Immortal Guard Warriors at  Ancient Susa 

Were these soldiers part of the 10,000 Immortals faced by Alexander the Great?

These 5 foot tall archers were the royal Immortal Guard from the palace of Darius at Susa (ancient Shushan). These archers are seen wearing colorful ceremonial clothing decorated with tiny stars, from their woven and twisted headbands, hair and beards, even to their shoes.  Their clothes are decorated with tiny stars. Their bows, arrows and spears were gold and silver.

The bright colored enameled tiles used to line the entire walls, bringing to life the illustrious and lavish celebrations that existed at the palace of the kings of ancient Persia.

All the colors seen here are reminiscent of the lavish banquet mentioned in the Book of Esther in the Bible (white, green, blue, purple, silver, gold), when the king of Persia invited nobles and princes from all over his empire to a feast at his palace.

Guests would ascend a wide stone staircase entering a gate into the courtyard. All along the path there were the elaborate carvings along the walls, of nobles and princes, royal guards, horses and chariots. Representatives from the lands and provinces of the Persian Empire bringing tribute to the ruler of the world, king Darius (522-486 B.C.). Their destination was the great audience hall and palace of the king, a place of tremendous wealth and luxury. According to history when Alexander the Great marched into Susa he took 40,000 talents of gold which was about 1200 tons.

Alexander the Great faced hordes of soldiers like the archers shown here when he conquered the world of the Persians. The Persian Empire was vast, extending from India to Greece, and down to Ethiopia.

These archers of the royal guard revealed on these brilliantly glazed ceramic tiles of blue and gold discovered at Susa are important discovery in the study of Biblical archaeology. It shows us the enemies of Alexander the Great who is alluded to in the Book of Daniel, and the luxurious wealth of the Persians as  mentioned in the Book of Esther regarding the royal banquet of the king of Persia.

Esther 1:6-7 "Where were white, green, and blue, hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble: the beds were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue, and white, and black, marble. And they gave them drink in vessels of gold, (the vessels being diverse one from another,) and royal wine in abundance, according to the state of the king."

Ezra 5:7 "They sent a letter unto him, wherein was written thus; Unto Darius the king, all peace."   

Esther 1:2-5 "in those days, when the king Ahasuerus sat on the throne of his kingdom, which was in Shushan the palace, In the third year of his reign, he made a feast unto all his princes and his servants; the power of Persia and Media, the nobles and princes of the provinces, being before him: When he shewed the riches of his glorious kingdom and the honour of his excellent majesty many days, even an hundred and fourscore days. And when these days were expired, the king made a feast unto all the people that were present in Shushan the palace, both unto great and small, seven days, in the court of the garden of the king's palace;

Louvre Museum Excerpt

Frieze of Archers
Achaemenid Persian Period, reign of Darius I, c. 510 BC

Frieze of Archers

This decorative frieze of polychrome glazed brick shows an army, the men carrying spears, bows and quivers. Are they the royal guards of Darius I (522-486), whom Herodotus called “the Immortals,” or might they represent an idealized image of the Persian people? The frieze is probably inspired by the brick friezes of Babylon, although the technique is different. That may be a legacy from the Middle Elamite Period, which saw the appearance of decoration in glazed siliceous brick.

Description

Archers on parade

The Frieze of Archers had two symmetrical lines of soldiers, parading at a slow march. Each archer’s hands are joined together on the shaft of his spear, and hanging from his shoulders is a bow, its ends in the form of duck’s heads, and a quiver. The butt of the spear, held vertical, rests on the front foot, shod like the other in a laced ankle-boot. The archers wear the long Persian robe, braided and pleated over the legs, the outline of whose ample sleeve describes a curve towards the belted waist. They are bearded, and their thick curly hair is massed at the nape of the neck, held back by a diadem of beaten metal. Each brick is molded from a quart-based body; its outer face is rectangular, but the brick tapers towards the back, a little like a quoin, so as to leave room for mortar when the decorated faces are butted up against each other. The frieze combines low relief and color, with glazes of green, brown, white and yellow separated by fine cloisons of siliceous body.


An inheritance from the Elamite period?

Decorative frieze was certainly inspired by the Processional Way in Babylon, constructed by Nebuchadnezar II (604-562), but the technique is different. The Babylonians used clay for their bricks, rather than the siliceous material employed here. The artists who worked for Darius may have revived a technique developed at Susa by the Elamites in the Late Elamite Period at the end of the second millennium. Polychrome brick decoration in Iran would have a great future in the architecture of the Islamic age.


The Immortals?

Although the British archaeologist W. K. Loftus, the first to excavate at Susa, had identified the main lines of the apadana, he had recognized only isolated motifs, palmettes and rosettes, from its glazed brick decoration. When Marcel Dieulafoy continued his predecessor’s work he discovered enough bricks to make possible the fairly convincing reconstruction displayed at the Louvre: two panels representing a procession of archers, framed by decorative motifs and surmounted by crenellations inspired by the facades of the rock-tombs of Persepolis and Naqsh-e Rustam. The rare inscribed bricks, on which one can still make out the name of Darius, were positioned in the middle. The archers were then assembled as separate panels. While the Lion Frieze was found on the ground at its original position in the East Court of the palace, the exact location of the Frieze of Archers is unknown, countless bricks and fragments having been found more or less all over the place when the apadana was excavated. Their number does suggest a hypothesis: the archers may have been positioned at regular intervals in several registers, over the height of the wall, as at Babylon. They would then have occupied a great part of the exterior walls of the palace, extending over hundreds of metres. How should such a colossal ensemble be understood? Were these men the ‘Immortals,’ the wealthy élite regiment of 10,000 men? Or might they rather represent an ideal image, repeated to infinity, of the ‘Persian people,’ a constituent element of the unified empire brought together under the rule of the king, to whom it might have been necessary to accord a special place in the old Elamite capital of Susa?