Susa was ancient long before Darius arrived. The city had been a center of Elamite civilization for millennia, strategically positioned in the lowlands of what is now Khuzestan province in southwestern Iran. Darius chose it as his favorite capital, the winter residence where the court escaped the harsher climate of Persepolis. Construction of the palace complex began around 521 BC and continued under his son Xerxes, then his grandsons Artaxerxes I and Darius II. The palace was built parallel to the great works at Persepolis, the two projects feeding off each other's innovations. The distinctive Persian column -- topped by paired bull capitals -- was likely developed at Susa before being refined at Persepolis.

The DSf inscription itemizes the construction with a specificity that borders on obsessive. Babylonians dug the foundations down to bedrock, then packed rubble to depths of 40 cubits. They molded the sun-dried brick. Medes and Egyptians adorned the walls with the glazed siliceous bricks that became Susa's signature -- brilliant panels of archers in procession, winged lions, griffins, and sphinxes, many of which now fill galleries at the Louvre. Lydians and Egyptians worked the wood. Medes and Egyptians crafted the gold. The audience hall, the Apadana, measured 109 by 109 meters, its roof supported by 36 massive columns with three sets of 12 columns holding up the portico roofs. The palace was not merely a building. It was a statement about what an empire could accomplish when it marshaled resources from the Indus to the Mediterranean.

The palace did not survive its own dynasty intact. A fire during the reign of Artaxerxes I, sometime in the mid-fifth century BC, destroyed much of the complex. Fifty years later, Artaxerxes II undertook a partial restoration. But the palace's fate was sealed in December 331 BC, when Alexander the Great's Macedonian army captured Susa and plundered its treasures. By then, Darius III had already fled, and the empire Darius I had built was collapsing city by city. The palace's wealth -- the accumulated gold and silver of generations -- went into Macedonian coffers. What Alexander left behind, time continued to dismantle.

Today the palace site in modern Shush is an archaeological landscape more notable for what it has lost than what it retains. Urban development since the 1930s has encroached on the ruins. Erosion has eaten at the remaining walls. Illegal excavations have scattered artifacts. Iraqi bombardment during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War added another layer of destruction. The most spectacular surviving elements of Darius's palace are no longer at Susa at all. The Frieze of Archers, the winged lion reliefs, the sphinx panels, the bull capitals -- the artistic achievements that made the palace extraordinary -- sit in the Louvre in Paris, thousands of miles from the Khuzestan plain where they were created. The DSf inscription fragments, scattered across museums, still speak in Darius's voice: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, enumerating the workers and materials of a palace that was meant to last forever.