The Elamite Relief at Naqš-e Rostam

Naqš-e Rostam is famous because Darius and three of his successors were buried there in a new style of tomb cut deep into the rock, and for the mysterious stone cube (Kaˁba) which probably also dates to his reign. The reliefs by the Sasanid kings, and the long inscription of Shahpur boasting of his victories over the Romans, are also renowned.

If you climb up from the parking lot past the souvenir shops and toilets through the remains of the Sasanid ring wall, and follow the cliffs beneath the tombs of the kings of old and past the Kaˁba, you will find something else.

Anyone familiar with Iranian art should be able to assign this relief to the Sasanid period (224-642 CE). The early Sasanid kings commissioned a flurry of rock reliefs to ensure that everyone remembered that they had been granted kingship by Ahuramazda and triumphed over the Parthians, the Romans, and many other enemies. But that off-hand assessment is not the whole story. Those smooth, empty panels are not typical of Sasanid reliefs …

The head floating in one of those panels is carved in a different style …

That coiled pattern under one of the busts does not belong either …

And the figure at the furthest right is completely out of place. All of these things are typical of the Middle Elamite period around 2000 BCE, like the Lullubian reliefs at Sar-e Pol-e Zahab.

When Darius came and ordered his tomb to be built a few hundred meters down the cliff, the relief was already about 1500 years old. If he had asked learned Babylonians in his household, they would probably have given him a similar number, because some of Middle Elamite reliefs bore Akkadian inscriptions which mentioned kings from the King Lists, and because Babylonian scholars were interested in the styles of art and calligraphy used in particular historical periods. Darius ordered that his bigger, finer, deeper relief be placed within sight of the old one while leaving it untouched.

Eight hundred years later, another set of Persians did something very odd. They carefully erased the old relief, then carved their own relief around its margins to celebrate their king and his favourite god. But they left just enough that passers by could see there had been an earlier relief, and they did their best not to make their own relief impinge into the space which the earlier sculptures had occupied. This meant that most of the figures in the background of their scene are busts rather than full-height figures, and that most of the relief is now smooth and empty. When the first of their chisels touched the face of the cliff, the Elamite relief was about as far from them in time as they are now from us.