Villes achéménides : essai de définition

International audienceIn the frame of his archaeological works carried out in Iran, Rémy Boucharlat provided seminalcontributions to our understanding of the Achaemenid royal foundations of Pasargadae and Persepolis.During the 2000’s, the restart of fieldwork on these sites using innovative methodological solutions was basedon large-scale surveys beyond the royal palaces complexes. The new results obtained have shed light on thelayout of these sites that were real cities as it has been firmly demonstrated by analyses of written sources andformer archaeological data. A comprehensive view of these recent data allows us to suggest a draft reconstructionof the cities layouts. Pasargadae and Persepolis provide us with two comparable examples of how theAchaemenid Persians planned cities: they were designed as much open urban landscapes formed with severaldivided settled places sheltering residents and activities of the city, distributed over hundreds of hectares andencompassed by green areas. Compared to the “classic” Mesopotamian cities, the Persian cases were newtypes of cities characterized by the central place of gardens and parks as well as by the absence of a singlepopulated and densely built core protected by ramparts. Characteristics shared with the Persian cities, thatfinally we describe as diffuse, are present in some sites scattered over the whole Empire suggesting that thisnew way of thinking the urban landscapes could have served as model. The thoughts presented here are thestarting point of further projects concerning more accurate definitions and analyzes of these particularcityscapes