One of the capitals of the Persian empire — the winter residence, in the lowlands of Elam, and much older than Persia itself (it had been a major city for three thousand years already). 'Susa the citadel' (Shushan ha-birah) is the fortified palace acropolis rather than the town: Nehemiah is inside the government complex. The same acropolis is the setting of the whole book of Esther. Excavated by French expeditions from the 1880s, it produced Darius's palace, the great columned apadana, and the glazed-brick reliefs of the royal guard now in the Louvre — as well as, remarkably, the stele of Hammurabi's laws, carried there as war booty from Babylon a thousand years earlier.