Susa, Haft Tappeh and Chogha Zanbil
We left Kermanshah at 8am, which is a bit early for us, but we knew we had a very long drive to Ahvaz with scheduled stops in Susa, Chogha Zanbil and Shushtar. The beginning of the road was very good and we made fairly decent time through landscape reminiscent of the U.S. desert Southwest. That is until we turned south off of the road to the Iraqi border and landed on the road to Ahvaz, which is simultaneously the road to the oil and gas fields in the southwestern tip of Iran. We ended up behind columns and colonies of oil tank trucks, mostly with Iraqi license plates. The oncoming traffic was filled with similar trucks returning to their home county. I was a little confused as to why Iraqis would be going after Iranian oil, but was told that it was cheaper here than there. I don’t suppose I will ever know the real reason. Amir is an excellent driver as well as guide, and he navigated in and out of the trucks with complete expertise. Nonetheless, the traffic took more time than we had planned and didn’t get to Susa until it was close to 2pm, in the heat of the day, which varied between 44-46C depending on whether we were standing in traffic or moving on the highway. When we got to Susa, Amir recognized the car of a friend of his’, so he called Hussein and arranged for us all to meet for a lunch snack of falafa sandwiches with pickles and tomatoes. Before meeting them, I went to Daniel’s tomb after donning the obligatory chador, which is really just a bedsheet that women have to drape over their heads and body. As I had done at the holy sites in Tehran, Rey and Tabriz, I took off my shoes, put them in a plastic bag that is available in a large bin by the entrance and went in camera in hand. Normally one isn’t allowed to photograph the inside of the shrine areas as they are reserved for prayer and reverence toward the person whose tomb it is, but I wanted to get pictures of the cut glass walls and ceiling that make up the tomb area, as well as the silver grate that encompasses the actual tomb. The pictures were shot from the hip, literally, without any ability to focus, so they didn’t come out all that well, but at least there is a record of what the tomb looked like and some of the people, in this case mostly young women (as in all such tombs, there is a women’s side and a men’s side), which surprised me. This site used to be among the most revered especially among Jewish followers, and it is surprising that it is so honored by Muslims as Daniel doesn’t play that much of a role in the Old Testament, and none as far as I know in the Qu’ran. In the courtyard of the site was a large poster with a picture of the Ayatollah & the words: “The Manifestation of Iran’s Power are the Martyrs.” Each city has a series of photos of those who fell during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s when almost every Iranian family lost at least one member. There is no love lost between the two countries, but on the other hand, the Iranians I’ve met have all said they like the Iraqi people, just like they like Americans. It’s the politics they don’t like. Gee. That sounds familiar…
The favela sandwich was quite good and the small kiosk type shop was well cooled, which was a relief from the heat. Afterwards we went first to the Susa Museum, which had a very small but nice collection of artifacts from the Achaemenid and Sassanian periods, including some death masks and a beautiful winged bull head. Taking a right turn out of the museum leads to steps going up to the French Castle that was built towards the end of the 19th C as a French fortress to keep the French archeologists safe from marauding local brigands. The inside is closed but the views from the courtyard and terrace are impressive. From the castle one simply crosses the street to get to the entrance to Darius’ Winter Palace at Susa. The site is very very hot in the summer, which was in full blaze already today. It is difficult to imagine what the palace looked like from the remains of the ruins, but one can see the bases of the columns in the Apadana, which were surprisingly smaller than those at the Anahita Temple in Kangavar. At the back of the site there was a bull capital which was very impressive and a number of fragments of animals, mostly winged bulls and plants in a cordoned off workshop area. The site is quite large and the palace must have been quite impressive 2,500 years ago. Today it is fascinating to walk around, but there is no way to get a sense of the grandeur of the past, only of its vastness.
From Susa we went to Haft Tappeh to see what’s left of a 1450 BCE ziggurat and the local museum. It was interesting, but again it was difficult to get any real sense of what it had once been. The museum, however, had three beautiful small goddess votives that were – naturally – mislabed as “human portraits.”
From Haft Tappeh we drove first on paved, then on gravel, then on sand, then got lost and turned around, until we found the correct unpaved road that led to a new paved road to get to Chogha Zanbil, which is amazingly not marked on the streets other than the turnoff from the main highway. I was beginning to think that we were hopelessly lost, but again, Amir came through and we made it to the best intact ziggurat from the ancient world. It’s a relatively late one, from 1250BCE, but it is awesome, and that is a word I don’t lightly use. The structure was originally five stories high, only two and dirt from half of the next one are left, but it stretches high into the sky and was originally built on a square base of about 105 m; it was supposedly 53 m tall when all five levels were visible. Each of the sides has a main staircase, some have circular altars in front, that were apparently mistakenly thought to be sundials, and all have unique features for each of the four directions. Across from the ziggurat entrance are three temples for local Elamite deities and on the Northwest side, there is a Kiririsha Temple. Her name means “Great Goddess” and as there is relatively little written about her we asked the caretaker if he knew anything more about her, but he didn’t. He did say Prof. Mesode Mufodi was the one who named her and I will look him up. (Can’t find him.) I found a way to get beyond the barriers to the inside of her temple and we walked through. When I came out the other end there was a lone cow just looking at me. Hmm, the goddess? From her temple we went over to see the water tank that supplied water to the complex. It was fairly far away, but the water came from even further away, some say as much as 45km although there is a river bend just a couple of kms away, which creates a green oasis amidst this extremely arid region. That said, when we were walking back from the water tank to the ziggurat it started to sprinkle. I took that as a blessing for the region.
We were the only people at the site and the caretaker was very kind; he offered us water as it was still quite hot, and then took us to an area slightly to the east of the entrance, but hidden from view over a ridge, where the royal tombs were. It was almost a straight climb down and I really didn’t think I could do it, nor did Amir want to try, so the caretaker scrambled down with my camera to take pictures. It was very kind of him! & he didn’t have any trouble climbing back up, he just scrambled.
It was late and Shushtar would have taken us well past dark, so we headed straight to Ahvaz. As it was we didn’t get to the hotel until after 10pm and had a very early morning for another quite long drive to Shiraz with an Anahita Temple, Achaemenid and Sassanid sites along the way. This is a very rich and intense trip.
