| home
: index
: picture
archive : Iran : Pasargadae : photos by Marco Prins ; text Jona Lendering © |
||
Pasargadae (1) |
||
| Unless otherwise indicated, pictures on this page © Marco Prins and Jona Lendering. Photos can be downloaded and used for non-commercial purposes, but you have to acknowledge Livius. | ||
 |
Pasargadae (Old Persian Pâthragâda) was built by the Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great in the valley of the river Polvar. According to the Roman geographer Strabo of Amasia, the town was built on the site where king Cyrus had defeated the leader of the Medes, Astyages, in 550 BCE (Strabo, Geography 15.3.8). This may or may not be true. In Antiquity, at least eight dams regulated the river, which shows that Pasargadae was an important city. |
|
 |
It became the capital of the Achaemenid empire, and remained its most important settlement until Darius I the Great and Xerxes built Persepolis. Yet even then, Pasargadae remained an important town, because the king was inaugurated here. The Greek researcher Herodotus of Halicarnassus, writing a generation or two after the foundation of the new capital, knew the name Pasargadae but did not know Persepolis. (Compare modern Holland: the government is in The Hague, but Amsterdam, where the Dutch king is inaugurated, is more famous.) | |
 |
||
| The picture above shows a view of Pasargadae from the Tall-i
Takht, the citadel in the north. |
||
 |
Pasargadae resembled a large park, about 2x3 kilometers large, in which several buildings were to be seen. This is one of the most famous monuments: the tomb of Cyrus. The great king was buried here in 530/529. According to literary sources, more than two centuries later, Alexander the Great ordered the tomb to be restored. Archaeologists have found no traces of repairs, however. | |
 |
The monument stands on a small platform. Similar substructures are known from western Anatolia, but as yet, it is impossible to establish which ones are earlier - the Iranian or Anatolian. Other scholars see parallels with the monuments in Urartu and point at a similar tomb at Çavustepe. Here you can see the tomb on a satellite photo. | |
 |
Stated differently, it is possible that Cyrus got the
idea of this
type of monument when he had defeated king Croesus
of Lydia
in 547 (or
a couple
of years later), but it is also possible that the Anatolians
copied
an Iranian form. The tomb is about eleven meters high. There are two
chambers: one is
the real tomb, the other is an attic. The function of this second room
is unknown.
The tomb was badly damaged in 1970-1971, when it played a role in the celebration of what was called "2500 years of Persian monarchy" (in fact, monarchy in Persia is much older). It was deemed necessary to create a helicopter landing site, for which several archaeological remains were removed. |
|
 |
Worse were the clumsy repairs. Several large stones were put on the wrong place, which left large gaps that were filled with cement and concrete. Soon, the cement started to fall, creating crevices through which water seeped into the building, causing very serious damage to the ancient monument.Restoration works have continued until October 2008. | |
 |
At that time, there were reports that the monument was again threatened, this time by an inundation caused by the construction of a dam in the river Sivand. That the monument would suffer, has been contradicted by the official authorities. I am not an engineer who can judge what has happened, but saw (in 2008) that all bridges in the area, which were renewed because of the dam, were considerably lower than the tomb, which suggests that the highest water levels will not threaten the tomb. | |
 |
The tomb chamber: two meters wide, two meters high, three meters deep. It contained a gold sarcophagus, Cyrus' arms, his jewelry and a cloak. This garment played an important role in the Persian inauguration rituals (see Plutarch of Chaeronea, Life of Artaxerxes, 3.1; the custom itself is Babylonian). | |
 |
The tomb again. Although it is not an enormous building, it dominates the fertile plain, which is on all sides surrounded by mountains. It is as if the tomb was built in a giant natural bowl. | |
|
|
||
|
|
||