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Invisible input - wisdom

Background

 

Susa (Persian: شوش‎‎ Shush; Hebrew: שׁוּשָׁן Shushān; Greek: Σοῦσα [ˈsuːsa]; Syriac: ܫܘܫ‎ Shush; Old Persian Çūšā) was an ancient city of the Neolithic, Sumerian, Proto-Elamite, Elamite,  Achaemenid, Seleucid, and Parthian empires of Iran.  In Elamite, the name of the city was written variously Ŝuŝan, Ŝuŝun.

It is located in the lower Zagros Mountains about 250 km (160 mi) east of the Tigris River, between the Karkheh and Dez Rivers.  The modern Iranian town of Shush is located at the site of ancient Susa.

It was one of the most important cities of the Ancient Near East.  

Susa is of especial interest because it is one of the oldest continuously used sites of the Mystery religions in this region.  When Ashurbanipal took over Susa from the Elamites in around 650BC he described it specifically as:

"Susa, the great holy city, abode of their gods, seat of their mysteries”

Susa is thus of great interest, as it came under the influence of numerous mystic movements, ‘Mysteries’ – the Ancestor systems, the Zoroastrian [First Persian Empire, Seleucid, and Parthian empires of Iran], the Mesopotamian system, the Kabbalistic system and via the trade routes set up by Darius and Cyrus the Great – the silk roads and caravanserai, many more eastern systems. 

One can thus speculate that Susa was thus one place where mystic ideas travelled and were interchanged.  The Sumerian system, for example, may have thus been influenced by ideas travelling from the Indo-European cultures and these in turn affected the Jewish peoples.  This would then have a flow of ideas from East to West.

Susa was destroyed at least three times in its history. The first was in 647 BCE, by Ashurbanipal. The second destruction took place in 638 CE, when the Muslim armies first conquered Persia. And in 1218, the city was razed by invading Mongols, as such archaeologically little can be seen of the temples, ziggurats, gardens, ponds and sacred enclosures that would have once been part of the sacred geography inherent to such a key Mysteries site.

But some artefacts have been found and aerial photographs have helped to give some idea of how great a city this might once have been.   

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Map showing the silk and other trading routes established by Cyrus and Darius. The red dots show the caravanserai established on the routes.