David Stronach

Parterres and stone watercourses at Pasargadae: notes on the Achaemenid contribution to garden design

Until only a few years ago it was a still prevalent opinion that the celebrated garden carpets of sixteenth-century Safavid Iran provided the oldest extant evidence for the form of the early Persian garden. From the appearance of such carpets it was already clear that Safavid gardens included numerous water channels, multiple parterres, and a centrally placed garden pavilion which often stood within a rectangular pool on the long axis of the plan. Such carpets of Safavid date indicate, moreover, that the design of even the most complex gardens of the day depended on the repeated use of a single, basic motif: namely that of the chahar bagh or fourfold garden.

Cyrus and the Kingship of Anshan: Further Perspectives

Abstract In the text of his Babylonian cylinder Cyrus the Great indicates that the kernel of his personal title includes the phrase “king of the city of Anshan” and that each of his predecessors was known as a “great king, king of the city of Anshan”. In one view that has been current for most of the past decade these titles should be read literally, and serious consideration should be given to the possibility that Cyrus founded an Anshanite empire rather than a Persian empire. The present paper explores a number of alternative approaches to this same testimony, especially following the presentation of a new thesis (Zournatzi, pre-published) which posits that these titles do not tell us so much about the exact history of Cyrus’ ancestral line as they acquaint us with certain ideological and political sensitivities that Cyrus expected to encounter at the moment that he sought to consolidate his hold on his last major acquisition: the city of Babylon.