Ctesiphon

• 1. Introduction

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  Ctesiphon sat on the eastern bank of the Tigris, about 35 kilometres southeast of what is now Baghdad. In the late 6th and early 7th century, some accounts listed it as the largest city in the world. What made a city that vast simply vanish? And why, after eight hundred years as the beating heart of Iranian power, does almost nothing of it survive above ground? Those are the questions at the center of this story. One arch remains standing in the Iraqi town of Salman Pak. It is called the Taq Kasra, and it was once part of a royal palace. The journey from imperial capital to near-total ruin is one of the most dramatic collapses in ancient urban history.

• 2. A City Born from a Camp

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  Mithridates I of Parthia planted a military camp across the river from the old Hellenistic city of Seleucia, and from that camp Ctesiphon grew. The founding dates to the late 120s BC. The choice of location was not accidental. The previous Parthian capitals, Mithradatkirt and Hecatompylos at Hyrcania, sat dangerously close to Scythian raiding routes, and moving the seat of power westward put distance between the court and that threat.

  The geographer Strabo captured the city's strange hybrid character in a passage that has survived the centuries. He called it "a large village" that the Parthian kings used as a winter residence, chosen deliberately to spare the people of Seleucia from having soldiers quartered among them. The kings summered at Ecbatana and Hyrcania, Strabo noted, because of "the prevalence of their ancient renown." But winter after winter in Ctesiphon transformed the place. Markets appeared, craftsmen followed the court, and buildings rose. What had been a camp became a city.

  The reign of Gotarzes I marked a peak for Ctesiphon as a political and commercial center. By around 58 BC, during the reign of Orodes II, it was formally the empire's capital. Seleucia, directly across the water, gradually merged with it, and other nearby settlements were absorbed. The result was a sprawling cosmopolitan entity that later Arabic sources would call al-Mada'in: "The Cities," plural, because no single name felt adequate for the whole.

• 3. Target of Rome

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  Rome looked east and saw Ctesiphon as a prize worth crossing deserts to reach. The city was captured by Roman forces four or five times across its history, three of those captures falling within the 2nd century alone.

  The emperor Trajan took the city in 116, but his successor Hadrian chose to give it back the very next year, in 117, as part of a peace settlement. The Roman general Avidius Cassius seized it again in 164, then abandoned it when that war too ended in peace. The most brutal visit came in 197, when the emperor Septimius Severus sacked Ctesiphon and carried off thousands of its inhabitants, selling them into slavery.

  Later, in 233, Severus Alexander advanced toward the city but met a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Sasanian ruler Ardashir I, as the historian Herodian recorded. In 283, the emperor Carus sacked it again, this time unopposed during a period of Sasanian civil upheaval. The year 363 brought the Battle of Ctesiphon, and the site witnessed further Roman military action. In 627, the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius surrounded the city and left only after the Persians accepted his peace terms.

  Each Roman assault tested the city, stripped it of people or treasure, and then receded. Ctesiphon survived them all. What it could not survive came later, and from a different direction entirely.

• 4. Sasanian Splendor

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  By 226, Ctesiphon had passed into Sasanian hands, and the new dynasty poured energy into expanding it. The city was divided into named districts, each with its own character. The oldest inhabited area, on the eastern side, bore the Arabic designation "the Old City." There the Sasanian residence known as the White Palace stood. The southern district, called Asbānbar or Aspānbar, was known for its halls, riches, games, stables, and baths, and the Taq Kasra was located there.

  The western bank held Veh-Ardashir, a name meaning "the good city of Ardashir" in Middle Persian. Jews called the same district Mahoza; Christians called it Kokhe; Arabs called it Behrasir. Veh-Ardashir housed many wealthy Jewish families and served as the seat of the Nestorian patriarch's church. Smaller districts carried names like Hanbu Shapur, Darzanidan, Veh Jondiu-Khosrow, Nawinabad, and Kardakadh.

  The city measured 30 square kilometres. That figure puts its scale in perspective: it was more than twice the surface area of fourth-century imperial Rome, which covered roughly 13.7 square kilometres. Population was equally mixed. Arameans, Persians, Greeks, and Assyrians lived alongside one another. Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism all had followers within the walls, and the Manichean community maintained a presence there as well, fixing their "patriarchate of Babylon" in Ctesiphon during the Umayyad period.

  Khosrow I added to the city's fabric after conquering Antioch in 541. He built an entirely new settlement near Ctesiphon for the population he brought back, naming it Veh-Antiok-Xusrō, which translates roughly as "better than Antioch Khosrow built this." Local residents called it Rumagan, meaning "town of the Romans." John of Ephesus, writing after a later campaign in 573, cited a letter reporting that no fewer than 292,000 persons had been deported from Dara, Apamia, and other Syrian towns to populate that settlement, though John himself noted the figure was probably not meant to be taken literally.

• 5. Plague, Coup, and Collapse

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  In 590, a member of the House of Mihran named Bahram Chobin drove the newly installed Sasanian ruler Khosrow II out of Iraq and seized the region. One year later, Khosrow II returned with Byzantine military support and took back his domains. His long reign brought a shift in the city's prestige. Khosrow preferred his winter residence at Dastagerd, and some of the great fame of al-Mada'in diminished as a result.

  In 627, Heraclius besieged the city. In 628, a deadly plague struck Ctesiphon, the surrounding area, and much of the western Sasanian Empire, killing Khosrow's own son and successor, Kavad II. In 629, a Mihranid usurper named Shahrbaraz briefly held the city before being assassinated by supporters of Khosrow II's daughter Borandukht. After that, Ctesiphon became a battleground between two internal Sasanian factions: the Pahlav faction under the House of Ispahbudhan and the Parsig faction under Piruz Khosrow.

  By the time the Arab Muslim forces arrived in the mid-630s, the city was already weakened by plague, dynastic chaos, and years of war on multiple fronts. The Battle of al-Qādisiyyah broke Sasanian military power. The Arabs attacked Ctesiphon and occupied it in early 637. The military officer Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas made peace with the inhabitants of Veh-Antiok-Xusrō and Veh-Ardashir. Those who stayed were required to acknowledge Muslim authority and pay the jizya tribute. When the Arab forces reached Ctesiphon itself, they found it already emptied. The Sasanian royal family, nobles, and troops had fled. The throne hall of the Taq Kasra was briefly repurposed as a mosque.

• 6. Archaeology and What Remains

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  German and American archaeologists arrived at the site in the early 20th century. A German Oriental Society expedition led by Oscar Reuther excavated at Ctesiphon in 1928-29, concentrating on an area called Qasr bint al-Qadi on the western part of the site. In the winter of 1931-32, a joint expedition from the German State Museums and the Metropolitan Museum of Art continued the work, covering areas including Ma'aridh, Tell Dheheb, the Taq-i Kisra, Selman Pak, and Umm ez-Za'tir under the direction of Ernst Kühnel.

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an Italian team from the University of Turin, directed by Antonio Invernizzi, worked on the opposite side of the Tigris, identifying that area as Veh Ardashir. Their work focused mainly on restoration at the palace of Khosrow II.

  In 2013, the Iraqi government contracted for restoration of the Taq Kasra, intending to develop it as a tourist attraction. The arch is estimated to date from somewhere between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD. It is the most conspicuous structure still standing from what was once the largest city in the world. Caliph Al-Mansur, who founded the Abbasid capital at Baghdad in the 760s, had attempted to demolish the old palace and reuse its bricks for his own construction. He stopped only because the undertaking proved too vast. Even Baghdad was partly built with materials taken from Ctesiphon's ruins. The Manichean community, meanwhile, had left the city by the ninth century and moved their patriarchate up the Silk Road to Samarkand.