History

Elamite capital (c. 4200 BCE – 6th century BCE). Susa was the principal city of the Elamite civilization, one of the earliest literate cultures of the ancient world, for roughly two thousand years. Elam dominated the Susiana plain — modern Khuzestan — and competed and traded with Mesopotamian powers including Sumer, Akkad, and Babylonia. The city served as a repository of Mesopotamian cultural achievements: the famous stele inscribed with the Code of Hammurabi was found at Susa, where it had been looted from Babylon around 1150 BCE by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte. Elamite power finally collapsed under repeated Assyrian attacks; Ashurbanipal sacked Susa in 646–645 BCE, an event depicted in a famous frieze from Nineveh now in the British Museum.

Achaemenid royal residence (550–330 BCE). When Cyrus the Great unified Persia and Media to found the Achaemenid Empire in the mid-6th century BCE, Susa became the empire’s administrative winter capital. Darius I (r. 522–486 BCE) undertook the most ambitious building program: the Apadana, an audience hall of at least 36 columns each 20 metres high with distinctive double-bull capitals, and the adjacent palace complex. Darius left an extraordinary foundation inscription describing the multinational workforce and raw materials drawn from across the empire — Lebanese cedar, Sardian gold, Nubian ebony, Indian ivory — that built the palace. The Book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible is set at the court of Susa during this period. Alexander the Great seized Susa in 331 BCE and held his mass wedding ceremony there in 324 BCE, marrying his officers to Persian noblewomen in a famous gesture of cultural fusion.

Seleucid, Parthian, and Sassanid periods (330 BCE – 7th century CE). After Alexander, Susa was refounded as a Greek polis named Seleukeia on the Eulaios by the Seleucid successors, and a Greek-speaking population coexisted with the existing Persian and Elamite communities. The city passed to the Parthians in the 2nd century BCE and retained importance as a commercial and administrative centre. Under the Sassanid Empire (224–651 CE) the city, by then known as Shush, remained inhabited. The Arab conquest of the 7th century CE marked the end of ancient Susa as a major urban centre, though a smaller medieval city continued on part of the site.