Darius I founded Persepolis around 515 BC on the Marvdasht plain, on a terrace partly cut from the Rahmat mountain and covering 125,000 square meters. It was a ceremonial capital for receptions and Nowruz rather than daily administration, which ran from Susa, Babylon, and Ecbatana. Elamite payroll tablets show the builders were paid laborers, Egyptians, Babylonians, Ionians, Lydians, Thracians, and Bactrians, given silver, grain, wine, and sheep. Visitors climbed a gently sloped double staircase to the Gate of All Nations and its lamassu, the hundred column throne hall begun by Xerxes I, and the Apadana, whose foundation boxes held gold and silver plates listing Darius’s borders and a coin hoard with no Persian darics.

In 330 BC Alexander the Great forced the Persian Gates against Ariobarzanes, took a treasury Diodorus put at 120,000 talents, and hauled it off on 20,000 mules and 5,000 camels. That spring the palaces burned, starting at the Hadish of Xerxes. Arrian calls it revenge for the burning of Athens, while Plutarch, Diodorus, and Curtius describe a drunken feast where the Athenian courtesan Thais urged him on. The collapsing roofs fired tens of thousands of unbaked clay tablets and sealed them until Chicago’s Oriental Institute excavated in the 1930s. Garcia de Silva Figueroa identified the site in 1618, and today it faces lichens and a dam controversy.

• How a missing coin type dates the Apadana foundation to around 515 BC
• Darius’s Tachara, the private palace that survived the fire
• Medieval locals calling the ruins Takht-e Jamshid, the throne of a demon-commanding king
• The Shah’s 1971 celebration, 10,000 Nowruz visitors in 2024, and Alireza Ghorbani’s first concert at the site
• The Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra’s 100th anniversary concert on September 6, 2025, and fears over the Sivand Dam