The Tomb of Darius I

Who ordered it built

Each attribution carries what supports it. Ancient buildings are routinely credited to people on the authority of writers centuries later, and that is not the same claim as an inscription on the building.

What it was for

A royal tomb: a cross-shaped façade cut into the cliff about fifteen metres above the ground, with a doorway at the centre of the cross leading to three chambers, each holding three rock-cut troughs for burials.

Nine burial places in one tomb indicates a family sepulchre rather than a single grave, though who else was interred there is not recorded.

How it was built

The cross form quotes a building: the lower arm is a blind columned porch with four engaged columns and bull capitals, so that the façade presents the front of a palace cut into a cliff.

Above it, a two-tier platform carried by thirty labelled figures in the dress of the empire's peoples, with the king standing on it before a fire altar under a winged figure and a disc.

The whole is carved, not built, and the technical achievement is a matter of scaffolding and of cutting to a plan on a vertical rock face fifteen metres up.

Measured

Every figure states what it rests on. A modern survey, an ancient text, a conversion from an ancient unit and a modern estimate are four different kinds of statement and are not interchangeable.

What it meant

The throne-bearers are the empire's constitutional theory in an image. Thirty peoples, each named, each in their own dress, hold the king up; the arrangement is not of subjects beneath a conqueror but of a structure supported by its parts. Read beside Greek accounts of Persian despotism, it is a different account of the same state, offered by the state itself.

DNb is the closest thing to a Persian statement of what a king should be: that he holds himself in control, that he does not act on anger, that he judges by what he knows rather than by what is said, that he rewards and punishes by merit, and that he is trained to ride, to shoot and to spear. It is a document about self-command written by an autocrat, and it belongs beside the Greek philosophical material on rulership rather than in a footnote to it.

The king stands before a fire altar under a winged disc and the inscription names Ahuramazda as the giver of his kingship. That is Achaemenid royal ideology stated plainly; it is not, by itself, evidence for the doctrines of the Zoroastrian texts written centuries later.

The rock-cut chamber burial is again hard to square with the exposure of the dead that later Zoroastrian practice requires.

After antiquity

Emptied in antiquity. The cliff was reused by the Sasanians for their own reliefs, cut below the tombs, and one Elamite relief older than all of it was largely cut away in the process.

Recorded by European travellers from the seventeenth century and studied systematically by Herzfeld and by Erich Schmidt in the 1930s.

Condition today

Because the tomb is cut and not built, and because it was never buried, its evidence has always been the surface itself; the excavation at Naqsh-e Rustam concentrated on the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht and the ground below.

The identification of the three unnamed tombs on the same cliff as Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I and Darius II rests on their position and style relative to this one, which makes Darius's inscribed tomb the anchor for the whole group.

Written about in antiquity

Still argued