In 330 B.C., an apparently very angry Alexander the Great led an army of conquering Greek warriors into the wealthy Persian city of Persepolis.
After ransacking kingly palaces and the imperial treasury building, smashing anything they did not steal, the soldiers burned the city, which then lay untouched under mounds of mud and debris for 2,260 years.
On Saturday, salvaged objects from Persepolis, architecturally one of the grandest and most impressive cities in the ancient world, will go on permanent display at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. Many of the items have never been seen by the public.
Archeologists from the institute began to dig into the buried site in the 1930s, launching still ongoing efforts to piece together the history of ancient Persia. Today, the Oriental Institute’s resident Persia expert, Abbas Alizaden, is the only foreign archeologist allowed to excavate sites in tightly controlled Iran.
The institute’s redesigned Persian gallery, which reflects the power and grandeur of the Persian Empire before Alexander came along, is the second to reopen at the museum since it closed in 1996 to build an addition. Its Egyptian collection reopened to the public last year.
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“Outside of Iran,” said museum director Karen Wilson, “there is no place else in the world that you can see the kinds of Persian material that we have.”
Dominating the exhibit hall are huge, exquisitely sculpted figures of bulls in black limestone, some weighing many tons. Though the bulls served a structural function, holding up ceiling beams in the city’s vast palaces atop 75-foot columns, they also are stunning pieces of fine art, testifying to the ancient Persians’ sense of design and craftsmanship.
Bits and pieces of shattered dishware–including broken dinner plates bearing the inscription of King Xerxes–provide surprising evidence of the fury Alexander felt toward the Persians, long the Greeks’ most dangerous enemies. Mentored by Aristotle, the enlightened Alexander usually frowned at gratuitous violence, but he may have been out for revenge this time: The Persians had burned the Acropolis in Athens in an earlier war.
Among other objects excavated from Persepolis are jewelry, artwork, dumped coinage and thousands of imperial documents inscribed on clay tablets.
The oldest artifacts in the new permanent exhibit are from early agricultural villages, including stone tools and crude, primitive pottery. Wilson said the 1,200 artifacts on display represent about a tenth of the museum’s total Persian collection and span 8,000 years of history.
All of the items were dug up before the 1970s, when Iran still shared artifacts with foreign archeologists who excavated them. Now Iran, like most nations, insists all recovered archeological artifacts are national treasures that cannot leave the country.
One of the most important sites opened by the Oriental Institute is in a mound known as Chogha Mish, a village that appeared 7,000 years ago and was lived in without interruption for 4,000 years.
Artifacts from that site trace how humans developed what Alizaden calls “administrative technology,” which is no less than the evolution of the written language.
“We can trace it all at Chogha Mish,” said Alizaden, 49, who was born in Iran and educated in Chicago. “At this site people began to make small clay tokens with shapes stamped into them, then sealed them into hollow clay balls to record business transactions.
“Through many hundreds of years we can see how gradually people flattened the clay into tablets, rather than making the hollow balls, and the shapes on the tokens inside mutated into cuneiform writing that was inscribed on the tablets.”
The Persepolis site in southwestern Iran lay undisturbed for centuries, studded with fallen columns and toppled sculpture. Until 100 years ago, many in Iran thought the huge carved bulls must have been the work of a race of giants that figure into Iranian mythology.
But as the Chicago archeologists began to uncover the history and treasures beneath the debris, Iran soon made Persepolis a sort of cultural mecca.
Items from the museum’s Persepolis collection prove the power of the conquering Persians over their far-flung empire. They include Anatolian coins–some of the earliest coinage known–as well as Babylonian alabaster bottles and an Egyptian cartouche inscribed with the name Ahmose II, the pharaoh Persian armies conquered in 525 B.C.
There also are a few examples of the gold objects and jewelry for which the Persians were famous in ancient times.
“Herodotus [the Greek historian] wrote that Persians had so much gold on their garments that it clinked as they walked,” said Wilson, adding that the wealth of Persian kings gave rise to the King Midas legend.
When the Islamic fundamentalist revolution overthrew the shah in the late 1970s, all foreign archeological work in Iran was stopped. It didn’t resume until 1996, when Iran allowed Alizaden to dig at a prehistoric site.
Now a naturalized U.S. citizen, he returned there last week to begin a two-month digging session.
“I’m looking for the transition period,” he said, “when humans changed from hunter/gatherers to settled farmers. Human attitudes really had to change to do that.”
On an earlier trip, Alizaden worked in eastern Iran at a site called Choga Bonut. His mentor, Helene Kantor, was sure it held even earlier material than Choga Mish.
She was right. He found artifacts dating to 7250 B.C., including an extremely primitive mill for grinding grain. It consisted of two rocks, one saddle-shaped and the other looking much like a rolling pin.
“We see arthritis in the knee joints of female skeletons from the same time period,” he said, “probably caused by having to spend long hours kneeling over this mill and crushing grain. We also see tooth decay caused by milled grain that wasn’t present in skeletons from times before milling began.”
Bones, he said, are the key to reconstructing the economy and environment of the time.
“We have bear bones from this site, so we know it wasn’t a desert then, though it is now. Bears live in forests,” Alizaden said. “We see the differences of bone morphology in domesticated sheep and goats and wild sheep and goats that were around then. The leg joints change as animals become domesticated, because they don’t move as much.”
Even that site wasn’t old enough for Alizaden, however, as the evidence there showed people had been settled farmers for some time.
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“I want to see that momentous stage when people decide to control their food supply by settling in a place and investing in it by planting and waiting for things to grow,” he said. “That is an act of swearing off the instant gratification of hunting and gathering.”
Alizaden thinks he has found it in a place called Elam, where he is spending the next two months. Elam is a marsh area on the border with Iraq, along a natural route through the wetlands used by traders and armies.
“We want to know what went into the process that moved humans into agriculture, and this place [Elam] looks like the right place to look,” Alizaden said. “Iran has given me wonderful support. The Oriental Institute has a great history of learning and discovery in Iran. I am hoping that this region will teach us more.”