The archaeology of Alexander the Great: 4. Persepolis
Head of a bull that once guarded the entrance to the Hundred-Column Hall in Persepolis. Now at the Oriental Institute, Chicago.The sack of Persepolis by Alexander III of Macedon is one of the great episodes of history. How true is it?
Persepolis was the capital of the Persian kingdom. Alexander described it to the Macedonians as the most hateful of the cities of Asia, and gave it over to his soldiers to plunder, all but the palaces. 2 It was the richest city under the sun and the private houses had been furnished with every sort of wealth over the years. The Macedonians raced into it slaughtering all the men whom they met and plundering the residences; many of the houses belonged to the common people and were abundantly supplied with furniture and wearing apparel of every kind. Here much silver was carried off and no little gold, and many rich dresses gay with sea purple or with gold embroidery became the prize of the victors. The enormous palaces, famed throughout the whole civilized world, fell victim to insult and utter destruction.
- Diodorus Siculus, Book XVII Library of History
Persepolis was the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire during the Achaemenid dynasty (ca. 550-330 BCE). The country's true capitals were Susa, Babylon and Ecbatana.
Alexander burned "the palaces" or "the palace," universally believed now to be the ruins at Takhti Jamshid. From F. Stolze's archaeological investigations it appears that at least one of these, the castle built by Xerxes, bears evident traces of having been destroyed by fire.
Are these ashes proof of the story passed down to us of Alexander?
Archaeology of Persepolis
Archaeological evidence shows that the earliest remains of Persepolis date from around 515 BCE. André Godard, the French archaeologist who excavated Persepolis in the early 1930s, believed that Cyrus the Great chose the site of Persepolis, but that Darius the Great built the terrace and the great palaces.
Darius ordered the construction of the Apadana Palace and the Council Hall (the Tripylon or three-gated hall), the main imperial Treasury and its surroundings. These were completed during the reign of his son, King Xerxes the Great. Further construction of the buildings on the terrace continued until the downfall of the Achaemenid dynasty by the army of Alexander.
Ruins of a number of colossal buildings exist on the terrace. All are constructed of dark-grey marble. Fifteen of their pillars stand intact. Three more pillars have been re-erected since 1970. Several of the buildings were never finished. Stolze has shown that some of the mason's rubbish remains. These ruins, for which the name Chehel minar ("the forty columns or minarets") can be traced back to the 13th century, are now known as Takht-e Jamshid - "the throne of Jamshid". Since the time of Pietro della Valle, it has been accepted beyond dispute that they represent the Persepolis captured and partly destroyed by Alexander the Great.
Though the locality described by Diodorus corresponds in some important particulars with Takht-e Jamshid, for example, in being supported by the mountain on the east, the evidence is not unambiguous:
Wikipedia: The citadel is a noteworthy one, and is surrounded by a triple wall. The first part of this is built over an elaborate foundation. It is sixteen cubits in height and is topped by battlements. The second wall is in all other respects like the first but of twice the height. The third circuit is rectangular in plan, and is sixty cubits in height, built of a stone hard and naturally durable. Each of the sides contains a gate with bronze doors, beside each of which stand bronze poles twenty cubits high; these were intended to catch the eye of the beholder, but the gates were for security.
At the eastern side of the terrace at a distance of four plethra is the so-called royal hill in which were the graves of the kings. This was a smooth rock hollowed out into many chambers in which were the sepulchres of the dead kings. These have no other access but receive the sarcophagi of the dead which are lifted by certain mechanical hoists. Scattered about the royal terrace were residences of the kings and members of the royal family as well as quarters for the great nobles, all luxuriously furnished, and buildings suitably made for guarding the royal treasure.
This is not true of the graves behind Takhte Jamshid, to which, as F. Stolze expressly observes, one can easily ride up. On the other hand, it is strictly true of the graves at Nakshi Rustam. Stolze accordingly started the theory that the royal castle of Persepolis stood close by Nakshi Rustam, and has sunk in course of time to shapeless heaps of earth, under which the remains may be concealed. The vast ruins, however, of Takhti Jamshid, and the terrace constructed with so much labour, can hardly be anything else than the ruins of palaces; as for temples, the Persians had no such thing, at least in the time of Darius and Xerxes. Moreover, Persian tradition at a very remote period knew of only three architectural wonders in that region, which it attributed to the fabulous queen Humgi (Khumái)the grave of Cyrus at Pasargadae, the building at HäjjIãbãd, and those on the great terrace.
