Gate of All Nations

Visitors to Persepolis still enter the way ambassadors did 2,500 years ago: up a broad double staircase with shallow steps — built, it is often said, so that dignitaries in long robes could climb with grace — to the Gate of All Nations, built by Xerxes I. Two colossal bulls guard the western doorway and two winged bull-men with bearded human heads, in the Assyrian tradition, face the east.

High on the walls, a trilingual inscription in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian records that Xerxes built the gate “by the grace of Ahura Mazda”. Look closer and you will also find names carved by 19th-century travellers and explorers — a reminder of how long this site has captured imaginations.