Susa

The setting for the books of Esther and Nehemiah; excavations of the Achaemenid palace confirm the luxurious royal setting described in Esther 1–2.

Susa is one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in the world. Its mound, called the Acropole, contains layers of human settlement going back to approximately 4200 BCE, and the city remained important through the Elamite, Babylonian, Achaemenid Persian, Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian periods. Today the site sits near the town of Shush in Khuzestan Province in southwestern Iran.

The first European archaeological work at Susa was done by William Kenneth Loftus, a British geologist and explorer who visited the site in 1851 and 1852. Loftus recognized the large artificial mounds as ancient ruins and conducted limited surface exploration and some test trenches, recovering pottery and identifying mud-brick architecture. His account of the site helped draw attention to Susa as a major candidate for excavation.

The next major phase of investigation came with the French archaeologist Marcel Dieulafoy and his wife Jane Dieulafoy, who worked at Susa from 1884 to 1886. They focused on the Achaemenid palace complex and recovered spectacular items including glazed brick panels depicting lion griffins and archers. These objects, made of molded and brilliantly colored faience bricks, decorated the walls of the palace of Darius I and are now displayed in the Louvre in Paris, where they remain among the most impressive objects in the ancient Near Eastern collection. The famous Frieze of Archers, showing Persian royal guardsmen in full ceremonial dress, came from Dieulafoy's excavations.

France obtained a monopoly concession over excavations at Susa from the Iranian government in 1897, and the most intensive work was carried out by Jacques de Morgan from 1897 to 1911. De Morgan directed a large team and excavated enormous volumes of the mound, recovering thousands of objects. His campaigns lacked some of the stratigraphic precision of later archaeology, but the sheer quantity of material recovered was extraordinary. In 1901 and 1902, de Morgan's team discovered the black diorite stele inscribed with the Code of Hammurabi, the most complete early law code known. The stele had been removed from Babylon as war booty by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte in the twelfth century BCE and brought to Susa. It is now in the Louvre.

Excavations continued under Roman Ghirshman from 1946 to 1967. Ghirshman's work was more methodical and produced important results for understanding the Elamite and Achaemenid periods. The Achaemenid palace complex, called the apadana, was a massive columned audience hall where the Persian kings received delegations. The columns stood about twenty meters tall, and their capitals were carved in the form of back-to-back bulls or lions. Several column bases and capital fragments survive at the site. The palace complex overall covered a very large area, with separate zones for official functions, private royal apartments, and service areas.

The city's prosperity during the Persian period is visible in the quality of objects recovered from the site, including gold and silver vessels, cylinder seals, jewelry, and administrative tablets. Thousands of clay tablets in Elamite were found in the palace archives, documenting the administrative machinery of the Achaemenid state. A small number of Old Persian tablets were also found, along with objects inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform.

After Iranian independence archaeological work was conducted jointly until 1979. Since then Iranian archaeologists have continued work at the site under the auspices of the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization.

• The Achaemenid palace apadana of Darius I, a massive columned audience hall with bull-capital columns standing approximately twenty meters tall, matching the 'palace' setting described throughout the book of Esther
• Glazed brick panels depicting Persian royal guards (the Frieze of Archers), now in the Louvre, showing the high luxury of the royal court at Susa
• The Code of Hammurabi stele (discovered 1901), the most complete ancient law code known, brought to Susa as war booty and now in the Louvre
• Thousands of Elamite administrative clay tablets from the palace archives documenting the internal workings of the Persian imperial bureaucracy
• Gold and silver vessels, royal jewelry, and cylinder seals confirming Susa's role as a wealthy imperial capital
• Elamite-period temples and palaces beneath the Achaemenid layers, showing Susa's importance as a capital city for more than two thousand years before the Persians
• Lion griffins and other decorative glazed brick reliefs from palace walls, consistent with the description of the palace interior in Esther 1:6

Susa, called Shushan in Hebrew, is the setting for three biblical books and appears in a fourth. The book of Esther is set entirely at the citadel of Shushan during the reign of Ahasuerus, identified by most scholars with Xerxes I (r. 486–465 BCE). Esther 1:2 introduces the story by saying the king 'sat on his royal throne in Shushan the citadel.' The book describes feasts held in a courtyard with white and blue curtains, marble pillars, couches of gold and silver, and a pavement of red, blue, white, and black marble (Esther 1:6). Excavations at Susa have confirmed the existence of the palace's courtyard and its elaborate decorative program, and the general plan of the palace fits the geography described in Esther's narrative, including the inner and outer courts where Esther approached the king. Nehemiah 1:1 places the book's opening at Shushan the palace, where Nehemiah served as cupbearer to King Artaxerxes I. This is the same palace complex excavated by French archaeologists, and the cupbearer's role is confirmed by Persian administrative documents that show a class of high-status palace servants with direct access to the king. Daniel chapters 8 and 10 describe visions received at Shushan the palace (Daniel 8:2) and beside the Tigris River. In the vision of chapter 8, Daniel sees a ram and a goat representing the Persian and Greek empires, with the vision taking place in Susa, perhaps reflecting the city's symbolic importance as the heart of Persian power. The great antiquity of Susa is also reflected in Ezra 4:9, which refers to 'the men of Susa, that is, the Elamites' among the peoples settled by the Assyrians in the former territory of Israel, connecting the city to the broader world of the ancient Near East.