Persepolis

Persepolis, in what is now southern Iran, was founded around 518 BCE by Darius I as the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the largest empire the ancient world had yet seen. Unlike the empire's administrative capitals at Susa and Babylon, Persepolis appears to have served primarily as a stage for the Nowruz (Persian New Year) festival, when delegations from across the empire's subject nations — vividly depicted bringing tribute in the famous relief carvings of the Apadana staircase, showing Medes, Elamites, Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, and many others in their distinctive dress — would gather to formally acknowledge the King of Kings.

In 330 BCE, Alexander the Great's army captured and looted Persepolis, and shortly afterward the palace complex was destroyed by fire. Ancient sources, including the historians Diodorus and Plutarch, record conflicting accounts of why: one tradition holds that Alexander ordered the burning deliberately, in retaliation for the Persian King Xerxes's destruction of Athens during the Greco-Persian Wars over a century earlier; another, more colourful account claims the fire began during a drunken celebration, started on the suggestion of the Athenian courtesan Thaïs as a symbolic act of revenge that Alexander later regretted. Archaeological evidence shows the fire was intense and widespread across the complex, but whether it was premeditated state policy or impulsive destruction remains debated by historians, with the truth likely obscured by the propaganda needs of the various Hellenistic successor states that later told the story.