Elamite Susa stars in Esther, Ezra, and Aeschylus alike
Susa, in Iran’s lower Zagros about 250 kilometres east of the Tigris between the Karkheh and Dez, underlies modern Shush. An Elamite name (Šušun/Šušan), it ranks among the Ancient Near East’s greatest cities and appears in earliest Sumerian literature as obedient to Uruk’s Inanna.
Its ruins lie beneath and beside the present-day town of Shush, on the plain between two Zagros rivers. Its name is Elamite, recorded as Šušun or Šušan, and it counts among the most important cities of the ancient Near East. Some of the oldest Sumerian literature already presents it as subject to Inanna, goddess of Uruk.
As Shushan it appears in the Hebrew Bible, above all as the setting of the Book of Esther, and also in Ezra, Nehemiah and Daniel; a tomb tradition for Daniel survives at Shush-Daniel. The Book of Jubilees places it within the inheritance of Shem and his son Elam and even names a child of Elam Susan. Aeschylus set his tragedy The Persians there, picturing Xerxes’ court receiving news of Salamis.
Henry Rawlinson examined the site in 1836, followed by A. H. Layard. In 1851 William Loftus, with Fenwick Williams, dug on a small scale and identified it as Susa, turning up a jar of about 110 coins, the earliest dated to 697–98 AD. Marcel-Auguste and Jane Dieulafoy began French excavations in 1885–86, finding glazed bricks, column bases and capitals from the Achaemenid palace, though they failed to recognise mudbrick walls and destroyed them while digging.
Treaties in 1894 and 1899 gave France an indefinite monopoly on excavation in Iran. Jacques de Morgan led major digs from 1897 to 1911 and headed the French delegation that oversaw work there until 1979. His great trench in the Acropole mound yielded the stele of Naram-Sin, Babylonian boundary stones and the stele of Hammurabi’s law code, and finds from Susa filled several halls of the Louvre.
Source: Susa
