Notes

The Oxus Treasure, some 180 pieces of Achaemenid gold and silver found near the Amu Darya in the 1870s, holds the finest metalwork of the Persian empire: armlets ending in griffin heads, a gold chariot drawn by four horses, and rings and plaques that show how far royal craft had travelled.

At Persepolis, every ambassador to the king of kings passed first through the Gate of All Nations, raised by Xerxes I in the fifth century BCE. Winged bulls and human-headed lamassu guarded its doorways, and its walls carried the king's inscription in three languages and three scripts of the empire.

On a cliff at Behistun in Kermanshah, Darius I carved his victory over nine rebel kings in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. The same text, copied and sent across the empire, later became the key that let scholars read cuneiform again after two thousand years of silence.

At Gonabad in Khorasan, the Qasabeh qanat has carried water underground for roughly 2,700 years, among the oldest and deepest qanats on earth. Its mother well sinks more than 300 metres, and its tunnels still water fields in a desert where surface rivers cannot be trusted.

Hattusha, capital of the Hittite empire in today's Turkey, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1986). Its Lions' Gate, the Yazılıkaya rock sanctuary and more than 8 km of walls with over 100 towers survive.

The Kikkuli horse-training manual, found among the Hittite tablets, uses Indo-Aryan number words such as aika, tera, panza, satta and nava for one, three, five, seven and nine: relatives of the Sanskrit count.

At Erebuni in present-day Yerevan, King Argishti I of Urartu founded a fortress in 782 BCE, its date fixed by a cuneiform inscription carved for the new stronghold. The city that grew from it gives Yerevan one of the oldest documented founding dates of any capital still inhabited.