The Apadana Reliefs: Nations Bringing Gifts

The Apadana reliefs are the carved stone stairway facades of the great audience hall at Persepolis, made in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE under Darius I and Xerxes I. They show twenty-three delegations from the peoples of the Persian Empire walking in procession with gifts for the king, faced by rows of Persian and Median nobles and guards. They are the fullest picture the Achaemenids left of how they wanted their empire to be seen.

How the hall itself was planned and raised is told on the page Building Persepolis. This page stays with the carvings: what they show, how the scenes are arranged, which peoples can be recognised, and how scholars have read them.

Two stairways, one design

The Apadana stood on a platform about three metres above the terrace, and visitors reached it by two double stairways, on the north and east sides. Each was faced with the same composition, laid out as a mirror image. On one wing, the delegations of the subject peoples climb in three registers toward the centre. On the other wing, Persian and Median dignitaries, the royal guard, grooms with horses and empty chariots stand or walk in step. In the triangular spaces at the ends, a lion attacks a bull, a motif that appears again and again at Persepolis and whose meaning (a seasonal symbol, royal power, or simply decoration) is still argued.

The north stairway was exposed for centuries and is worn. The east stairway lay under debris from the collapse of the hall and came out of the ground in the 1930s with its edges still sharp, which is why most photographs of the reliefs show the east side.

The missing centre

The centre of each stairway originally held a large panel of the king enthroned, with the crown prince behind him and a court official raising his hand to his mouth in greeting before him. In 1936 Erich Schmidt found two such panels not on the Apadana but in a courtyard of the Treasury. The usual explanation, set out by the Italian restorer Ann Britt Tilia, is that they were moved in antiquity, perhaps under Artaxerxes I, and replaced on the stairways by panels with guards. Why they were moved is unknown. The audience panels are now split between the National Museum of Iran in Tehran and the site.

Reading the delegations

Each delegation is led by an usher, a Persian or a Mede, who takes its leader by the hand. Tall conifer trees, often called cypresses, separate one group from the next. Every group is set apart by clothes, headgear, hairstyle and the gifts it carries, and this detail has let scholars identify most of them by comparing the carvings with the lists of lands in the royal inscriptions. The numbering most often used goes back to Schmidt and to the German scholar Gerold Walser.

Some identifications are secure, others are not, and different books will label the same group differently. Among the clearer ones:

• Medes head the procession, bringing vessels, clothing and daggers.
• Elamites lead a lioness, with men carrying her two cubs.
• Armenians bring a horse and a large wine vessel with handles shaped as griffins.
• Babylonians lead a humped bull.
• Lydians bring metal bowls, armlets and a light chariot with a pair of horses.
• Bactrians and Arachosians lead two-humped camels.
• Indians, bare-chested, carry baskets or jars that are usually taken to hold gold dust, and lead a donkey.
• Arabs lead a one-humped dromedary.
• Ethiopians, that is Kushites from south of Egypt, bring an elephant tusk and an animal often identified as an okapi.

The gifts are typical of each land: horses from the uplands, camels from Central Asia, gold from India, ivory from Africa, textiles and fine metalwork from the western cities. The carving says, in images, what Darius says in words at Susa, where he lists the lands that supplied cedar, gold, lapis lazuli and ivory for his palace.

Gift, tribute and the king’s ideal

Older books often call the scene a “tribute procession”. Many historians now prefer the word gifts. Pierre Briant and others distinguish the regular tax, assessed and collected by the satrap, from the gifts brought to the king in person, which Herodotus describes for peoples such as the Arabs and Ethiopians. On the reliefs, nobody is bound, nobody kneels, and the delegates walk upright beside their Persian guides. Margaret Cool Root, in her 1979 study of Achaemenid royal art, argued that this calm is the message: the carvings present an empire of willing peoples gathered around the king, a picture of order rather than a record of conquest.

The same idea appears on the royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam, where the peoples of the empire hold up the throne of the king together. The Apadana gives that idea its most crowded and detailed form.

The Nowruz theory

A popular reading holds that the reliefs show a real annual ceremony: at Nowruz, the spring new year, delegations from every province came to Persepolis to present their gifts. The idea was taken up by several twentieth-century scholars and is repeated in many guidebooks and in Iran today.

There is no ancient source that says so. No Achaemenid inscription mentions a new-year festival, Greek writers who describe Persian court life do not tie Persepolis to one, and the Fortification tablets show the king and court moving between Susa, Babylon, Ecbatana and Persepolis through the year. Most specialists now treat the Nowruz link as possible but unproven, and regard the procession as an ideal image that need not depict any single day. It remains a fair question whether Persepolis hosted some seasonal gathering; it is the specific claim that the reliefs record Nowruz that the evidence does not support.

Colour, craft and the people who carved them

The reliefs were not grey when they were new. Traces of blue, red, green and other pigments have been found on the stone, and current research on the polychromy of Persepolis suggests that clothing, hair and objects were painted. Some details, such as crowns and jewellery, may have had metal fittings.

The Persepolis tablets record craftsmen from many lands working on the site, and Darius’s Susa foundation text names Ionians, Sardians, Medes, Egyptians and Babylonians among his workers. The style of the Apadana is a new blend: Assyrian in its long processional friezes, Greek-influenced in the soft folds of some garments, but organised in a strict order that is Persian.

What the reliefs tell historians

The Apadana carvings are a source for clothing, weapons, animals and metalwork across the ancient Near East, and they are one of the few places where the Achaemenids describe their empire on their own terms. Because they are an official image, they tell us how the king wished his rule to be seen, not how the provinces experienced it. Read beside the satrapy and tax system and the records of the Fortification tablets, they show the gap and the link between ideal and administration.

For the site as a whole, see the blog post on Persepolis, and for practical advice the guide to visiting Persepolis.