Susa

In Sumerian the city was written with the logogram MÙŠ.EREN, followed by the place determinative KI, and read Šušin. It appears in the cuneiform record from the Early Dynastic period onward, for Susa lay within the orbit of the Mesopotamian city-states from the beginning and adopted their writing system to record its own language; the city is named in the inscriptions of the kings of Ur, who ruled it during the Third Dynasty, and in the title of its native governor Puzur-Inshushinak, “governor of Susa, military governor of the land of Elam.” The same logogram names the patron god Inshushinak, the divine “lord of Susa.”

The Sumerian writing shows how early and how deeply Susa was entangled with Mesopotamia, a city of Elam that nonetheless kept its accounts in Sumerian and was governed at times from Ur. That a logogram, a single fixed sign-group, served for the name reflects how familiar the place was to Mesopotamian scribes: it needed no spelling out. The Sumerian form is the oldest written witness on the page, the point at which the Elamite name of the city first entered the literate record of the ancient world, through the cuneiform of its powerful western neighbors.

The Elamite name of the city, Šušun, written in cuneiform syllabically as šu-šu-un, is the form from which the whole family descends. It is the name Susa called itself across the long history of Elam, of which the city was the political and religious center, and it shifts across the periods of the language between Šušun, Šušen, and the later Šušan without ever ceasing to be recognizable. The name is of unknown meaning, like much of the Elamite onomasticon, and it is bound up with the city’s patron deity Inshushinak, whose name is itself In-Šušinak, “lord of Susa,” so that the god and the city named each other.

This is the headwater entry, the rare case of an endonym that its neighbors took over rather than translated or replaced. Elamite was a language isolate, written in a borrowed Mesopotamian cuneiform and otherwise leaving little mark on the languages around it, yet this one word it gave to everyone: to the Sumerians and Akkadians who fought over the city, to the Persians who made it a capital, to the Hebrews and Greeks who knew it as the seat of the Great King. Almost nothing else of Elamite survives in living speech, but the name of its first city is spoken still, in the Iranian town of Shush, more than four thousand years after it was first written down.

The Akkadian name Šušan (also Šušim) could be written with the same Mesopotamian logogram the Sumerians used or spelled out syllabically as šu-ša-an, and it runs through Akkadian texts from the Sargonic empire to the Neo-Babylonian period. Susa was a fixed point in the Mesopotamian view of the east, the capital of the Elamite kingdom that was alternately Mesopotamia’s trading partner and its enemy, and the name carries the weight of that long rivalry. Its most famous appearance is in the annals of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who sacked the city in 646 BCE, leveled its temples, carried off the statue of the goddess Nanaya that he claimed the Elamites had held for over a millennium, and boasted of sowing the site with salt.

Akkadian is the language in which the conflict over Susa was mostly recorded, since the Assyrian and Babylonian kings who fought the Elamites wrote their accounts in it, and so the Akkadian form sits at the documentary center of the city’s ancient history. The name held steady through it all: the city could be sacked and its gods deported, but the Akkadian scribes went on calling it by the same Elamite name its own people used. The persistence is the point of the entry, a name that survived even the destruction of the thing it named, to be rebuilt and called Šušan again.

The Greek name Soûsa, a neuter plural, is the Persian capital as the Greek world imagined it. Herodotus makes it the terminus of the Royal Road that ran ninety days’ march from Sardis, the place where the Great King sat and from which the empire was governed; Aeschylus sets the opening of the Persians at Susa, where the chorus of elders and the queen mother await news of Xerxes’s expedition, so that the city becomes, on the Athenian stage, the very emblem of Persian wealth and hybris. To the Greeks, Susa was less a city than the heart of the adversary, the seat of the power that had come to burn the Acropolis.

The Greek form carries a small philological clue. Old Persian called the city Çūšā, with the initial affricate ç, but the Greeks wrote Soûsa with a plain sibilant, which means they did not take the name from the Persian court language but from the older native form Šuš- as it was spoken across the empire, in Elamite and Aramaic. The Greeks met Susa through the machinery of the Achaemenid state rather than through its royal inscriptions, and their spelling preserves the difference. Soûsa then passed into Latin and the European tradition as the standard classical name, the form under which the capital of the Great King is still known in the West.

