Persepolis

Persepolis was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, built from around 515 BC on a vast stone platform, partly artificial and partly cut from the adjoining mountainside, in the plain of Marvdasht in what is now Fars province, Iran. Begun under Darius I and extended by his successors Xerxes I and Artaxerxes I, the complex functioned not as an ordinary city but as a seasonal ceremonial centre, its palaces including the great columned audience hall known as the Apadana, the Gate of All Nations, and the Throne Hall, all built of limestone, mud brick and cedar and decorated with relief carvings of tribute bearing delegations from across the empire. When Alexander the Great's army captured Persepolis in 330 BC, fire, reportedly beginning in the Hadish Palace, swept through and destroyed most of its wooden elements, though the same fire is thought to have helped preserve some of the site's clay administrative archive by baking it. Its ruins, with their standing columns and carved staircases, remain one of the principal surviving monuments of Achaemenid architecture.