Ancient Ecbatana — Avicenna's tomb, the Achaemenid Ganjnameh inscriptions, and Iran's coldest winters on the rim of the Zagros
Hamadan (Hamedân) is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world — it was ancient Ecbatana (Hagmatana in Old Persian), the summer capital of the Median Empire (700–550 BCE) and then the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 BCE) and the Parthian Empire. The city sits at 1,850m in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, which gives it the coldest winters of any major Iranian city (heavy snowfall December–February) and a summer climate dramatically cooler than Tehran or Isfahan. The primary monuments: the Ganjnameh inscriptions (two rock-cut trilingual Old Persian, Elamite, and Baby…
Hamadan was identified as Ecbatana by the Greek historians Herodotus and Polybius — the Median capital built by King Deioces (c. 715 BCE) as a series of seven concentric walls, each a different colour. Alexander the Great captured the city in 330 BCE after Persepolis; the Macedonian general Hephaestion (Alexander's closest companion) died in Hamadan in 324 BCE and Alexander reportedly ordered the manes of all horses in the Persian Empire to be cropped in mourning. The city subsequently passed through Seleucid, Parthian, Sasanian, Islamic (Arab, Buyid, Seljuk, Ilkhanid, Safavid), and modern Ir…