The monuments of the Achæmenid dynasty are gathered together upon three principal sites, the ruins of which have been explored in a fairly complete manner: Susa, where the Achæmenids, including Darius and his successors, erected their palaces at the spot on which the old capital of Elam, destroyed by Assurbanipal, formerly stood; Persepolis, the imposing remains of which form two groups, called at the present day Takht-i-Jemshid and Nakhsh-i-Rustam; lastly, the pile of ruins at Meshed-Murgab and Madar-i-Soleiman, two Persian villages in the valley of the Polvar, on the road from Ispahan to Shiraz, where, without doubt, the ancient city of Pasargadæ must have been. § I. CIVIL ARCHITECTURE. When Cyrus had his new capital, Pasargadæ, built in the valley of the Polvar, he had completed the destruction of the kingdom of Crœsus, finished the conquest of Asia Minor, and made himself master of Babylon. The precise date of the monuments of Meshed-Murgab is fixed by the cuneiform inscriptions, which, while they are all composed in honour of Cyrus, are written in three versions, Persian, Medic, and Assyrian, and consequently we cannot place them earlier than the conquest of Chaldæa in B.C. 538. In his victorious expeditions through regions remote from the table-land of Fars, his native country, such as Mesopotamia, Lydia, and the coasts of Asia Minor, Cyrus had the opportunity of observing monuments which must have astonished him by their architecture, and palaces which seemed to him far finer than those inhabited hitherto by his ancestors, princes of proverbial austerity and simplicity. He conceived the idea of constructing for himself a royal residence as sumptuous as those of Crœsus and Nabonidus, and of importing into the heart of Persia the architecture of Babylon and the Hellenic architecture of Asia Minor. His military successes assisted him wonderfully in this undertaking. The prisoners of war whom he captured at Babylon and in the Greek cities of Ionia became the workmen who built his palaces; and he allured the architects, whom he could not carry away by force, by loading them with wealth and honours. The successors of Cyrus continued, like him, to appeal to the artists of Greece, whose voluntary exile from their native country has often been remarked by historians. Pliny, for instance, cites a worker in bronze, Telephanes of Phocæa, who passed among his contemporaries as a worthy rival of Polycletus, Myron, and Pythagoras, and whom the kings of Persia, Darius and Xerxes, attracted to their court, where he exercised his craft during the greater part of his career.[53]