Persepolis, Iran · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Everyone climbs the great double staircase at Persepolis for the same reason, to stand among the fallen columns and the stone winged bulls and imagine the parties Darius and Xerxes once threw up here. What almost nobody stops to notice is what is missing from the carvings all around them. Cut into the stone of the Apadana staircase is a procession of twenty three nations of the empire, each in their own dress, each carrying a gift from home, Armenians with a horse, Nubians with an elephant tusk, Lydians with bowls, Bactrians leading a camel. And here is the thing that never makes the guidebooks. There is not a single scene of violence anywhere in it. No prisoners roped together, no bodies underfoot, no king clubbing a smaller enemy. Walk into an Egyptian temple or an Assyrian palace of the same age and you cannot move for captives in chains and rulers trampling the defeated. Persepolis shows none of it. Instead a Persian usher takes each foreign delegate gently by the hand, the way you would lead a guest to the table, and walks him up towards the king. For an empire that stretched from Greece to India, it chose to picture itself not as a conqueror standing on the necks of the beaten, but as a host, receiving the whole known world as it arrived to bring gifts. I find that quietly extraordinary. The columns are the thing everyone photographs. The real marvel is the handhold, carved into rock two and a half thousand years ago, where power decided to show itself as welcome.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.