Qualla: Susa: The City That Outlived Its Empires

Susa: The City That Outlived Its Empires: Introduction

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Harris, source, CC BY-SA 2.0. Ashurbanipal wanted the world to know what he had done. In 647 BC, the Assyrian king sacked Susa and dictated his triumph onto a clay tablet: "I destroyed the ziggurat of Susa. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to naught; their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds." He even sowed salt on the land. And yet Susa endured. It had already been standing for more than three thousand years before Ashurbanipal arrived, and it would stand for two thousand more after he left. Few cities on Earth have absorbed so much destruction and simply continued.

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Image: Steve Harris, source | CC BY-SA 2.0

Susa: The City That Outlived Its Empires: Before Writing, Before Bronze

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit anonymous, Public domain. Settlement at Susa began around 4200 BC, making it one of the oldest continuously occupied sites in the ancient world. The city rose between the Karkheh and Dez rivers in what is now Iran's Khuzestan province, at the foot of the Zagros Mountains and 250 kilometers east of the Tig...

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Image: anonymous | Public domain

Susa: The City That Outlived Its Empires: Capital of Elam, Crossroads of Empires

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Susa's position between the Mesopotamian lowlands and the Iranian highlands made it a natural capital. The Elamites claimed it, and so did the Sumerians, the Akkadians, and the Babylonians. Sargon the Great absorbed it into his empire around 2330 BC. The Elamite king Kutik-Inshus...

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Image: Public domain

Susa: The City That Outlived Its Empires: The Palace of Darius

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Darafsh, CC BY-SA 3.0. Susa reached its grandest expression under the Achaemenid Persians. Cyrus the Great captured the city between 540 and 539 BC, and his successors made it one of four imperial capitals. Darius the Great undertook a massive building program, digging down to bedrock and packing forty...

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Image: Darafsh | CC BY-SA 3.0

Susa: The City That Outlived Its Empires: Conquered, Destroyed, Rebuilt

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Darafsh, CC BY-SA 3.0. Alexander the Great took Susa without a fight in 331 BC; the satrap surrendered the city and its treasury. Alexander later held a mass wedding here in 324 BC, marrying Macedonian officers to Persian women in a symbolic fusion of empires. Under the Seleucids, Susa became a Greek-s...

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Image: Darafsh | CC BY-SA 3.0

Susa: The City That Outlived Its Empires: What Remains at Shush

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Flandin and Coste, Public domain. The modern town of Shush sits directly on the ancient site, a modest Iranian city of perhaps sixty-five thousand people in the hot lowlands of Khuzestan. The archaeological mounds still rise above the surrounding plain -- the Acropolis, the Apadana, the Royal City, the Craftsmen'...

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Image: Flandin and Coste | Public domain