Why was the Persian capital called ‘Persepolis’, which is obviously a Greek name? Persepolis, the ancient capital of the Persian Empire, was indeed a Greek name. The original name of the city in Old Persian was “Pārsa,” which referred to the region where the Persians originated. The Greeks, however, referred to the city as “Persepolis,” a term derived from the Greek words “Perses” (meaning Persian) and “polis” (meaning city).
The use of the Greek name is mainly due to the fact that much of the historical information about ancient Persia comes from Greek sources, including the writings of historians like Herodotus. When the Greeks under Alexander the Great conquered Persia in the 4th century BCE, they encountered and documented the city, often using their own language to describe it.
So, the name “Persepolis” is a Greek rendition of the original Persian name, and it has been widely adopted in Western scholarship and historical texts.
