PASARGADAE, the spacious capital and last resting place of Cyrus the Great (559-530 BCE). Located in northern Fārs in the fertile and well-watered Dasht-i Murghab (Dat-e morḡāb), the site stands 1,900 m above sea level at 30°15 N and 53°14 E. In a straight line, Pasargadae lies 40 km to the northeast of Persepolis; and, while the modern road takes 80 km to cover the distance between the two sites, the route taken by the pre-modern highway, following the relatively direct course of the River Pulvar through the spectacular Tang-i Bulaghi (Tang-e Bolāḡi), was only 50 km in length.
The Name. In 1967, shortly before the completion of his monograph on the Achaemenid Elamite fortification tablets found at Persepolis, R. T. Hallock came to realize (D. Stronach, personal communication) that the toponym Batrakata(s), which appears in this and other variant spellings on seven of the tablets, could well represent the Elamite form of the name of Cyrus capital. As Hallock (1969, p. 676) went on to indicate, this attractive possibility (first suggested by the relative closeness of the Elamite name to the well-known Greek form of the name, Pasargadai) finds a degree of corroboration in the contents of the tablets in question (dated to the years 497-491) in that they refer, inter alia, to a royal treasury and to royal stores at this location (see BATRAKATA), the name is first mentioned by Herodotus (i.125), who relates that this was the name of the most renowned of the Persian tribes. But since Herodotus fails to mention Pasargadae as a place-name, the possibility that this claim was based on erroneous information cannot be completely discounted. For many years the only additional support for the name as a tribal designation came from the claims of two much later classical writers (see, e.g., Ptolemy, vi.8.12), to the effect that there was a tribe of this name in Carmania, and to Hans Triedlers not unreasonable conclusion (1962, col. 778) that the tribe in question could have migrated to this new location. Subsequently, Ilya Gershevitch, in response to the fact that the Greek name happens to occur in a plural form (such as could conceivably refer to a tribal entity as well as to the site), and in response to the newly available Elamite etymologies contained in the fortification tablets, has suggested that the original Iranian tribal name could have held the meaning those who wield solid clubs (Gershevitch, 1969, p. 168).
In the main, however, scholarly debate has concentrated on the likely spelling and meaning of the Iranian place-name that stand behind the classical place-name. In this context, most commentators have taken the view that there could have been a metathesis in the form of the name and they have presumed that, in its original form, it would have begun with the spelling Parsa. (For hypothetical reconstructions based on this premise, see Stronach, 1978, pp. 280-81 and Boucharlat, 2004, p. 352). It is most unlikely, however, that the readily recognizable form Parsa would have undergone a transformation into something else (Martin Schwartz, private communication); and, beyond this, the character of the newly discovered Elamite name, combined with the weight of classical testimony (rehearsed in detail in Triedler, 1962) would seem to rule out the likelihood of the proposed metathesis. If evidence to the contrary is sought, one has to refer either to the first century writings of Quintus Curtius (where the spelling Parsagada is attested) or to an explanation given, presumably by a Persian informant, to the historian of the late fourth century BCE, Anaximenes of Lampsakos, to the effect that the name of Cyrus capital meant encampment of the Persians (Anaximenes, Frag. 19J).
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