Persian (Achaemenid)

Achaemenid palaces stand on raised stone terraces and center on hypostyle halls, square rooms whose flat timber roofs rest on rows of tall, slender stone columns. Capitals are carved as the front halves of two animals back to back, usually bulls, with the roof beams resting between their necks. Stairways lead up to the halls, their side walls carved with guards and with delegations from across the empire bringing gifts. Gateways are guarded by lamassu, human-headed winged bulls from Assyrian art.

At Persepolis in southern Iran, the Apadana, Darius I's audience hall, had 72 columns, and the Hall of a Hundred Columns measured about 70 m on each side. At Pasargadae, the earlier capital, the Tomb of Cyrus is a small gabled stone chamber on six stepped tiers. The royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam are cut into a cliff in the shape of a cross, with carved palace facades. Egyptian halls have thick, closely spaced columns under stone roofs; Persian columns are thinner and much farther apart, under timber beams.

Cyrus the Great founded Pasargadae near the site of his victory over the Median king Astyages in 550 BCE, and his tomb there dates from about 540-530 BCE. Darius I began Persepolis as a ceremonial capital about 515 BCE and also built a palace at Susa. Achaemenid builders drew on Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Elamite, Lydian, Greek and Median practice. Darius brought in Egyptian workers, and the cavetto cornice, a concave molding along the top of a wall, appears across Persepolis as a result.

Xerxes I (ruled 486-465 BCE) completed the Apadana, and Artaxerxes I finished the Hall of a Hundred Columns. In 330 BCE the army of Alexander the Great burned Persepolis; ancient writers disagree on whether the fire was planned. By the early 20th century only 13 of the Apadana's columns were standing. Historians trace the stone pillars of Mauryan India and the hypostyle halls of early mosques in Iran and Iraq to Achaemenid models. Pasargadae's palace gardens are the earliest known example of the chahar bagh, the Persian garden divided into four parts. Persepolis became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.