Susa

Susa lies in the lowlands of Khuzestan, west of the Zagros Mountains, on a tell that has been occupied since roughly 4200 BC. It served as a principal capital of the Elamite kingdom for nearly two millennia and then, after Cyrus the Great's conquest in the 540s BC, as the winter residence of the Achaemenid Persian kings — Darius I, Xerxes I, and Artaxerxes I held court there each cool season, summering at Ecbatana and observing the great festivals at Persepolis. Marcel Dieulafoy directed the first French expedition from 1884 to 1886; Jacques de Morgan led the systematic Délégation Scientifique Française en Perse from 1897 to 1912; Roman Ghirshman directed the renewed French mission from 1946 to 1967. Susa is the named setting of three Old Testament books. Esther 1 places Ahasuerus's hundred-and-eighty-day banquet "in Susa the citadel," and the entire Esther narrative — Vashti's dismissal, Esther's elevation, Haman's plot, the festival of Purim — unfolds on the palace platform. Nehemiah 1:1 and 2:1 set the cupbearer's commission to rebuild Jerusalem in "Susa the citadel" during the twentieth year of Artaxerxes (445 BC). Daniel 8:2 records the prophet's vision of the ram and the goat "by the river Ulai," the canal that ran beside the Susa palace. The Apadana audience hall built by Darius and completed by Xerxes I held seventy-two stone columns sixty-five feet tall; several capitals, including the great twin-bull capital, were excavated by de Morgan and now stand in the Louvre's Iranian galleries. The famous Code of Hammurabi stele was looted from Babylon to Susa by an Elamite king around 1158 BC and recovered there by de Morgan's team in 1901. The modern town of Shush lies at the foot of the tell; the French expedition's archive remains at the Louvre. Sources: Roman Ghirshman, The Arts of Ancient Iran (Golden Press, 1964); Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Eisenbrauns, 2002); Jean Perrot, ed., The Palace of Darius at Susa (I. B. Tauris, 2013); Esther 1–9; Nehemiah 1–2.