Foundation Charter of the Palace of Darius I
Unknown · Reign of Darius I, 522-486 BC
A thick slab of clay, a little larger than a paperback, is covered on both sides with tidy rows of cuneiform signs. The language is Old Persian, the tongue of the Achaemenid kings, and the writing is the simplified wedge script invented for them. The tablet was buried under a doorway threshold of the Apadana at Susa, a message for the gods rather than for readers. Notice how straight the lines are and how evenly the scribe pressed his stylus, a sign of a royal commission.
The text is the foundation charter of the palace, known to scholars from several copies in different languages. Darius the First recounts how the ground was dug, the rubble packed and the bricks laid, and then names the materials brought from every corner of his empire: cedar from Lebanon, gold from Sardis and Bactria, lapis lazuli and carnelian from Sogdiana, turquoise from Chorasmia, silver and ebony from Egypt, ivory from Ethiopia and India. Found by the French mission at Susa and allotted to the Louvre in the division of finds, it is the palace explained in the king's own words.
Did You Know? The charter is one of the rare royal texts that names the workers, listing Ionians and Sardians as stone cutters, Medes and Egyptians as goldsmiths and Babylonians as brick makers.
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