiar to Old Persian. Median forms are only in personal or geographical names and some are typically from religious vocabulary
3.
Hypostyle
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In architecture, a hypostyle hall has a roof which is supported by columns. The word hypostyle comes from the Ancient Greek ὑπόστυλος hypóstȳlos meaning under columns, the roof may be constructed of with bridging lintels of stone, wood or other rigid material such as cast iron, steel or reinforced concrete. The architectural form has many applications, occurring in the cella of Ancient Greek temples and in many Asian buildings, with a combination of columns and arches, the hypostyle hall became one of the two main types of mosque construction. In many mosques, especially the early congregational mosques, the hall has the hypostyle form. One of the finest examples of the mosques is the Great Mosque of Kairouan in the city of Kairouan. The hypostyle is widely used in modern architecture, peristyle Portico Apadana Ancient Egyptian architecture This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, Chisholm, Hugh, ed. Hypostyle
4.
Persepolis
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Persepolis or Parsa, also known as Takht-e-Jamshid, was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire. Persepolis is situated 60 km northeast of the city of Shiraz in Fars Province, the earliest remains of Persepolis date back to 515 BC. It exemplifies the Achaemenid style of architecture, UNESCO declared the ruins of Persepolis a World Heritage Site in 1979. The English word Persepolis is derived from Ancient Greek Persépolis, a compound of Pérsēs and pólis, to the ancient Persians, the city was known as Pārsa. Persepolis is near the small river Pulvar, which flows into the Kur River, the site includes a 125,000 square meter terrace, partly artificially constructed and partly cut out of a mountain, with its east side leaning on Rahmet Mountain. The other three sides are formed by retaining walls, which vary in height with the slope of the ground, rising from 5–13 metres on the west side was a double stair. From there, it slopes to the top. To create the level terrace, depressions were filled with soil and heavy rocks, archaeological evidence shows that the earliest remains of Persepolis date back to 515 BC. As the residence of the rulers of the empire, however, the countrys true capitals were Susa, Babylon and Ecbatana. This accounts for the fact that the Greeks were not acquainted with the city until Alexander the Great took, Darius I ordered the construction of the Apadana and the Council Hall, as well as the main imperial Treasury and its surroundings. These were completed during the reign of his son, Xerxes I, further construction of the buildings on the terrace continued until the downfall of the Achaemenid Empire. Around 519 BC, construction of a stairway was begun. The stairway was initially planned to be the entrance to the terrace 20 metres above the ground. The dual stairway, known as the Persepolitan Stairway, was built symmetrically on the side of the Great Wall. The 111 steps measured 6.9 metres wide, with treads of 31 centimetres and rises of 10 centimetres, originally, the steps were believed to have been constructed to allow for nobles and royalty to ascend by horseback. New theories, however, suggest that the shallow risers allowed visiting dignitaries to maintain an appearance while ascending. The top of the led to a small yard in the north-eastern side of the terrace. Grey limestone was the building material used at Persepolis
5.
Darius I
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Darius I was the third king of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Darius ascended the throne by overthrowing Gaumata, the alleged magus usurper of Bardiya with the assistance of six other Persian noble families, the new king met with rebellions throughout his kingdom and quelled them each time. A major event in Dariuss life was his expedition to punish Athens and Eretria for their aid in the Ionian Revolt, Darius organized the empire by dividing it into provinces and placing satraps to govern it. He organized a new monetary system, along with making Aramaic the official language of the empire. He also put the empire in better standing by building roads and introducing standard weights, through these changes the empire was centralized and unified. Darius also worked on projects throughout the empire, focusing on Susa, Pasargadae, Persepolis, Babylon. He had the cliff-face Behistun Inscription carved to record his conquests, Darius is mentioned in the Biblical books of Haggai, Zechariah, and Ezra–Nehemiah. The Achaemenid Empire during Darius reign controlled the largest fraction of the population of any empire in history. Based on historical estimates, Darius I ruled over approximately 50 million people. Dārīus and Dārēus are the Latin forms of the Greek Dareîos, itself from Old Persian Dārayavauš, the longer form is also seen to have been reflected in the Elamite Da-ri-a-ma-u-iš, Babylonian Da-ri-ia-muš, Aramaic drywhwš, and possibly the longer Greek form Dareiaîos. The name is a nominative form meaning he who holds firm the good, which can be seen by the first part dāraya, meaning holder, and the adverb vau, meaning goodness. At some time between his coronation and his death, Darius left a tri-lingual monumental relief on Mount Behistun, the inscription begins with a brief autobiography including his ancestry and lineage. To aid the presentation of his ancestry, Darius wrote down the sequence of events occurred after the death of Cyrus the Great. Darius mentions several times that he is the king by the grace of Ahura Mazda. Herodotus, a Greek historian and author of The Histories, provided an account of many Persian kings and he wrote extensively on Darius, spanning half of Book 3 along with Books 4,5 and 6. It begins with the removal of the alleged usurper Gaumata and continues to the end of Dariuss reign, in the book of Daniel the kings name changes from king of the Chaldeans = Babylonians to king of the Persians which also occurred between the kingships of Darius I and Xerxes. Additionally the 120 satraps mentioned in Daniel 6,1 can be translated as 20 tribute owing satraps, the Book of Ezra describes the decree to continue reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, specifying financial support and supplies for the temple services. This decree is dated approximately 519 BCE, between Cyrus and Darius, an exchange of letters with King Ahasuerus and Artaxerxes is described, the grandson of Darius I, during whose reign Ezra and Nehemiah came to Jerusalem
6.