The Old Persian name Çūšā is written in Darius’s alphabetic cuneiform as ça-u-ša-a, opening with the special sign for ç, the sound Old Persian developed from an older consonant cluster and used in a handful of words. It belongs to the Achaemenid royal inscriptions, and above all to the great foundation charter of the palace at Susa (DSf), in which Darius records building his residence there and names the peoples and materials gathered from across the empire to raise it: cedar from Lebanon, gold from Sardis and Bactria, ivory from Nubia and India, craftsmen from Ionia and Media. Susa was one of the empire’s capitals, and the charter is the city speaking of itself in the language of its Persian kings.

The entry sits at the heart of the trilingual Achaemenid pattern: the same building, the same city, named in parallel in Old Persian Çūšā, in Elamite, and in Babylonian Akkadian, the three chancellery languages of the empire, often on the same monument. The Old Persian rendering is distinctive for its initial ç where every other language on the page keeps a plain sibilant, an Iranian reshaping of the inherited name. It is the only form here that the city’s own Persian rulers coined, and fittingly it survives mainly in the inscriptions they carved into the palace they built at Susa itself.

The Imperial Aramaic form Šwšn, vocalized Šūšan, names Susa in the chancellery language of the Achaemenid empire. It appears in the Aramaic section of the Book of Ezra, in the list of peoples whom the Persian authorities had resettled in Samaria, where “the Susians” (Šūšankāyē) stand among the deportees alongside Babylonians and Elamites (Ezra 4:9). The spelling here follows the modern scholarly convention of Hebrew square script; the original was written in the Aramaic alphabet, the everyday hand of Persian administration from Egypt to the Indus.

The Aramaic entry catches Susa in its imperial role. This was the city from which, in Aramaic, the Persian bureaucracy governed the largest empire the world had yet seen, and the name appears in that bureaucracy’s own documents, not as a foreign place but as one of the centers of power. Where the Old Persian Çūšā is the language of royal display carved in stone, the Aramaic Šwšn is the language of the working state, the ink-and-papyrus tongue in which the empire actually ran, and it is the bridge by which the name passed from the Persian world into the later Syriac and Arabic of the region.

The Hebrew name Šūšan is the Shushan of the Bible, and it belongs entirely to the literature of the Persian period and after. It is the great stage of the Book of Esther, “Shushan the citadel,” where the court of Ahasuerus holds its feasts and Mordecai sits in the king’s gate; it is where Nehemiah served as cupbearer before going up to Jerusalem (Nehemiah 1:1); and it is the scene of Daniel’s vision by the river Ulai (Daniel 8:2). For the Jews of the eastern diaspora, Susa was the seat of the empire that ruled them, and these books make it the setting where Jewish life and Persian power meet.

The Hebrew form is the one through which most Western readers first meet the city, under the name Shushan, long before they meet it as Susa. It also attracted a folk etymology that the city, by coincidence of sound, is the place of the šôšan, the lily, so that Susa was imagined as a city of lilies, though the name is in truth the borrowed Elamite one shared by every entry on this page. The biblical Shushan thus carries the city into a religious tradition that knew nothing of Elam or Inshushinak, remembering it instead as the glittering, dangerous capital of the king who held the fate of a scattered people in his hand.

The Latin Susa, a neuter plural like its Greek source, is taken over directly from Greek Soûsa with the usual naturalization of a Greek place name. Pliny the Elder describes it in his survey of the east as the old capital of the Persians, founded, he reports, by Darius, and names the surrounding people the Susiani and their region Susiana. By the time Latin writers used the name, Susa lay deep in Parthian and then Sasanian territory, far beyond the Roman frontier, and it figures in Latin chiefly as a famous capital of the vanished Persian empire of Cyrus and Darius rather than as a living city Romans dealt with.

