PASARGADAE, a city of ancient Persia, situated in the modern plain of Murghab, some 3o m. N.E. of the later Perse polis. The name originally belonged to one of the tribes of the Persians, which included the clan of the Achaemenidae, from which sprang the royal family of Cyrus and Darius (Herod. i. 125; a Pasargadian Badres is mentioned, Herod. iv. 167). Ac cording to the account of Ctesias (preserved by Anaximenes of Lampsacus in Steph. Byz. s.v. ; Strabo xv. 73o, cf. 729; Nic. Damasc. fr. 66, 68 sqq.; Polyaen. vii. 6, 1. 9. 45, 2), the last battle of Cyrus against Astyages, in which the Per sians were incited to a desperate struggle by their women, was fought here. After the victory Cyrus built a town, with his palace and tomb, which was named Pasargadae after the tribe (cf. Curt. v. 6, 1o; x. 1, 22). Every Persian king was, at his accession, invested here, in the sanctuary of a warlike goddess (Anaitis?), with the garb of Cyrus, and received a meal of figs and terebinths with a cup of sour milk (Pint. Artax. 3) ; and whenever he entered his native country he gave a gold piece to every woman of Pasar gadae in remembrance of the heroic intervention of their ancestors in the battle (Nic. Damasc. loc. cit.; Plut. Alex. 69). According to a fragment of the same tradition, preserved by Strabo (xv. 729), Pasargadae lay "in the hollow Persis (Code Persis) on the bank of the river Cyrus, after which the king changed his name, which was formerly Atradates" (in Nic. Damasc. this is the name of his father). The river Cyrus is the Kur of the Persians, now generally named Bandamir; the historians of Alexander call it Araxes, and give to its tributary, the modern Pulwar, which passes by the ruins of Murghab and Persepolis, the name Medos (Strabo xv. 729; Curt. v. 4, 7).
The capital of Cyrus was soon supplanted by Persepolis, founded by Darius; but in Pasargadae remained a great treasury, which was surrendered to Alexander in 336 after his conquest of Persis (Arrian iii. 18, o; Curt. v. 6, o). After his return from India he visited Pasargadae on the march from Carmania to Per sepolis, found the tomb of Cyrus plundered, punished the male factors, and ordered Aristobulus to restore it (Arrian vi. 29; Strabo xv. 73o). Aristobulus' description agrees exactly with the ruins of Murghab on the Bandamir, about 3o m. upwards from
Persepolis; and all the other references in the historians of Cyrus and Alexander indicate the same place. The identity of the ruins of Murghab with Pasargadae has lately been established beyond doubt by the discovery of the sculpture of Cyrus, bearing the trilingual inscription "Cyrus, the great King, the Achaemenian" which can refer to none but the founder of the Achaemenian dynasty. The conjecture of Oppert, that Pasargadae is identical with Pishiyauvada, where (on a mountain Arakadri) the usurper Gaumata (Smerdis) proclaimed himself king, and where his suc cessor, the second false Smerdis Vahyazdata, gathered an army (inscrip. of Behistun, i. 1 1 ; iii. 41), is hardly probable. T. Markwart proposed another etymology, "pas-arkadrish," that is, "Behind the (mount) Arkadrish." The principal ruins of the town of Pasargadae at Murghab are a great terrace like that of Persepolis, and the remainders of three buildings, on which the building inscription of Cyrus, "I Cyrus the king the Achaemenid" (sc. "have built this"), occurs five times in Persian, Susian and Babylonian. They were built of bricks, with a foundation of stones and stone door-cases, like the palaces at Persepolis; and on these fragments of a procession of tribute-bearers and the figure of a winged demon (wrongly considered as a portrait of Cyrus) are preserved. Outside the town is one tomb in the form of a tower, and the tomb of Cyrus himself, a stone house on a high substructure which rises in seven surrounded by a court with columns. The remains of a portico, which are discernible around the tomb, belong to a mosque constructed about A.D. 1300.