Xerxes I
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Xerxes I, called Xerxes the Great, was the fourth king of kings of the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia. He ruled from 486 BC until his assassination in 465 BC at the hands of Artabanus, Xerxes I is most likely the Persian king identified as Ahasuerus in the biblical Book of Esther. He is also notable in Western history for his invasion of Greece in 480 BC. Like his predecessor Darius I, he ruled the empire at its territorial apex and his forces temporarily overran mainland Greece north of the Isthmus of Corinth until the losses at Salamis and Plataea a year later reversed these gains and ended the second invasion decisively. Xerxes was born to Darius I and Atossa, Darius and Atossa were both Achaemenids as they were both descendants of Achaemenes. While Darius was preparing for war against Greece, a revolt spurred in Egypt in 486 BC due to heavy taxes. Under Persian law, the king was required to choose a successor before setting out on dangerous expeditions, when Darius decided to leave, Darius prepared his tomb at Naqsh-e Rustam and appointed Xerxes, his eldest son by Atossa, as his successor. However, Darius could not lead the campaign due to his failing health, Xerxes was crowned and succeeded his father in October–December 486 BC when he was about 36 years old. Almost immediately, Xerxes crushed revolts in Egypt and Babylon that had broken out the year before, and appointed his brother Achaemenes as satrap over Egypt. In 484 BC, he outraged the Babylonians by violently confiscating and melting down the statue of Bel. This comes from the Daiva Inscriptions of Xerxes, lines 6-13, although Herodotus report in the Histories has created debate concerning Xerxess religious beliefs, modern scholars consider him a Zoroastrian. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Xerxess first attempt to bridge the Hellespont ended in failure when a storm destroyed the flax, in retaliation, Xerxes ordered the Hellespont whipped three hundred times, and had fetters thrown into the water. Xerxess second attempt to bridge the Hellespont was successful, many smaller Greek states, moreover, took the side of the Persians, especially Thessaly, Thebes and Argos. Xerxes was victorious during the initial battles, Xerxes set out in the spring of 480 BC from Sardis with a fleet and army which Herodotus estimated was roughly one million strong along with 10,000 elite warriors named the Persian Immortals. More recent estimates place the Persian force at around 60,000 combatants, at the Battle of Thermopylae, a small force of Greek warriors led by King Leonidas of Sparta resisted the much larger Persian forces, but were ultimately defeated. According to Herodotus, the Persians broke the Spartan phalanx after a Greek man called Ephialtes betrayed his country by telling the Persians of another pass around the mountains. At Artemisium, large storms had destroyed ships from the Greek side and so the battle stopped prematurely as the Greeks received news of the defeat at Thermopylae, most of the Athenians had abandoned the city and fled to the island of Salamis before Xerxes arrived. A small group attempted to defend the Athenian Acropolis, but they were defeated, Xerxes burnt the city, leaving an archaeologically attested destruction layer, known as the Perserschutt
7.
