The Wheel: S2L77: Persepolis, 515 BCE

From 1977 03 29 Iran

How do you summarize 2,500 years of history in one short blog post? Let's focus on three events in the long history of Persepolis.

First is the city's founding in 515 BCE as the capital of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia. Persepolis was the royal home of Cyrus the Great, Darius I, and Xerxes the Great. It was during their rule that the famous Greco-Persian Wars were fought, during which the Persians torched Athens.

That directly led to the second event, two hundred years later, when Alexander the Great's army came through Persepolis. Alexander considered Persepolis "the most hateful of the cities of Asia" and allowed his army to sack the city and burn it to the ground.

Jump forward 23 centuries, to 1971 and the third event. The Shah of Iran holds a giant celebration honoring 2,500 years of the Persian Empire (to which, not coincidentally, he claims his own unpopular rule to be a direct heir). He builds a giant tent city to house the festivities. Dozens of world leaders attend the gala. Eight years later, the Shah falls during the Iranian revolution, the tent city is looted and now stands in ruins next to the ruins of Cyrus the Great's ancient city.

Here I should probably quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandias, but that poem is getting enough attention elsewhere right now (see the episode of the television series Breaking Bad), so I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine why I was reminded of Ozymandias while touring Persepolis in 1977, even though Shelley was writing of ancient Egypt, not Persia.

More photos after the jump.