APADANA AND ROYAL PALACES

The famous archaeological site of Suse, the ancient capital of a country that extends Mesopotamia, is in ruins and, at present, there are still very few visible elements. In fact, the most beautiful Pièces rooms in Suse, including the famous Frise of enamelled bricks, are visible in France in the Louvre. Darius I had made Suse his capital in 520 BC, and the city then knew an international radiation. It was destroyed by Alexander the Great in 323 BC.

The old city of Suse was built on four small mounds. Although the site was occupied since the Fifth Millennium, the main remains still visible date back to the achaemenid era. They are spread over two of the four mounds. Near the "French fortress", the largest mound contains the remains of the former royal city, formerly the district district. To the northwest of the ruined terrace was the Apadana, where Darius I had built, at the end of the th century BC, his residence and two other palaces. He started by redesigning the old site of Suse, in Elam, to make it the administrative capital of the empire. On a partially artificial terrace covering an area of about 20 000 m 2, it built a monumental palace dominating the city, which included, in the north, a huge hypostyle hall, in columns, called Apadana. With its twenty meters High, she prefigured that of Persepolis. The Apadana was destined for hearings according to Iranian tradition. The hypostyles rooms are alien to mesopotamians and mésopotamiennes traditions, with this type of architecture probably coming from northwestern Iran. The Suse palaces were not built stone like those of Persepolis, they constituted a completely new creation. Suse being located in the plain where the stone was to be imported, the decor was made of a long material used in Mesopotamia and Susiane: the casting brick, here covered with glaze. In Pasargadae and Persepolis, the palaces were decorated with stone bas reliefs. Suse's moulded brick friezes were veritable bas-reliefs, one of which represented palm trees, orantes goddesses, royal couples and bulls. The decor of Darius's palace was very much inspired by that of King Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BC) in Babylon. The walls and the processionnelle pathway were lined with glaze clay bricks representing animal parades, deities attributes: the lion of the goddess Ishtar, the bull of the god of the Adad storm, the dragon of the god of the city Marduk. The same party chaired Suse, where we find lions, winged bulls and fabulous animals borrowed from traditional iconography. The griffon, the susienne creation of the end of the fourth millennium, has known, with many variants, wide dissemination. The sphinx, a human-headed lion, a temple keeper symbolizing the pharaoh in Egypt, appeared in Syria in the Second millennium, with wings and often seated, before spreading throughout the Middle East. Here he is crowned with the tiara divine and accompanies the winged disc, a symbolic figure also of Egyptian origin which, in the Persians, serves as a royal emblem or represents the god Ahura Mazda. The large enamelled panels allow to imagine the splendour that these ornaments should give to the monuments. The most famous frise, that of the Archers (i. e. the Persian people), a Tout's decor. Turning to the right or left, but represented in the same position, the archers is dressed in the robes of the king himself, his dignitaries and his guards. These friezes appear with Darius and appear influenced by Greek art (analogue analogous on the treasure of Siphnos, in Delphi, ca. 525 BC), but some bronzes of the Loristan, slightly older, also show a trial of restitution of a symmetrical pleating. In the face, identical for all, only the eye seen in front of it breaks the perfection of the profile. Armaments are the same for everyone: arches adorned with canard duck, the Assyrian fashion, quiver on the left shoulder, is held with two hands, the grenade end of which rests on the foot, according to a tradition of the old Elam. These wonderful turquoise blue friezes friezes are located in the Louvre museum. Marcel Dieulafoy, who discovered in 1885 the elements of one of these friezes bearing a fragmentary inscription of Darius, saw in the Immortal Archers described by Herodotus, elite guard accompanying the king in his campaigns and thus appointed because they were still ten thousand. The Frise des Archers was sent to France in the late th century by archaeologist Jane Dieulafoy. (See his book of travel stories, On Mission from the Immortal, Suse 1884-1885 Excavations Journal.) Among the metal sculptures from Suse, the Suse Lion is certainly the most beautiful piece that has been left to us (Paris, Louvre). The same fields of excavations delivered very beautiful jewelry. The Louvre has remarkable copies. Two tablets found under the palace of Darius list the noble predecessors of the king. In the «Charter» of his palace, Darius identified the peoples who had participated in the construction, symbolic, of the unity of the empire. And he said: " The nations that fought against each other, whose people against each other killed themselves, that, I, made sure, with the help of Ahura Mazda, that their people didn't kill themselves anymore, and I réinstallais everyone in his country. In the presence of my decisions, they were honor, so that the fort does not strike or hold the poor. This is the ideal perfect peacemaker. " Another clay burial tablet, from Suse and etched into cuneiform characters, seems very close to our current concerns: «Come and I shall go, O God, my master… I shall resume your hand before the supreme gods; pending my sentence, I will take your feet. Illuminant the house of darkness, O my god, you will let me pass the swamp of weakness and sorrow. In this place of difficulty, you're veilleras on me. You abreuveras me with water and oil in this field of thirst. " (Excavations R. de Mecquenem, 1914, in the Louvre). Today, Suse only retains the remains of the foundation of the palaces. In the Apadana, some fragments of columns of columns and of the bull capitals still lie ashore.