The literature on Persepolis, this crown jewel of the ancient Near Eastern art, is either reports of purely academic investigation or phantasies of uninformed profit seekers. The present volume fulfils the need for an authoritative and well-illustrated description of the monuments by one who served as their custo¬dian for many years and who is universally acknowle¬dged as an archaeologist and art historian of the first rank. Professor Shahbazi takes the reader through Persepolis, step by step, and describes the remains with accuracy and clarity, leaving no detail unexplai¬ned. The lavish illustrations chosen carefully and learnedly follow the description without overbur¬dening the text with a series of unrelated pictures. The bibliography is designed to enhance the reader›s appreciation of Persepolis and the art of the ancient Near East.

A. Shapur Shahbazi was born in Shiraz and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Archaeology from the Uni-versity of London. He founded the Institute of Achaemenid Research at Persepolis in 1974 and ser¬ved as its Director till 1979. He has taught at the universities of Shiraz, Tehran, Goettingen, Harvard, Columbia, and Eastern Oregon. As a world renown scholar, he is the author of seventeen books and 150 articles in English, Persian, and German. His books include Cyrus the Great (Shiraz 1970), The Reigne of Darius the Great (Tehran 1971), The Old Persian Inscriptions of the Persepolis Platform (London 1985), Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography (Harvard Uni¬versity Press 1991), and Persepolis Illustrated, the fourth revised and enlarged edition of which is the present volume. He was recently a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University and currently serves as the Advisor to the newly constituted Foundation for the Parsa-Pasargadae Research.