Susa Ziggurat

32.1892°N, 48.2597°E.

The ziggurat at Susa — ancient Shushan, the Elamite and later Achaemenid Persian capital — in modern Khuzestan Province, Iran. Construction date approximately 1150 BCE during the Middle Elamite period under king Shutruk-Nahhunte I, who is also the king who carried the Code of Hammurabi stele away from Sippar to Susa as war booty in approximately 1158 BCE — where French excavators recovered it intact in 1901 and removed it to the Louvre. Original base of the ziggurat approximately 50 metres per side; original height around 30 metres. Excavated by the French Archaeological Mission to Persia from 1897 onward under successive directors including Jacques de Morgan, Roland de Mecquenem, and Roman Ghirshman. Susa is named twenty-two times in the Hebrew Bible — as the setting for the entirety of the Book of Esther and for visions in Daniel — and was the principal capital of the Achaemenid kings Darius and Xerxes.

A ziggurat in the city where the Code of Hammurabi spent three thousand years before being carried to Paris, in a capital that appears in three of the world's major scriptural traditions.