Villes achéménides : essai de définition
Résumé
In the frame of his archaeological works carried out in Iran, Rémy Boucharlat provided seminal
contributions to our understanding of the Achaemenid royal foundations of Pasargadae and Persepolis.
During the 2000’s, the restart of fieldwork on these sites using innovative methodological solutions was based
on large-scale surveys beyond the royal palaces complexes. The new results obtained have shed light on the
layout of these sites that were real cities as it has been firmly demonstrated by analyses of written sources and
former archaeological data. A comprehensive view of these recent data allows us to suggest a draft reconstruction
of the cities layouts. Pasargadae and Persepolis provide us with two comparable examples of how the
Achaemenid Persians planned cities: they were designed as much open urban landscapes formed with several
divided settled places sheltering residents and activities of the city, distributed over hundreds of hectares and
encompassed by green areas. Compared to the “classic” Mesopotamian cities, the Persian cases were new
types of cities characterized by the central place of gardens and parks as well as by the absence of a single
populated and densely built core protected by ramparts. Characteristics shared with the Persian cities, that
finally we describe as diffuse, are present in some sites scattered over the whole Empire suggesting that this
new way of thinking the urban landscapes could have served as model. The thoughts presented here are the
starting point of further projects concerning more accurate definitions and analyzes of these particular
cityscapes.