Tablets from Persepolis

Sabrina Maras

The archaeological site of Persepolis is located at the foot of the Kuh-e Rahmat (or “Mountain of Mercy”) in the Marv Dasht plain in Fars province, southwestern Iran. Its exact coordinates are Latitude: 29° 56' 9 N, Longitude: 52° 53' 23 E. Persepolis was the capital city of the Achaemenid Persian empire under Darius the Great beginning in c. 522 BCE, until its collapse at the hands of Alexander the Great in c. 331 BCE. Persepolis was a center of royal power, a place of imperial ceremony, and the locus of regional administration. Its current extant remains — which include several ceremonial structures, such as the apadana of Darius, and palaces — still attest to the grandeur and importance of the site.

During the 1933 spring season of excavations at Persepolis, Ernst E. Herzfeld, then working under the auspices of the Oriental Institute of Chicago, made a major discovery within the interior rooms and corridors of the fortification wall at the north-east corner of the Persepolis terrace — an archive of tens of thousands of tablets dating to the thirteenth to the twenty-eighth years (509-493 BC) of the reign of Darius the Great. The archive is known today as the Persepolis Fortification archive (PFA). The PFA concerns administration of transfers of commodities (generally food) on behalf of the state. The geographic area covered by the archive includes the environs of Persepolis (Parsa), Pasargadae (Batrakatash), and Shiraz (Tirazzish), and an amorphous area stretching to the northwest along the royal road to Susa, in modern-day Khuzistan. The texts and seal impressions have provided a wealth of information on myriad aspects of Achaemenid culture, including economic, artistic, social, and religious activities. The PFA is perhaps the single most important source on the Achaemenid Persian empire to have survived from antiquity.

In 1935, the clay tablets were sent from Iran to Chicago’s Oriental Institute, where they remain on loan today for research purposes. The excavated archive consists of 20,000–30,000 tablets and fragments. Most of the tablets belonging to the PFA have texts written in cuneiform in the Elamite language. Approximately 1,000 tablets have texts written in Aramaic. Singleton texts occur also in Greek, Babylonian, Phrygian, and Old Persian. The great bulk of the inscribed tablets carry seal impressions representing the officials and offices involved in the transactions. There is also a significant number of tablets, perhaps as many as 5,000, that are uninscribed but carry seal impressions.

The Elamite texts from the archive were initially studied, beginning in 1938, by Arno Poebel, George Cameron and R. T. Hallock. It was Hallock who eventually published transliterations and translations of some 2,087 of the Elamite texts in his landmark OIP volume of 1969 (these tablets and texts are prefixed with the siglum PF). The seal designs on the corpus of PF tablets have recently been the focus of an in-depth study by Margaret C. Root and Mark B. Garrison, partially published in 2001 as volume I of the Persepolis Fortification Tablet Seal Project. This project, slated to publish in three volumes the over 1,000 seal designs found on the PF tablets, marks a seminal moment in the study of Achaemenid glyptic. Under the direction of Matthew W. Stolper, a major initiative, the PFA Project, has recently been launched to document the unpublished material from the archive. Researchers involved in the project include (among others) Mark B. Garrison (glyptic), Trinity University, Wouter F. M. Henkelman (Elamite texts), College de France, Annalisa Azzoni (Aramaic texts), Vanderbilt University, and E.R.M. Dusinberre (glyptic on the Aramaic tablets), University of Colorado.