Three empires, one country
“Persian” comes from Persis, today’s province of Fars in south-western Iran, homeland of the dynasty that built the first Persian empire. That empire, the Achaemenid, began under Cyrus the Great, who took Babylon in 539 BCE. It ended when Alexander the Great conquered it and burned Persepolis in 330 BCE. At its height it stretched from Egypt and western Anatolia to Central Asia.
After Alexander and his successors, two more Iranian dynasties ruled the region: first the Parthians, then the Sasanians. Each had its own art. This guide spends most time on the Achaemenids, because their palaces, reliefs and gold are the works most people mean by “ancient Persian art”.
Borrowed motifs, one royal look
Look closely at Achaemenid art and you keep recognising other people’s ideas. The art historian Michael Roaf described it as an eclectic mixture of elements from Assyrian, Babylonian, Elamite, Median, Greek, Egyptian and Scythian traditions, often taken over almost unchanged. Winged human-headed bulls guarding doorways recall Assyrian palace reliefs; doorways and lotus patterns echo Egypt; column bases follow Ionian Greek models.
The workforce was just as mixed. Texts of the period list Babylonian bricklayers, goldsmiths from Media and Egypt, stonemasons from Ionia and Sardis and woodworkers from Sardis and Egypt. The Greek historian Herodotus mocked the Persians for adopting foreign customs so readily. Modern scholars read it differently: by embracing the traditions of conquered peoples, the kings showed that their empire included them all.
So was the result a new style? Roaf asked exactly that question: whether Achaemenid art was an “international style” or a collection of borrowed parts. One way to see it is that the parts were borrowed, but the combination was Persian: calm, ordered, repeated, with rows of figures paying homage to a single king.
Glazed brick and gold
Two crafts show the mix especially well. At Susa, in south-western Iran, Darius I decorated his palace around 510 BCE with archers in glazed brick, bearded men in long robes with spears, bows and quivers. The technique came from Mesopotamia, where Babylon had faced its gates with glazed brick a few decades earlier. The Frieze of Archers is now reconstructed in the Louvre in Paris.
The second craft is gold. The Oxus Treasure, a hoard of about 180 pieces of gold and silver metalwork and some 200 coins, was found near the Oxus river in Central Asia around 1877-1880. Most of it is in the British Museum in London, and some of its pieces show the influence of Scythian art, the art of the steppe nomads.
The Cyrus Cylinder: a charter or propaganda?
The most famous Persian object in London is made of clay. The Cyrus Cylinder, inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform after Cyrus took Babylon, praises the new king and blames the last Babylonian ruler. Since 1971 it has often been presented as the first charter of human rights. Many historians call that reading anachronistic: for them the text belongs to a long Mesopotamian tradition of royal inscriptions that justified a king’s rule.
After Alexander: Parthians and Sasanians
The Parthians ruled Iran and Mesopotamia from 247 BCE to 224 CE, and their art is hard to pin down because it mixes Hellenistic and Near Eastern traditions. In stone reliefs the figures usually face the viewer straight on, with fine lines picking out the patterns of their clothes; a worshipper raises an open right hand. In architecture the Parthians are credited with the iwan, a vaulted hall closed on three sides and open on the fourth, a form that has shaped Middle Eastern building ever since.
The best surviving iwans are at Hatra, in northern Iraq, a fortified caravan city that flourished in the second century CE under strong Parthian influence. It was destroyed around 240 CE by the next dynasty, the Sasanians, who ruled Iran from 224 CE.
The Sasanians carved their victories into the rock. At Naqsh-e Rostam, near Persepolis, a relief about 13 by 6 metres shows Shapur I on horseback with the Roman emperor Valerian, whom he captured at Edessa in 260 CE, the only Roman emperor ever taken prisoner. Its place, on the same cliff as Achaemenid royal tombs, suggests the Sasanians wanted to link themselves with the earlier empire. Each king wore his own form of crown, which is how scholars identify them on reliefs and coins.
Beyond reliefs, the Sasanians are best known for court art, and above all for silver plates with the royal hunt: the king on horseback or on foot, killing lions or other beasts. The court probably controlled their production and gave them as gifts to allied rulers, so each plate carried a message about the king’s power and prowess far beyond Iran.
Where to see it
The great site is Persepolis, in Fars province, Iran. In Europe, the British Museum in London holds the Oxus Treasure and the Cyrus Cylinder, and the Louvre in Paris has the Frieze of Archers from Susa. Sasanian silver is shown in several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Sources
- Roaf, M., “Was Achaemenid art an ‘international style’?”, Material Entanglements.
- Archaeology Magazine, “Rise of the Persian Princes” (July-August 2023).
- Ministère de la Culture, archives Jacques de Morgan, “Frieze of archers”.
- British Museum, collection database (Oxus Treasure, Cyrus Cylinder).
- Harper, P. O. and Meyers, P., Silver Vessels of the Sasanian Period, Vol. 1: Royal Imagery (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1981); LACMA curatorial notes.
- History News Network, “Cyrus: Dictator or author of the first bill of rights?”.
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