A city older than the Persian Empire
Susa is best known as one of the royal cities of the Achaemenid Persian kings, but it was already ancient when Persian rulers made it a capital. Settlement on the site, in the Khuzestan plain of south-western Iran, goes back to roughly the late fifth millennium BCE. By the fourth millennium BCE the town was in close contact with Mesopotamia, and its material culture shows strong influence from the Uruk period in the Mesopotamian south. Around 3100 to 2900 BCE, Susa produced tablets in a script now called proto-Elamite, which has not been deciphered.
Because Susa sits between the Mesopotamian river plain and the Iranian highlands, it was a natural meeting point of lowland and highland worlds. Most of what is known comes from a mound that was excavated by French teams from the 1880s onward, so the city is also a story about early archaeology, including some choices that would be handled differently today.
The Elamite capital
For much of the third, second and early first millennia BCE, Susa was a principal city of Elam, a state whose heartland lay in south-western Iran. The Elamites had their own language, written in several scripts, and their own gods. Their relationship with Mesopotamian powers alternated between trade, intermarriage, rivalry and war.
Two Elamite episodes stand out. In the thirteenth century BCE the king Untash-Napirisha founded a religious centre now known as Chogha Zanbil, some distance from Susa, whose stepped ziggurat is among the best preserved in the region. A little later, in roughly the twelfth century BCE, Elamite kings raided Mesopotamia and carried monuments back to Susa as booty. Among them was the stele inscribed with the laws of Hammurabi, which French archaeologists found at Susa in 1901 to 1902 and which is now in the Louvre. The Elamites did not make that law code; they took it, and it survived because it was kept there.
The Assyrian Empire eventually turned on Elam. Texts of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal describe the sack of Susa in the mid-seventh century BCE, around 646 BCE, with temples looted and statues removed. The city was badly damaged, though it did not vanish.
Susa under the Achaemenids
After Cyrus the Great brought the Persian state to dominance in the mid-sixth century BCE, Susa became part of a much larger empire, and under Darius I (who ruled from 522 BCE) it was rebuilt as a royal centre. Darius commissioned a large palace and an audience hall, the apadana, on and beside the old mound.
Darius also left a foundation text, found at Susa in several copies and written in Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian. It describes how the palace was built and where its materials came from. Cedar was brought from Lebanon, gold from Sardis and Bactria, and lapis lazuli and carnelian from Sogdiana, with silver and ebony from Egypt among the other goods named. It also credits workers from different parts of the empire, including Babylonians, Ionians and Egyptians. The text is partly royal propaganda, presenting the empire as one cooperative effort, but it is a rare written account of how a palace was supplied and staffed.
Among the best-known finds are panels of glazed brick showing archers and lions, made from moulded coloured bricks. Many are now in the Louvre. They give a good idea of the colourful palace walls, and the style can be compared with the Apadana staircase reliefs at the Persian ceremonial centre of Persepolis, which was being built in the same general period under Darius.
The Royal Road and the administration
Susa’s importance rested not only on buildings but on communications. Herodotus describes a Royal Road running from Sardis, in western Anatolia, to Susa, with 111 way-stations and a total length that works out, by his own figures, to roughly 2,500 kilometres. Sardis was the old seat of the Lydian kings, a city remembered through the story of Sardis and Croesus, and after the Persian conquest it became the western anchor of a provincial network. Herodotus adds that the stations allowed official messengers to pass dispatches on in relays, a system that made Susa reachable from the Aegean coast far faster than an ordinary traveller could manage.
The road fits within the satrapy system, in which the empire was divided into provinces governed by satraps who reported to the king. Susa was the capital of its own province and also a place where the king could be found, in the way Greek writers describe the court moving between Babylon, Susa, Ecbatana and Persepolis. The details of the seasonal moves vary by source and should not be treated as a fixed schedule. Susa was also home to an Elamite-speaking population and scribal tradition that continued to be used for administration.
The biblical Book of Esther is set in Susa, called Shushan, but it is a story with a literary character, and scholars debate how much it reflects real events. It matters mainly as evidence of how widely the city’s name was known.
After the Persians
Alexander the Great took Susa in 331 BCE, shortly after the battle often summarised as Alexander versus Darius at Gaugamela, and found large amounts of royal treasure. In 324 BCE he is reported to have held a mass wedding of Macedonian officers and Persian noblewomen there. Under the Seleucids the city was refounded with Greek institutions, and under the Parthians and the Sasanian dynasty it remained a regional centre. Later sources report that it was damaged after a revolt against the Sasanian king Shapur II in the fourth century CE, but the details are uncertain.
Through the Islamic period the town continued as Shush, and the tomb traditionally associated with the prophet Daniel still draws visitors. The archaeological landscape of Susa was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2015.
What remains debated
Several matters are not settled. Linear Elamite, used in the late third millennium BCE, has long resisted reading, and recent proposals for deciphering it are still being assessed. The exact layout and dating of some Achaemenid buildings is hard to reconstruct, because earlier excavations were fast and poorly recorded by modern standards. And because Susa’s mound was built up over millennia, its layers mix the remains of several periods. What can be said with confidence is that few places show so clearly how an old regional capital was folded into an empire and then given a new face.