Destroyed, but not forgotten
The word “forgotten” in the title does not quite fit. Persepolis was destroyed in 330 BCE, but its ruins stayed visible in Fars for the next two thousand years, and people living nearby knew them. In Persian tradition they became known as Takht-e Jamshid, the “throne of Jamshid”, after a legendary king. Medieval Muslim writers and later European travellers described the site, and the nearby city of Istakhr carried on as a regional centre after the Achaemenids. What was lost was the memory of who built Persepolis and why, and that knowledge returned only when scholars deciphered the inscriptions in the nineteenth century.
Alexander and the Persian heartland
Alexander of Macedon defeated Darius III at Gaugamela in 331 BCE, in the encounter often described as Alexander versus Darius. He then occupied the main Persian cities in turn. Babylon and the city of Susa surrendered, and the treasuries of Susa gave him very large quantities of silver and gold. He then advanced into Fars and reached Persepolis early in 330 BCE.
Ancient authors report that Alexander forced the pass defending the road into Fars and then took the city and its treasury, said by Diodorus and Plutarch to hold an enormous store of precious metal that required a vast train of pack animals to carry off. These figures should be treated as ancient estimates rather than hard data. Alexander and his army stayed at Persepolis for several months before moving on in pursuit of Darius, who was killed by his own followers later that year.
The fire
The burning of Persepolis is described by several writers who lived centuries after the event: Diodorus Siculus (first century BCE), Quintus Curtius Rufus and Plutarch (first century CE), and Arrian (second century CE). They draw on earlier lost accounts, including those of Alexander’s contemporaries.
In the most vivid version, found in Diodorus, Curtius and Plutarch, the fire followed a drinking party. An Athenian woman named Thais is said to have urged Alexander to burn the royal palace in revenge for Xerxes’ burning of the Athenian Acropolis in 480 BCE, and the king, with his companions, took torches and set it alight. Arrian gives a different account. He says Alexander burned the palaces as a deliberate act of retribution for the Persian invasion of Greece, and that his older general Parmenion advised him against it, arguing that it was wasteful to destroy what was now his own property and that it would harm his standing in Asia. Alexander is said to have insisted on revenge.
Deliberate or accidental?
Historians remain divided, and the question is open. The main views are these.
- A spontaneous act. The drinking-party story presents the fire as an impulsive act. Some modern scholars think a version of this may be true, while noting that the dramatic Thais story is exactly what a later writer might embellish.
- A deliberate political act. Burning the symbolic centre of the Persian kings could have served as a declaration that the Greek war of revenge, which Alexander’s father Philip had planned, was complete. This fits with the Greco-Persian conflict being remembered by Greeks as the origin of the campaign.
- A mix. Some historians argue that a planned punishment of the palaces was carried out in a theatrical, drunken setting, so that both strands of the sources contain something true.
Archaeology confirms burning on the terrace, with layers of ash and charred wood, and fire damage is clear in the Apadana and in the area of the palaces. The extent is less certain, and not every building shows the same degree of destruction. That matters because it suggests the fire was selective or uneven, at least in places, though this is hard to judge from limited evidence. The timber roofs, which used cedar, would have fuelled a fierce blaze in the large halls, but stone columns and carved reliefs survived the heat.
After the destruction
Persepolis was not rebuilt on its former scale. Its region remained important, and later rulers reused or occupied parts of the area. The terrace and its carved stairways were gradually buried in silt and debris, which is why the eastern Apadana stairway survived in excellent condition.
From travellers to excavators
European visitors began recording the ruins in the early seventeenth century, and the Italian traveller Pietro della Valle visited in 1621. In the eighteenth century Carsten Niebuhr copied inscriptions with great care, and his copies helped later scholars. Georg Friedrich Grotefend, working in the early nineteenth century from such copies, made the first breakthrough in reading Old Persian, an early step in cuneiform decipherment that, with the later work on the Behistun inscription, opened the way to reading Babylonian and the other cuneiform languages.
Systematic excavation began in the 1930s with Ernst Herzfeld and then Erich Schmidt for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, followed by Iranian and Italian teams who carried out restoration. The discovery of the administrative tablets in those years transformed understanding of the site. Persepolis was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979.
Scholars still disagree over details of the fire, and much remains to be learned about the whole complex. The ruins are now studied less as a lost wonder than as evidence for a well-organised empire that came to a violent end.