The Achaemenids and their Artistic and Architectural Tradition: an Archaeological Perspective

The author tries to read within the particular artistic and architectural production of the Achaemenid period, a specific attitude of that dynasty to develop atypical forms of settlement and occupation of the territory compared to the original ancient near eastern tradition. And this is the case of “urban” structures such as those in Persepolis and Pasargadae, which can be defined as Towns/Palaces, rather than very cities; this is a very different way of occupying a territory, almost no urban, and in a context macroscopically architectural. The cases of Susa and Dahan-i Ghulaman (Sistan) from the author addressed, enrich the unusual panorama of an empire, almost without cities, and with a stone artistic and architectural production concentrated only in Fars, at Persepolis, Pasargadae and Susa, and completely absent in the rest of the Empire.