Elamite
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Elamite is an extinct language spoken by the ancient Elamites. Elamite was a used in present-day south-western Iran from 2800 to 550 BC. The last written records in Elamite appear about the time of the conquest of the Achaemenid Empire by Alexander the Great, Elamite has no demonstrable relatives and is usually considered a language isolate. The lack of established relatives is one reason that interpretation of the language is difficult, Elamite cuneiform, adapted from Akkadian cuneiform, was used from ca.2500 to 331 BC. Elamite cuneiform was largely a syllabary of some 130 glyphs at any one time and retained only a few logograms from Akkadian, but over time, the complete corpus of Elamite cuneiform consists of c.20 thousand tablets and fragments. The majority belong to the Achaemenid era, and contain primarily economic records, two earlier scripts of the area remain undeciphered but plausibly have encoded Elamite, Proto-Elamite is the oldest known writing system from Iran. It was used during a period of time, clay tablets with Proto-Elamite writing have been found at different sites across Iran. It is thought to have developed from early cuneiform and consists of more than 1,000 signs and it is thought to be largely logographic. Linear Elamite is attested in a few monumental inscriptions and it is often claimed that Linear Elamite is a syllabic writing system derived from Proto-Elamite, but it cannot be proven. Linear Elamite was used for a brief period of time during the last quarter of the third millennium BC. Elamite was a language, and Elamite grammar was characterized by a well-developed. Animate nouns had separate markers for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person, documents from the Old Elamite and early Neo-Elamite stages are rather scarce. Neo-Elamite can be regarded as a transition between Middle and Achaemenid Elamite, with respect to language structure, because of the limitations of the languages scripts, phonology is not well understood. As for the vowels, Elamite had at least /a/, /i/, and /u/ and may also have had an /e/, roots are generally of the forms CV, VC, VCV and, more rarely, CVCCV. Elamite is agglutinative, and predominantly suffixing, the inanimate 3rd singular -me forms abstracts. In noun phrases and pronoun phrases, the suffixes referring to the head are appended to the modifier, sometimes the suffix is preserved on the head as well. g. The suffix -na, which originated from the inanimate agreement suffix -n followed by the nominalizing particle -a. The personal pronouns distinguish nominative and accusative case forms and they are as follows, In general, no special possessive pronouns are needed in view of the construction with the noun class suffixes
8.
Akkadian
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Akkadian is an extinct East Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the writing system, which was originally used to write the unrelated Ancient Sumerian. The language was named after the city of Akkad, a centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire. The mutual influence between Sumerian and Akkadian had led scholars to describe the languages as a sprachbund, Akkadian proper names were first attested in Sumerian texts from around the mid 3rd-millennium BC. From the second half of the third millennium BC, texts written in Akkadian begin to appear. By the second millennium BC, two variant forms of the language were in use in Assyria and Babylonia, known as Assyrian and Babylonian respectively, for centuries, Akkadian was the native language in Mesopotamian nations such as Assyria and Babylonia. However, it began to decline during the Neo-Assyrian Empire around the 8th century BC, by the Hellenistic period, the language was largely confined to scholars and priests working in temples in Assyria and Babylonia. The last known Akkadian cuneiform document dates from the 1st century AD, Akkadian belongs with the other Semitic languages in the Near Eastern branch of the Afroasiatic languages, a family native to East Africa, which then spread to West, Northwest and Northeast Africa. Within the Near Eastern Semitic languages, Akkadian forms an East Semitic subgroup and this novel word order is due to the influence of the Sumerian substratum, which has an SOV order. Additionally Akkadian is the only Semitic language to use the prepositions ina and ana, other Semitic languages like Arabic and Aramaic have the prepositions bi/bə and li/lə. The origin of the Akkadian spatial prepositions is unknown, in contrast to most other Semitic languages, Akkadian has only one non-sibilant fricative, ḫ. Akkadian lost both the glottal and pharyngeal fricatives, which are characteristic of the other Semitic languages, until the Old Babylonian period, the Akkadian sibilants were exclusively affricated. Old Akkadian is preserved on clay tablets dating back to c.2500 BC and it was written using cuneiform, a script adopted from the Sumerians using wedge-shaped symbols pressed in wet clay. As employed by Akkadian scribes, the cuneiform script could represent either Sumerian logograms, Sumerian syllables, Akkadian syllables. For this reason, the sign AN can on the one hand be a logogram for the word ilum, additionally, this sign was used as a determinative for divine names. Another peculiarity of Akkadian cuneiform is that many signs do not have a phonetic value. Certain signs, such as AḪ, do not distinguish between the different vowel qualities, nor is there any coordination in the other direction, the syllable -ša-, for example, is rendered by the sign ŠA, but also by the sign NĪĜ. Both of these are used for the same syllable in the same text
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