Tomb of Cyrus the Great

Interesting facts

The burial chamber is tiny: about 3.17 metres long and 2.11 metres wide and high, enclosed by walls up to 1.5 metres thick.

The present doorway is only about 78 centimetres wide and 1.4 metres high, matching ancient reports that even a slight man could barely squeeze inside.

Between the flat inner ceiling and the gabled outer roof lies a hidden cavity about 4.75 metres long, once thought to have held coffins.

When James Morier visited in the early 19th century, local custom kept the key with women, and only women were permitted to enter.

The Greek writer Onesicritus claimed the tomb was a ten-storey tower with Cyrus lying on the top floor, a description that matches nothing on the site.

Some scholars note that its dimensions almost exactly match those of the tomb of Alyattes, father of the Lydian king Croesus, though the comparison is disputed.

In 1818 Robert Ker Porter found the tomb enclosed by a square of 24 columns, of which 17 were still standing.

The stone is a pale yellowish limestone, probably quarried at Sivand, north of Pasargadae.

A smaller Achaemenid tomb of the same form, Gur-e Dokhtar in Bushehr province, has been proposed as the tomb of another member of the Achaemenid royal family.

Why it is worth it

On the open plain of Pasargadae, the first capital of the Achaemenid Empire, stands a small stone house on a stepped plinth — the tomb of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire. It is almost startlingly plain: a gabled chamber of pale limestone on six receding steps, a little over 11 metres high in all, without a word of inscription surviving. That austerity is its power. It has stood for some two and a half thousand years; its blocks were laid without mortar and once tied with metal clamps, and it is often described as the oldest base-isolated structure in the world, built to ride out earthquakes.

The best ancient description comes from Aristobulus, who travelled with Alexander the Great, as retold by Arrian and Strabo. Alexander found the tomb looted, with only the golden coffin and couch left behind, and he ordered it restored and its narrow entrance sealed. Aristobulus recorded that Magi had guarded it for generations, receiving a sheep every day and a horse every month, and he quoted an inscription asking the visitor not to begrudge the king his monument. Of the grove that once surrounded it, and of the colonnade later travellers saw, nothing remains.

After the Islamic conquest local tradition knew the building as the tomb of the mother of Solomon, and it was the British diplomat James Morier, in 1812, and Robert Ker Porter a few years later who argued, from the ancient texts, that it was Cyrus's. Above the doorway the archaeologist David Stronach in 1964 recovered the worn remains of a carved flower first drawn by a traveller in 1638. The tomb is the centrepiece of the Pasargadae World Heritage Site, and its setting — a lone monument in a wide, empty valley — is as much a part of it as the stone.

Getting there

The tomb lies within the archaeological site of Pasargadae, about 1.5 km from the small town of Pāsārgād in Fars Province. The nearest airport is Shiraz Shahid Dastghaib International (SYZ), about 92 km away in a straight line; visitors usually come by road from Shiraz.

Tomb of Cyrus the Great

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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