Persia, a Museum of Materials · Hall 3 · White Stone & Water

Plan a paradise

The word paradise began as an Old Iranian word for a walled enclosure. At Pasargadae, from about 546 BC, Cyrus the Great laid out a garden in front of his palace and watered it through channels of cut white stone, only 25 cm wide, with a square basin every 13 or 14 metres. Lay the channels yourself: water runs only downhill, and trees come up wherever it reaches.

637 of 637 m running with water

Stone channels

637 m

all of it carrying water

Watered ground

1.51 ha

29% of the plot

Trees planted

186

cypresses and planes by the water, fruit trees further in

Drag across the plot to lay stone from the intake. With a keyboard: arrows move, Enter lays or lifts a stone, Shift and an arrow lays stone as you go.

Material: White limestone and water
Place: Pasargadae, Fars; UNESCO World Heritage, 2004
Date: Built from about 546 BC
Channels: 25 cm wide, a basin every 13–14 m, over 1,100 m in all
Also listed: The Persian Garden: nine gardens, UNESCO 2011

Try this

The plot opens with a simplified version of the channels Stronach excavated: a rectangle in front of the portico of Palace P, split down the middle on the line of the throne. Every basin fills.
Lay a channel east, across the foot of the low knoll. The water stops where the ground rises, and the stone beyond stays dry, crossed in red. The builders had to give every channel a steady fall.
Carry the garden out into the plain. Surveys of the ground since 1999 show that this garden was one part of a far larger park, with a great pool about 200 m long.

The plot, its slope and the knoll are ours, on a grid of 7 m cells, and the fall of the land is exaggerated so that you can see it. The width of the channels, the spacing of their basins and the length of the portico of Palace P (about 72 m) follow the excavation reports; the two pavilions are placed only roughly, and the columns of Palace P are drawn schematically. The preset shows the channels in front of Palace P; that the garden was divided into four is an inference from the throne’s line of sight, not something dug up. Water moves from cell to cell and never uphill; real water is subtler. Which trees grew here is not known, so the trees are generic.

The Tomb of Cyrus

On the plain south-west of the palaces stands the tomb that Greek writers described as Cyrus’s: a stone house with a gabled roof on six tiers of white stone, about 11 m high in all, on a base of 13.35 by 12.30 m. The chamber inside is only 3.17 m long and 2.11 m wide and high, and its door is 78 cm wide. Aristobulus, whom Alexander sent in 324 BC to restore the plundered tomb, describes it standing in a grove of all kinds of trees, watered by a stream. Later centuries forgot the name, and it became Mashhad-e Madar-e Soleyman, the shrine of the mother of Solomon.

“O man, I am Cyrus, who won the empire for the Persians and was king of Asia. Do not begrudge me this monument.”The inscription as Strabo reports it after Aristobulus (Geography 15.3.7), in our English. No such text survives on the stone.

Drag to walk round it · scroll or pinch to come closer

The sun on the day of the equinox15:30

Built stone by stone from the surveys of Dieulafoy (1884), Herzfeld (1910) and Stronach (1978): a first tier of 1.65 m, about 0.60 m of it foundation that was once hidden and is now exposed, standing on a low projecting socle; then 1.05, 1.05 and three of 0.575 m, 11.10 m to the lost apex; treads of 0.62 and 0.57 m; walls 1.5 m thick in four courses; a cornice 0.54 m tall; a door 0.78 by 1.39 m in a frame of two fasciae. The door faces north-west, and the sun moves as it does over Pasargadae on the day of the equinox. The capstone and the upper half of the rosette on the gable are lost. The size and wear of each block, the lichen and the robbed clamp holes are drawn by us after photographs.

Stone that carried water

David Stronach excavated the garden in 1961–63. Its channels are cut limestone, 25 cm wide and laid flush with the ground, with a deep square basin every 13 or 14 m; they ran for more than 1,100 m, fed by a canal taken off the Pulvar river about 2 km upstream. The long portico of Palace P looks straight down the central channel from a throne seat on its axis, and Stronach argued in 1989 that the king’s gaze divided the garden into four plots of about 70 by 50 m: the first chahar-bagh. Surveys by Benech, Boucharlat and Gondet have since found a vast park around it, with a pool about 200 m long; the fourfold plan remains an interpretation.

