Susa

Susa, the modern town of Shush in Khuzestan, is one of the oldest continuously important cities in the world. Its mounds, rising above the plain between the Karkheh and Dez rivers, hold the remains of settlements reaching back to the fifth millennium BCE. For much of antiquity it was the capital of Elam, the great civilisation of south-western Iran, and later one of the royal capitals of the Achaemenid Persian kings.

The Elamites’ wars with Mesopotamia left their mark here. In the twelfth century BCE an Elamite king brought back the stele of Hammurabi, inscribed with his famous law code, as a trophy from Babylonia. In the seventh century BCE the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal sacked the city. Under Darius I, from the late sixth century BCE, Susa rose again, with a great palace and audience hall, the Apadana, decorated with panels of glazed brick showing archers of the royal guard, lions and winged bulls.

Modern excavation at Susa was led for decades by French archaeologists. In 1901 the mission of Jacques de Morgan found the Hammurabi stele here; it is now in the Louvre. To protect his team, de Morgan built a fortified castle on the highest mound, still standing above the town today. The town of Shush is also home to the shrine traditionally held to be the tomb of the prophet Daniel, honoured by Muslims and Jews alike.

UNESCO inscribed Susa in 2015, describing its layers of architecture as a record of Elamite, Persian and Parthian culture over thousands of years.