It is safest therefore to identify these last with the royal palaces destroyed by Alexander. Cleitarchus, who can scarcely have visited the place himself, with his usual recklessness of statement, confounded the tombs behind the palaces with those of Nakshi Rustam; indeed he appears to imagine that all the royal sepulchres were at the same place.
We see that the archaeology does not fulfil the expectations of the historians without ambiguity.
The Sources of Alexander at Persepolis
Diodorus Siculus writes (Bibliotheca historica) that he was born at Agyrium (now called Agira) in Sicily and we know nothing more of him other than a reference by Jerome in his Chronicon (49 BCE): "Diodorus of Sicily, a writer of Greek history, became illustrious". A Greek inscription from Agyrium (I.G. XIV, 588) on a tombstone "Diodorus, the son of Apollonius" may be his. Diodorus is therefore writing almost three centuries after Alexander.
Diodorus assembled his work from many sources, including Hecataeus of Abdera, Ctesias of Cnidus, Ephorus, Theopompus, Hieronymus of Cardia, Duris of Samos, Diyllus, Philistus, Timaeus, Polybius, and Posidonius.
From the events mentioned as witnessed by Diodorus, we know that he wrote sometime between 60 and 30 BCE.
His account of Alexander (Book 17 of his Library of world history) follows, almost word for word, that of the Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, who wrote (during 41-54 CE) Historiae Alexandri Magni, a biography of Alexander the Great in Latin in ten books.
It is usual to claim that both Diodorus and Curtius have a common source, though as they are a century apart, I regard it as reasonable to assume that Curtius draws on Diodorus.
Diodorus asserts that he devoted thirty years to the composition of his history and that he undertook a number of dangerous journeys through Europe and Asia in prosecution of his historical researches. Modern critics have called this claim into question, noting several surprising mistakes that an eye-witness would not be expected to have made.
What was his source for Alexander? This is always assumed to be one Cleitarchus and this is where, as is usual for histories of antiquity, we come to hearsay.
No work of Cleitarchus exists.
There are many references to him in antiquity and this is assumed to prove the case. For example:
- Quintilian (Instit. x. I. 74) credits him with more ability than trustworthiness, but Marcus Fabius Quintilianus is a a Roman rhetorician of the first century of this era.
- Cicero (Brutus, II) accuses him of giving a fictitious account of the death of Themistocles, but this Roman philosopher and politician lived between 106 and 43 BCE.
When we ask if the archaeology matches the history, we have to ask first: what history?
Two extracts from a scholarly review:
There is an unwritten law that the volume of scholarship on a subject is in inverse proportion to the evidence available. That is particularly true of the early Hellenistic historian, Cleitarchus, son of Deinon. In Jacoby's definitive compendium thirty six fragments are accepted as authentic, comprising eight pages of text. On the whole these "fragments" are singularly uninformative. Few give any extended digest of Cleitarchus' narrative, and there are only five lines of verbatim quotation. All that has survived of his work, then, is a handful of weak attestations, supplemented by a few vague and bilious criticisms of his style and veracity made by later authors, usually with a taste for Atticism and antipathetic to Cleitarchus. Yet Cleitarchus bulks very large in the historiography of Alexander's reign, not for what is directly attested but for his supposed contribution to the extant source tradition.
The search for Cleitarchus is beset by doubt and ambiguity. Some may doubt that there is anything to find.
- A.B. Bosworth
In Search of Cleitarchus: Review-discussion of Luisa Prandi: Fortuna è realtà dell' opera di Clitarco
(Historia Einzelschriften 104) Pp. 203. Steiner, Stuttgart 1996.
What we have is "uninformative...weak...vague...supposed" - the history of Alexander appears to me to be a matter of faith and largely unsupported by archaeology. As faith, it assumes the character of divinity, which is appropriate in the context for how Alexander was portrayed and venerated in antiquity.