Land of the Turquoise Mountains by Cyrus Massoudi

Author:Cyrus Massoudi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848856370
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2014-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

I rumbled away from Ilam in a battered old Mercedes bus heading for Ahvaz but hopped out at a crossroads to await a lift to Shush. Shush is a small town in Khuzestan province roughly 200 kilometres from Ahvaz, the provincial capital and ultimate destination of the bus. Khuzestan is famous for and positively dripping with two things: history and oil. It has been the capital of key civilisations stretching back some six millennia that we know of and almost certainly more. The first traces of habitation in the region have been dated even earlier, to 7000 BCE. It is believed that a lost civilisation going back to the fourth millennium BCE developed the area, making it one of the oldest known settlements in the world. In the middle of the third millennium BCE Shush, or Susa as it was known in the ancient world, became the capital of the Elamites, who conquered much of Babylonia at the height of their powers in the second millennium BCE. The renowned biblical king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar I (c. 1126–1103 BCE), defeated the waning Elamite civilisation in the twelfth century BCE, plundering Susa’s riches – most notably the statue of the Babylonian sun god Marduk that had been taken from its homeland during earlier Elamite conquests. Susa was again sacked and almost completely destroyed by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal between 645 and 640 BCE, just prior to the time that the biblical figures Daniel and Nehemiah lived in the city during the Babylonian captivity of Judah. The ancient city’s fortunes were revived in the following century by Cyrus the Great (c. 559–529 BCE) and his son Cambyses II (529–522 BCE) in turn. After Cambyses’s death, Darius I chose Susa as the site of his winter palace. The city saw Alexander and his successors the Seleucids come and go, enjoyed a renaissance under the Sasanians, who ruled Persia between the third century BCE and the seventh century CE, and was again sacked by the invading Arab armies marching under the banner of Islam in 638 CE. Susa was again rebuilt and enjoyed a bout of relative peace for a few hundred years only to be lost in the murky tracts of time after Genghis Khan swept through the region in a grim wave of destruction and bloodshed in the thirteenth century, making it another one of the many victims of the Mongol invasions that devastated Iran and many other parts of the Middle East.

For centuries the great ancient capital of Susa lay buried, forgotten by one and all until just over 150 years ago when a British archaeologist by the name of W.K. Loftus unearthed the remains of the lost city in 1852. The archaeological baton was then passed to the ever-fastidious French, who constructed the Château de Morgan, a fortress that still lords over the small town, behind whose sturdy walls they could carry on their work unperturbed by the wild tribesmen beyond. Modern-day Shush has since re-emerged as a small town thriving from tourism and the agricultural produce of its fertile land.

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