Ta’mir (Repair): Art and Architectural Restoration in Achaemenid Persia

From palace facades to carved royal inscriptions, discover how the Achaemenids maintained, mended, and renewed their monumental architecture. This virtual symposium brings together scholars to explore ancient repair practices of care, materials, techniques, and what they reveal about craftsmanship in the ancient world.

Architectural repair, تعمیر or ta’mir, in modern Persian usage, was a fundamental component of monumental construction in Achaemenid Persia between the late sixth and late fourth centuries BCE. This virtual conversation examines evidence for sustained intervention in the built palace and tomb environments of Pasargadae, Persepolis, and Susa, approaching these sites not as static monuments but as continuously maintained architectural systems. Drawing on archeological, archival, and material analysis, the papers investigate a wide range of repair techniques practiced, including iron clamp stabilization, stone patching, block replacement, mudbrick intervention, and the recutting of inscribed surfaces.

Rather than treating such interventions as secondary or purely restorative, the conversations position care and repair as integral to architectural production itself, as a set of technical operations through which structures were stabilized, modified, and sustained over time. By reconstructing these practices across multiple sites and materials, we propose that Achaemenid Persian architecture was defined not only by initial construction but by ongoing processes of maintenance and adjustment. Repair emerges as a constitutive aspect of architectural form, linking material knowledge, labor organization, and imperial building practices.

Speakers:

• Alexander Nagel, FIT
• Margaret Cool Root, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Atefeh Shekofteh, Uppsala University
• Omid Oudbashi, University of Gothenburg
• Soheil Delshad, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Centre Sarikhani d’Études Élamites, Paris

This event is free and open to the public.