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Kish Island

Kish Island has been mentioned in history variously as Kamtina, Arakia, Arakata, and Ghiss. In 325 BC, Alexander the Great commissioned Niarkus to set off an expedition voyage into the Sea of Oman and the Persian Gulf. Niarkus's writings on Arakata is the first known mention of Kish Island in antiquity.[1] When Marco Polo visited the Imperial court in China, he commented on the Emperor's wife pearls, he was told that they were from Kish.[2] In the 1970s the last Shah of Iran turned the island into a luxury resort for the international elite complete with a Grand Casino (now closed) and an airport designed to handle the Concorde. After the Islamic Revolution, Kish Island became a duty-free shopping center.

Pasargad History

Its ruins lie 87 km (54 mi) northeast of Persepolis, in present Fars province of Iran, and was the first capital of the Achaemenid Empire. The construction of the capital city by Cyrus the Great, begun in 546 BCE or later, was left unfinished, for Cyrus died in battle in 530 BCE or 529 BCE. Pasargadae remained the Persian capital until Darius began assembling another in Persepolis. The modern name comes from the Greek, but may derive from an earlier one used during Achaemenid times, Pâthragâda.meaning the garden of Pars

The archaeological site covers 1.6 square kilometres and includes a structure commonly believed to be the mausoleum of Cyrus, the fortress of Toll-e Takht sitting on top of a nearby hill, and the remains of two royal palaces and gardens. The gardens provide the earliest known example of the Persian chahar bagh, or four-fold garden design. (See Persian Gardens.)

Latest research on Pasargadae’s structural engineering has shown the Achaemenid engineers constructed the city to withstand a severe earthquake, at what would today be classified as a '7.0' on the Richter magnitude scale. The foundations are today classified as having a "Base Isolation" design, much the same as what is presently used in countries for the construction of facilities - such as nuclear power plants - that require insulation from the effects of a seismic activity.

The monument generally assumed to be the tomb of Cyrus the Great.The most important monument in Pasargadae is the tomb of Cyrus the Great. It has six broad steps leading to the sepulchre, the chamber of which measures 3.17 m long by 2.11 m wide by 2.11 m high, and has a low and narrow entrance. Though there is no firm evidence identifying the tomb as that of Cyrus, Greek historians tell us that Alexander the Great believed it was so. When Alexander looted and destroyed Persepolis, he paid a visit to the tomb of Cyrus. Arrian, writing in the second century of the common era, recorded that Alexander commanded Aristobulus, one of his warriors, to enter the monument. Inside he found a golden bed, a table set with drinking vessels, a gold coffin, some ornaments studded with precious stones and an inscription of the tomb. No trace of any such inscription survives to modern times, and there is considerable disagreement to the exact wording of the text. Strabo reports that it read