Susa is the form that carried the name into the scholarly languages of Europe along the familiar Greek-via-Latin road, the same route that gave Europe its names for Egypt, Persia, and Assyria. English, French, Italian, and the rest all write Susa after this Latin rendering of the Greek, so that the city is known in the modern West under a name two removes from the Elamite original, Latinized from a Greek plural that itself reshaped the native Šuš-. The thing it named had been a great capital for three thousand years before any Roman wrote it down, and the Latin form remembers it precisely as antiquity, the storied seat of the Great King.

The Syriac Šūšan is the form the Peshitta uses for the city, following the Hebrew of its source text. It stands in the Syriac Daniel, where the seer is “in Susa the citadel, in the province of Elam” (Daniel 8:2), and throughout the Syriac Esther, whose whole drama unfolds at Šūšan. The Syriac church received the biblical Shushan through the Peshitta’s translation from Hebrew, keeping the older two-syllable form Šūšan rather than the contracted Šuš of everyday Sasanian speech.

What sets the Syriac entry apart from most biblical place names is that Susa was not only scripture to its speakers but a neighbor. The city lay in Beth Huzaye, the Khuzistan heartland of the Church of the East, an inhabited town with a bishop, so that Syriac Christians read of Šūšan in their Bibles and could also have walked to it. The name therefore lived a double life in Syriac, at once the remote Persian capital of the Book of Esther and an ordinary diocese down the road, the scriptural and the local fused in a single word, anchored by the tomb shown there as the prophet Daniel’s.

The Babylonian Aramaic name of the city, Šušan, the Shushan of the book of Esther, the Persian royal capital where that story is set. In the Talmud it is Shushan ha-birah, “Shushan the citadel,” and it carried a peculiar afterlife in Jewish memory: the rabbis report that a relief of the Susa palace was carved on the eastern gate of the Jerusalem Temple.

Šušan is the Persian capital seen from the Jewish East, and the Temple-gate image is its strange distinction. According to the tradition, the returning exiles set the likeness of Shushan on the Temple’s gate so that the awe of the Persian court would be before them, or that they might remember whence they had come; either way, the seat of Esther’s king was built into the holiest place in Jerusalem. The Babylonian rabbis, themselves living in the old Persian heartland, kept the name of its ancient capital as a fixture of sacred geography.

By the Sasanian period the long name had worn down, and Middle Persian knew the city simply as Šuš, written here in Pahlavi script. It is listed in the Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr, the Middle Persian catalogue of the cities of the empire, among the towns of the southwest beside Ahvāz, Šustar, and Gondēšāpur. The Sasanians built and rebuilt across Susiana, founding new royal cities nearby, but the old site kept its ancient name in this clipped one-syllable form, the natural outcome of three thousand years of erosion of Šušan down to its first sound and a final sibilant.

The Middle Persian form is the hinge between the ancient name and the medieval one. Šuš is essentially the name as it is still pronounced, and it passed without further change into Arabic as al-Sūs after the Islamic conquest, and from there to the modern Iranian town of Shush. The Sasanian centuries also fixed the tradition that the prophet Daniel was buried at Šuš, tying the worn-down Persian name back to the biblical Shushan of his vision, so that the city’s oldest and its scriptural identities met again in its last ancient form.

The Arabic al-Sūs continues the Sasanian Šuš with the definite article, and it is the name under which the city enters the geographical literature of the Islamic world. The Arab armies took Susiana within a decade of the Prophet’s death, and Susa, by now the modest town of al-Sūs, appears in the geographers and historians of the caliphate; Yāqūt’s thirteenth-century dictionary of places describes it in the district of Khūzistān, noting above all the shrine of the prophet Daniel, Qabr Dāniyāl, which made the small town a place of pilgrimage. The medieval city declined after the Mongol period, but the name held.

Al-Sūs is the last link in a chain more than four thousand years long, the same word the Elamites first wrote as Šušun before there was an Akkad or a Babylon, carried intact through Sumerian and Akkadian, Persian and Hebrew, Greek and Latin and Syriac, and arriving in Arabic essentially unchanged. The Daniel tradition at al-Sūs closes the circuit with the biblical Shushan, the city of the prophet’s vision now the site of his tomb. The modern Iranian town of Shush stands on the ruins under a name its first inhabitants would still recognize, an endonym that outlasted every empire that ever conquered the city it names.