Persepolis

The Akkadian name for the city, Pārsa, the third language of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions, in which the trilingual texts of the terrace were also composed. Babylonian scribes rendered the city, like the country, as Pārsa, completing the imperial triad of Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian in which the Persians proclaimed their works. The form is the same name once more, in the venerable cuneiform of Mesopotamia.

The Akkadian entry places Persepolis squarely in the trilingual pattern that runs through this atlas, the three chancellery languages of the empire naming one place in parallel, as they do for Egypt, Babylon, and Susa. Here, though, all three give the same answer, Pārsa, Paršan, Pārsa, none of them distinguishing the city from the country. It took a fourth language, Greek, standing outside the empire, to give the capital a name of its own.

The Old Persian name for the city, Pārsa, identical to the name of the country and the people. The inscriptions Darius set on the terrace name the place Pārsa: in DPd the king prays for the protection of “this Pārsa,” meaning at once the land and the citadel he was building upon it. There was, in the royal language, no separate word for the ceremonial capital; it was simply Pārsa, the Persia of the Persians, the homeland made monumental.

That the Achaemenids gave their greatest building-work no name of its own is itself the point. Pārsa the city is Pārsa the country, and the same form appears on this page as on the page for Persia, the city named for the land rather than the land for the city. Where Babylon gave its name to Babylonia, here the movement runs the other way: the heartland’s name was laid, unaltered, upon its grandest monument, as if to say that this terrace of audience-halls simply was Persia, gathered into stone.

The Elamite name for the city, Paršan, in the administrative language of the empire’s bureaucracy and, crucially, in the great archive found at the site itself. The thousands of Elamite tablets of the Persepolis Fortification archive, the day-to-day records of rations and travel disbursed from the royal storehouses, repeatedly name the place Paršan, the working name of the city in the hands of the clerks who ran it. It is the same name as the Old Persian Pārsa, in the Elamite chancellery’s rendering.

Paršan is the city’s name as written by the people who actually administered it, recovered from the very building it names. While the royal inscriptions on the terrace proclaim Pārsa in the language of kings, these tablets, found in the fortification wall, show the same name doing humble work, tallying flour and wine and the wages of laborers. The grandest and the most ordinary records of the Achaemenid capital agree: the city was simply Persia, whether carved for eternity or scratched on clay for the month’s accounts.

The Greek name for the city, Persépolis, “city of the Persians,” compounded from Persai, the Persians, and pólis, city. It is the Greeks’ own coinage, formed because their word for the country, Persís, did not name the capital, and it is the name under which the classical sources tell the city’s most famous episode, its burning by Alexander after a night of feasting, narrated in detail by Diodorus. The Persians’ own Pārsa left no mark on Greek; the Greeks named the place themselves.

Persépolis carries a grim double meaning audible to any Greek ear. Beside “city of the Persians,” the name echoes the verb pérthō, “to sack, to destroy,” whose forms include persai, so that Persépolis can be heard as “city-sacker” or, turned about, “the city that is sacked.” For the capital that Alexander gave to the flames, the pun reads like prophecy. It is a rare and dark example of an exonym that seems to foretell its subject’s fate, the Greek name for the Persian capital holding, in its very sound, the destruction the Greeks would bring upon it.

The Latin name for the city, Persepolis, taken over unchanged from the Greek. Roman writers knew it chiefly through the histories of Alexander: Curtius Rufus describes the wealth of Persepolis and the drunken night on which it was set ablaze, and Pliny notes the city in his survey of Persia. Latin had no more contact with the ruined capital than Greek did, and simply inherited the Greek name and its associations.

Persepolis is the form by which the city is known to the modern world, and it descends not from the Persians but from their enemies. The capital that called itself Pārsa was forgotten under that name; the Greek Persépolis, carried through Latin into the languages of European scholarship, is what archaeologists restored to the ruins when they identified them. The city built to embody Persia is remembered, in the end, by a Greek word, the name given it by the civilization that burned it and wrote its history.