Taq Kasra, also called the Arch of Ctesiphon, is a monumental arch that once formed the throne hall of the royal palace of the Sasanian kings at Ctesiphon, near the modern town of Salman Pak in Iraq, roughly 35 kilometers southeast of Baghdad on the Tigris River. Scholars date the arch to between the third and sixth centuries AD, with several Sasanian rulers proposed as its builder, and it survives as an exceptional feat of Sasanian engineering, a single large vaulted arch of a scale unmatched by earlier Mesopotamian construction. After the Muslim conquest of the city in 637, the throne hall was briefly used as a mosque, underscoring its monumental status even after the fall of the Sasanian Empire, and today the arch is the most conspicuous surviving structure of Ctesiphon, a symbol of the city's history as a capital of the Parthian and Sasanian empires for more than eight centuries, and it has appeared on Iraqi postage since 1923.
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