At Naqsh-e Rustam, the cliff face rises forty metres above the Persian plain — a sheer wall of charcoal-grey limestone into which four royal tombs were cut twenty-four centuries ago. The carvings have lost every trace of their original pigment. What remains is bare stone, shadow and contour: the negative space of a civilisation's argument with time, resolved at the edge of a chisel. I spent two weeks there last autumn, tracing the same grooves that Sassanid stonecutters worked in the third century, and I came away convinced that inscription is not documentation — it is defiance.
Every surviving inscription was an act of optimism disguised as a monument. The carver believed in a future reader.
From the field notes of Dr. Miriam Tavakoli, Persepolis Archive, 1987