The Achaemenid Parasol: Background, Diffusion and Legacy

Starting from the well-known examples carved on the doorjambs of some buildings on the Persepolis Terrace, this book aims to trace and analyse archaeological evidence of the use of the royal parasol at the court of the Persian Great King and in the wider territories subject to military and political control by the Achaemenid Dynasty. Imbued with a preeminent symbolic value pertaining to the ideological domain of kingship and retained as a sign of authority par excellence, the use of this peculiar element of the royal paraphernalia was already widespread before the Achaemenid Empire and survived its collapse, when it entered both the secular and religious imagery of Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic Central Asia and Northern India, before returning to Iran in the Late Antiquity