The total Tonnage of Trade, in 1925-26, at all the ports of Persia, amounted to 4,241,000 tons, of which 299,00o tons repre sent imports and 3,942,00o tons exports. This trade was dis tributed as follows:— The fact that the archaeology of the Iranian plateau is scarcely known before an advanced period in the Iron Age is due mainly to insufficient exploration and an absence of excavation. In Elam, geographically a part of Mesopotamia, but politically attached to Persia in modern times as in the 6th century B.C., civilization began as early as in Babylonia, and the two countries were using related types of painted pottery before 300o B.C. Some of this Elamite pottery, which has been found at Susa has counterparts in a district of Turkestan contiguous to the north-east frontier of modern Persia, and in Sistan, on the borders of Persia, Baluchistan. and Afghanistan, hence the progress of exploration may be ex pected to reveal traces of this very ancient culture at many places in the intervening plateau, if not in the Caspian depression.
Of life on the plateau in the third and second millennia B.C., practically nothing can be stated, but it may be inferred that dissimilar physical features prevented such a development as took place in Elam, which followed in the wake of Mesopotamia. Perhaps the older portions of the Avesta, which may have been composed in Northern Persia early in the first millennium, describe the conditions prevalent throughout Iran during the early Iron Age; these reveal an insecurity, resulting from an absence of large communities, which left the small settled population to the mercy of nomads and rival chieftains. Significant material re mains could not be expected from such a society, especially since unbaked brick and small timber would normally be used for building. A pair of fire-altars of the Zoroastrian cult, cut from the rock near Persepolis, perhaps antedate the Achaemenian period, for their mouldings offer no known parallel ; the only other monu ments of early type, rock-cut tombs and reliefs in the Zagros mountains which separate the plateau from might conceivably be due to a local school of the Achaemenian age and in any case cannot be more than a few centuries older. On the routes from Mesopotamia towards the Caspian and Turkestan, already traversed by caravans and occasionally by Assyrian armies, the local chiefs were compelled to construct forts on patterns supplied from Nineveh, but of neither of these nor of the market-towns along the roads have traces yet been found. Forti fied hill-tops, suchlias are frequently seen in Persia, must go back in many cases to remote antiquity : they were used in the Bronze Age by the megalithic people of the Caspian basin, but on the plateau the one familiar example is the fortress at Pasargadae, known as the Takht-i-Suliman or Throne of Solomon, which has been attributed to Cyrus but must have been built later in the Achaemenid dynasty or during the Hellenistic Age, because the regularity of the masonry indicates Greek influence of about the fourth century.
It is questionable whether there survives so much as a de scription of any work of the short-lived Median empire, which grew up in the Assyrian sphere of influence in North Persia, but the monuments of its Achaemenid successors are very numer ous and represent practically every reign (550-331 B.c.). Two buildings at Pasargadae bear the inscriptions of a King Cyrus, almost certainly to be identified with Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian empire, not with the ambitious prince in whose re bellion Xenophon took part. An oblong hall, supported by pillars, forms the main feature of each building, while small rooms or towers projected at the corners and were connected by pillared porches. The walls themselves were of mud brick, although stone was used for the foundations, for the pillars, for the door-ways and for tall blocks at the corner of each room, which are notched at the top to contain the beams of the wooden ceiling. No evidence exists for the presence of an upper storey in any Achaemenian building, indeed the exceptional slimness of the columns would render it impracticable ; the roofs must have been flat, being formed no doubt of a thick bed of compressed earth, in accord ance with the local conditions. The king must have required far more accommodation for his large retinue of servants and clerks, his harem and his guards, and these were doubtless housed in buildings entirely composed of mud-brick and therefore easily de stroyed through the action of the weather, leaving only the stone portions of these two palaces, intended respectively for private business and for public audiences.
In shape the ruins bear a certain relation to the bit hilani or pillared house of Syria and Asia Minor, sometimes adopted by the Assyrians, but the type may possibly have been indigenous to the wooded hills of Anshan, the original principality of Cyrus. One of his palaces at Pasargadae was lined with a dado of carved slabs, the few scraps of which appear to represent foreigners bringing tribute to the king; both dado and subject are almost in variable features of the Assyrian palace. One side of a doorway is occupied with a relief of a winged genius, whose head bears a crown imitated from that of Egyptian deities ; here again the composition and details have a clear similarity to Assyrian work, while the dress is identical with that worn by the last Elamite king on the Assyrian reliefs of the late seventh century, and by figures in the rock-carvings of the Zagros mountains. The in scription cut above the figure, "I, Cyrus, the king, the Achae menid," misled former scholars into the belief that the sculpture was a portrait, but the formula recurs in various parts of both ruins and, like the similar inscriptions in Mesopotamia, refers merely to the author of the buildings.