Persepolis
Darius I built the greatest palace at Persepolis on the western side of platform. This palace was called the "Apadana". The King of Kings used it for official audiences. The work began in 518 BC, and his son, Xerxes I, completed it 30 years later. The palace had a grand hall in the shape of a square, each side long with seventy-two columns, thirteen of which still stand on the enormous platform. Each column is high with a square Taurus (bull) and plinth. The columns carried the weight of the vast and heavy ceiling. The tops of the columns were made from animal sculptures such as two-headed lions, eagles, human beings and cows (cows were symbols of fertility and abundance in ancient Iran). The columns were joined to each other with the help of oak and cedar beams, which were brought from Lebanon. The walls were covered with a layer of mud and stucco to a depth of 5 cm, which was used for bonding, and then covered with the greenish stucco which is found throughout the palaces.
List of book-burning incidents
The burning of Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, about 330 BC, was one of the stains on the record of
Alexander the Great, contrasting with the efforts he otherwise made to act humanely towards the defeated Persians. Various accounts
attribute it to an accident, a drunken revelry by Alexander's soldiers, or a deliberate act of revenge for the burning of the Acropolis of Athens by the Achaemenid army centuries before. There was evidently no deliberate targeting of books and written material, but – though not mentioned in Greek and Latin accounts – such destruction did result from the setting on fire of palaces made mostly of highly combustible cedar wood. The "Book of Arda Wiraz", a Zoroastrian work composed in the 3rd or 4th century CE, mentions the destruction of Royal Archives and of "all the Avesta (Zoroastrian scriptures) and Zend (commentraries)" which were "written with gold ink upon prepared cow-skins". The "Bundahishn" – an encyclopædiaic collection of Zoroastrian cosmogony and cosmology – also refers to "Aleskandar" (Alexander) having burned the Avesta following his defeat of "Dara" (Darius III). For this act of sacrilege, Alexander's name was regularly accompanied in Middle Persian Zoroastrian texts by the appelation "Gujastak" ("the Damned", or "the Evil"). As late as the 10th century CE, the native Iranian writer Biruni, in his "The Chronology of Ancient Nations", mentioned regretfully the loss of historiographical sources due to that burning.