Possible fragment of the throne of Darius the Great discovered at Persepolis

Author: * Aurelian Junius - 5 Posts on this thread out of 580 Posts sitewide.
Date: Dec 26, 2004 - 13:14

Here's a newspaper article from an Iranian paper reporting that archaeologists working at Persepolis believe they have found a fragment -- most likely a part of one of the legs -- of the throne of Darius the Great (522-486 B.C.). Darius, the successor of Cyrus the Great (the original founder of the Achmaenid dynasty), was famous for extending the Persian Empire all the way to Europe; for mounting a famous expedition acros the Dardanelles to Thrace; and for suppressing the Ionian Revolt in 494 B.C. and launching the punitive expedition against Athens that was turned back at Marathon in 490 B.C.

After Darius died, his son Xerxes I apparently preferred a new throne of his own (or maybe he just preferred not to try to fill his father's throne). He had the old one classed as surplus and put it into the royal treasury. There it apparently remained for more than 150 years, until the night a drunken Alexander the Great and his officers torched the palace at Persepolis. The archaeologists fround the throne leg fragment in a drainage channel that ran underneath the rooms containing the treasury. Thus, it seems likely that the throne was destroyed in the fire -- perhaps shattered when the roof of the treasury collapsed -- and that fragmemts of it fell into the drainage channel below.