From a walled garden to paradise

Median *paridaiza-, Old Persian *paridaida-, meant “walled around”, forms reconstructed from their descendants; Avestan has pairi-daēza, an enclosure, and the tablets of Persepolis name “paradises”, walled plantations kept by the king. The Greeks took the word as parádeisos: Xenophon tells how Cyrus the Younger showed a Spartan visitor his paradise at Sardis and said he had planted some of the trees himself. The Greek translation of the Bible used it for the Garden of Eden, and from there it reached most European languages. Hall 12 follows other Persian words on the same road.

The first capital

Cyrus founded Pasargadae on the plain where, Strabo says, he defeated Astyages about 550 BC; most of its stone buildings went up between about 546 and 530 BC, cut in the Ionian way after the conquest of Lydia. On a jamb of its great gate a four-winged figure, almost 3 m tall with its crown, still stands in an Elamite robe and an Egyptian crown. Short inscriptions in three languages, “I, Cyrus, the king, an Achaemenid”, were probably added under Darius. UNESCO listed Pasargadae in 2004, and in 2011 made its garden one of the nine that form “The Persian Garden”.

Episode 3 of 12

Still alive today

The old word is back in everyday Persian: pardis now names university campuses, multiplex cinemas and a town east of Tehran; and by way of Greek it reached English as paradise.

Questions people ask

Is this where the word paradise comes from?

The word comes from Old Iranian for a walled enclosure, used for royal parks all over the Achaemenid empire. The garden at Pasargadae is the oldest of those parks whose layout has been excavated.

Was it really a four-part garden?

The stone channels outline a rectangle split down its length; the division into four comes from the line of sight from the throne and is Stronach’s reading, widely followed but not proven. The geophysical surveys suggest a larger, more varied park.

Where did the water come from?

From the Pulvar, the river that runs through the plain, by a canal that left it about 2 km upstream. The channels then carried it round the garden with a steady fall.

Is the tomb really Cyrus’s?

Arrian and Strabo, both quoting Aristobulus, describe a tomb of exactly this form at Pasargadae, and it is generally accepted as Cyrus’s. The inscription they quote does not survive.

What grew in the garden?

The Greek sources speak of trees of all kinds. The plants themselves have not been identified at Pasargadae, so the cypresses, plane trees and fruit trees here stand for the Persian garden in general.

Where can I see it?

Pasargadae is in Fars, about 40 km north-east of Persepolis. The palace columns, the gate with its winged figure and the tomb stand on the open plain; the channels were partly re-laid for visitors.

Continue your visit

In the next episode…

The king of this garden takes Babylon, and a clay cylinder is written in his name to be buried in a building’s foundations: what did he have it say?
Hall 4 · Glazed Brick · Babylon and the Cyrus Cylinder →

EarlierHall 1 · Painted Clay · Spin the gobletEnter the hall →

Just beforeHall 2 · Brick & Bitumen · Raise the zigguratIn a coming update

Next hallHall 4 · Glazed Brick · The Cyrus CylinderEnter the hall →The museumThe entrance · all twelve halls, oldest firstBack to the entrance →

Sources: D. Stronach and H. Gopnik, “Pasargadae”, and D. Stronach, “Čahārbāḡ”, Encyclopaedia Iranica; D. Stronach, Pasargadae (Oxford, 1978); the 2004 UNESCO nomination dossier for Pasargadae; UNESCO World Heritage List, “Pasargadae” (2004) and “The Persian Garden” (2011); M. Benech, R. Boucharlat and S. Gondet, ARTA 2012.003; F. Kidd, Metropolitan Museum (2013); A. Panaino, “Paradise”, Encyclopaedia Iranica; Arrian, Anabasis 6.29; Strabo, Geography 15.3.7; Xenophon, Oeconomicus 4.20–22.

The garden, its water and the tomb drawing are made with code by Bridge Labs.