Dynastic History | Persepolis, the Tachara — Four Accounts of One Fire, None of Them Present

Persepolis burned in 330 BCE, months after Alexander's army took the terrace. Ernst Herzfeld and then Erich Schmidt, excavating through the 1930s, recorded ash and charred cedar across the complex. That there was a fire is the least argued part of the story.

What kind of act it was is argued. Arrian describes a decision taken deliberately, against an adviser's objection. Diodorus, Curtius and Plutarch describe instead a drunken banquet at which an Athenian woman, Thaïs, proposed the burning and the king carried a torch himself. All four wrote three to five centuries afterwards; the banquet version is traced by scholars to Cleitarchus, and N. G. L. Hammond argued in 1992 that it cannot be reconciled with the systematic looting the excavation found. None of the four was present. The house whose palaces these were left no narrative of it at all — the Achaemenid record here is inscriptions and ration tablets, not a history.

The Tachara, Darius I's own residence and the smallest palace on the terrace, came through better than the rest: doorframes still standing, attendants still in procession along the wall below. Later arrivals treated it as a writing surface. Middle Persian inscriptions from the reign of Shapur II, and an Arabic one in Kufic script, were cut into the jambs of its central doorway by people who had come to look at ruins that were already ancient.

The dynasty did not end in this fire. Darius III was killed the same year by Bessus, the satrap of Bactria, and his confederates. But no court sat on the terrace again, and the ticket office now stands at the foot of the stairs.

📸 Cover: The Tachara at Persepolis, Hansueli Krapf, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons