Dynastic History | Bishapur — The City That Dated Itself by Two Fires

Shapur I laid out Bishapur on the Shāpur river in western Fars, on a rectangular street grid whose northern edge bends where the river forced it. At the main crossing stand two stone columns. One carries a bilingual inscription in Middle Persian and Parthian, set up by a scribe named Aps'y, which dates the work not to a calendar year but to years counted from the fires lit for Ardashir and for Shapur, and to Shapur's twenty-fourth regnal year. The usual conversion is about 266, and Encyclopædia Iranica says plainly that the figure shifts with whichever accession date is accepted for Shapur. A city that dated itself this carefully still cannot be pinned to a year.

Shapur's own inscription at the Kaʿba-ye Zardošt, at Naqsh-e Rostam, records where the labour came from. After taking the Roman emperor Valerian at Edessa in 260, he deported Valerian, his officers and his troops into Persis, Parthia, Khuzestan and elsewhere in Ērānšahr. The much later Chronicle of Seert names Bishapur among the places they were settled. The familiar claim that Roman prisoners built the city runs ahead of that record; Iranica cautions against it and points to the mosaic floors of one building as the clearest Western workmanship on the site.

A French mission from the Louvre — Georges Salles and Roman Ghirshman — excavated here between 1935 and 1941, and ʿA.-A. Sarfarāz resumed the work from the 1960s, tracing the closely spaced towers of the north wall in 1969. What a visitor walks through now is the street plan, the wall line, and the sunken stone court of the temple usually identified with Anahita.

📸 Cover: the sunken stone court of the temple identified with Anahita, not the inscribed columns, Behnam9395, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons