The day a Roman emperor was led away by the hand

Here is a Naqsh-e Rustam detail, and it is not the part that first grabs you. You arrive for the tombs, four enormous crosses cut high into a cliff a few miles from Persepolis, the burial places of Achaemenid kings including Darius the Great, set so far up the rock they look built for giants. And they are genuinely staggering.

But the carving that stayed with me is much lower down, cut centuries later by a different dynasty. It shows the Persian king Shapur the First on horseback, huge and unhurried, and standing in front of him a Roman emperor called Valerian, held by the wrist like a man being led away. It records the battle of Edessa in the year 260, when Shapur captured a serving Roman emperor alive. It is the only time in the whole of Rome's history that one of its emperors was taken prisoner by a foreign enemy.

I painted the cliff in watercolour and ink, the tombs above and that quiet, human sized triumph below, and the whole time I kept thinking about how Rome carved its victories everywhere, and here, on a Persian rock face, is the one carved by the other side. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here:  Naqsh-e Rustam, Fars · Travel Poster