The date of 539 BCE, which is traditionally held to be the beginning of the Achaemenid period at Susa, refers to the capture of Babylon, as it is supposed that Cyrus II conquered Susa after he took Babylon (Herodotus, 1.190-91; Strabo, 15.3.2). The history of Persia before Cyrus (see ACHAEMENID DYNASTY) and at the beginning of his reign, and that of the relations of Persia with neighboring regions, indicate that Persian elements were present in the plain not far from Susa in the first decades of the 6th century (see above, viii). The administrative tablets from the Acropolis, written by a Susan authority, mention suppliers with Iranian names, as well as place names in eastern Khuzestan. Thus it is not certain that the control of Susa was achieved by an actual conquest.
There is no evidence of Cyrus or Cambyses having been active at Susa. Only Darius, once his power was consolidated, chose Susa as one of his royal residences, soon after 520. In addition to Herodotus (3.140), some details in the royal inscriptions and in an Egyptian text point to such a date (Vallat, 1986, p. 281; Briant, 1993). Building was carried out there at the same time that he built Persepolis. Even so, until the advent of Alexander the Greeks knew only of Susa, which they saw as the residence of the king of Persia and the capital of the empire from Cambyses to Artaxerxes II (Hdt., 3.30, 64; 4.83, 85; 5.49); for instance, it was at Susa that Darius learned of the defeat at Marathon (Aeschylus, The Persians 16) and to Susa that Xerxes sent information about the fall of Athens, then his own defeat (Hdt., 8.54 and 99). The choice of Darius was probably influenced by the geographical position of Susa, nearer than Fars to the rich Mesopotamian regions of the empire, but also by the glorious past of the city, which was the old capital of Elam and thus an important political component of the empire, where it was necessary to display royal power. He also established other residences outside Persia, at Babylon and Ecbatana.
Written sources. The descriptive history of Susa during the two centuries of the empire is poorly documented by the texts, which are few in number. The royal inscriptions are dated by the king who is the author; there exist more than thirty on stone tablets, round or square column bases, and mud bricks (for the corpus accumulated since the beginning of excavation, see Scheil, 1929, 1933; Kent, 1953; Steve, 1987; Lecoq, 1997). They deal with the construction of buildings, but none describes political events. They are often trilingual (Old Persian, Elamite, Akkadian), and some are represented by several examples. They deal with structures such as walls, “palace,” “apadāna” (only once), “buildings,” “house,” but several of these clearly correspond to the same building or to part of a complex identified by another inscription. None of them refers to a temple or sanctuary.
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