Persepolis, the Empire's Stone Stage

Darius I didn't build Persepolis to live in — he had palaces for that. He built it as a stage: a place to receive the empire once a year and remind everyone, in stone, exactly how vast that empire was.

Climb the grand staircase today and you'll find the same reliefs that greeted Persian nobles 2,500 years ago: long processions of delegates from across the empire — Elamites, Babylonians, Lydians, Bactrians, Indians — each carved carrying a gift native to their homeland. Horses, textiles, precious metals, even, famously, a pair of camels. It's a census carved in rock, and a not-so-subtle reminder of who paid tribute to whom.

The city was less a home than a message: the Achaemenid empire stretched from the Aegean to the Indus, and here was the proof, permanently on display for every visiting dignitary.

In 330 BCE, Alexander the Great's forces burned Persepolis to the ground — accounts differ on whether it was calculated revenge for Persia's earlier burning of Athens, or a drunken accident that got out of hand. Either way, what's left today are the bones: broken columns, gatehouses, and those same stone processions, still marching toward a throne room that no longer exists.