A hub, but not of the kind the title suggests
Persepolis is sometimes described as a centre of scholarship, with libraries and schools like those of later Hellenistic cities. The evidence does not support that picture. No library or school building has been identified there, and no collection of literary, scientific or religious texts has been found on the terrace. What archaeologists did find, in large numbers, is administrative paperwork. Persepolis was a centre of organisation and record-keeping, and that is a form of culture too, although it is a different one from the one the title implies.
The tablets are among the richest sources for how the Achaemenid state operated on the ground, and they tell a more interesting story than a library would.
The discovery
In the early 1930s, excavators working for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago cleared rooms in the fortification wall at the northeast corner of the terrace and found a huge cache of clay tablets. Further tablets were found a few years later in the treasury. The first group became known as the Persepolis Fortification Archive, named for where it lay, not for its content. It consists of tens of thousands of tablets and fragments, most inscribed in Elamite and some sealed, together with several hundred texts in Aramaic and other documents.
The documents date to roughly the thirteenth to twenty-eighth years of Darius I, which is approximately 509 to 493 BCE. Many were unbaked clay and survived because the rooms collapsed and filled with debris. Much of the material was sent to Chicago for study, and portions have since been returned to Iran.
Why Elamite
Elamite was the language of the older kingdom of Elam, centred on Susa and Anshan, and it remained the working administrative language of Fars under the Persians. Written in a cuneiform script, it was used by scribes trained in a local tradition that predates the Persian kings. The Persians relied on those existing scribes rather than introducing an entirely new bureaucratic language, a typical example of their practice of building on what was already there. Aramaic, written on parchment and leather that has mostly decayed, was also used, so the clay tablets may represent only part of the original record.
What the tablets record
The great majority of the texts are accounts and memoranda, and they follow a few recurring themes.
- Rations. Grain, flour, wine, beer, fruit and livestock were issued to groups of workers and to officials. Amounts were measured in standard units, though the exact modern equivalents are debated, a subject tied to the wider study of ancient weights measures.
- Workers. Labourers, craftspeople and their families appear on ration lists, often grouped by occupation and place of origin. Women and children are included, and some texts reportedly give extra rations to women who had recently given birth, with differences recorded according to the child’s sex.
- Travel. Sealed letters of authorisation allowed travellers to draw rations at stations along routes. These show how people and officials moved around the empire and how far the state tracked such movement.
- Storage and livestock. Many texts record deliveries to storehouses, the management of flocks and the transfer of produce between estates.
Taken together they show a state economy organised largely in kind, with food as a main form of payment. Silver was used too, and the later treasury tablets record workers paid in silver, but coin minting had not yet made coins a common means of payment in Fars at this date, and payment by weight was normal.
Officials, seals and scribes
The tablets name many officials in a chain of command, from local supervisors to a senior administrator in charge of the region, and they show a bureaucracy with clear procedures. Thousands of the tablets carry impressions made by seals, which acted like signatures and authorisations. The seal images are an important source of Persian-period art in their own right, showing hunting, ritual and animal scenes.
The scribes themselves were skilled professionals, but the tablets give little sign of a school. They show how scribes worked rather than how they were trained, and the long tradition of Babylonian scribal scholarship, with its literary and scientific copying, is not matched in this archive. A closer parallel is the commercial record-keeping of early trading communities such as the Kanesh merchant colonies.
What this changes
The archive undermines two common images of Persepolis. One is the idea that it was a cultural academy. The other is the notion that its monuments appeared without a workforce behind them. The tablets show paid and rationed people, with identifiable families and supervisors, and they fit the picture of a state that managed labour on a large scale.
Care is still needed. The archive covers only one period, roughly a quarter of a century under Darius, and one region. It does not tell us what happened under later kings, and it comes from the administration of a province near the royal centre, not from the whole empire. It also cannot reveal the experience of workers beyond what officials chose to record. For those who study it, the tablets remain a reminder that ancient government left traces mostly through routine documents, and that questions about ancient schooling cannot be answered from an archive of this kind. The daily business of feeding a workforce can be as informative as any royal inscription. The tablets show a literate administration, which is not the same as a centre of learning.