Elam and the first cities

The story of Iran does not begin with Persians. It begins on the plain of Khuzestan, in the south-west, where the Karkheh and Karun rivers run down towards the Gulf. Here, around 4000 BCE, people began building on a low rise that would become Susa. Its early potters made fine, thin-walled beakers painted with long-necked birds, running dogs and ibexes whose horns sweep round into great circles. The people of this lowland and of the highlands behind it, in what is now Fars, are known to us as Elamites. Their language, Elamite, has no proven relatives. Around 3200 BCE they developed a writing system of their own, now called Proto-Elamite, which scholars have still not deciphered. Elam was never a single tidy state. It was a shifting federation of lowland and highland centres, with Susa on the plain and Anshan, near modern Shiraz, in the mountains.

Neighbours and rivals

For most of its history Elam lived in the shadow and the company of Mesopotamia. Its kings traded, intermarried and went to war with Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian rulers. In the 12th century BCE the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte raided Babylonia and carried home trophies, among them the basalt stele inscribed with the laws of Hammurabi. French archaeologists dug it up at Susa in 1901–02, and it now stands in the Louvre: a Babylonian monument preserved by an Elamite act of plunder.

The ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil

South-east of Susa rises Chogha Zanbil, founded around 1250 BCE by King Untash-Napirisha as a religious city named Dur-Untash. At its heart stood a stepped temple tower, a ziggurat, dedicated to Inshushinak, the god of Susa. Many of its baked bricks carry lines of cuneiform naming the king and his gods. Building seems to have stopped after the king's death. Today the ziggurat is one of the best preserved anywhere, and the site was added to UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1979. Elam's end came slowly. The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal sacked Susa around 646 BCE and claimed to have sown its fields with salt. Yet Elamite culture survived. When the Achaemenid Persians built their empire a century later, they kept Susa as a capital and used Elamite as a language of administration; thousands of clay tablets from Persepolis are written in it. The Persians did not so much replace Elam as grow out of it.