Ancient rulers of the Near East represented their power and royal ideology through changing their surrounding “space”, fabricating “places”, such as royal capitals, gardens, and residential quarters. Such spatial features are attestations, demonstrating the perception of empires of their surrounding space. This research intends to investigate the transformation of the perception of space in three Iranian dynasties of the Antique and Late Antique Near East from 312 BCE to 224 CE, including the Hellenistic Seleucids and Parthian Arsacids.

In addition, this project intends to contextualize the modern spatial discourse of late 1980s as a theoretical basis with regard to different types of spaces, including physical, conceptual, and imagined; according to the temporal/spatial dimensions.

This topic can be approached from both a physical and an intellectual point of view, and thus can be traced through two sets of resources:

Textual and visual testimonies, such as royal inscriptions (e.g. Old, Middle Persian and Parthian), bas-reliefs, religious manuscripts (e.g. Avestan and Middle Persian) and Greco-Latin written materials;

Spatial organization of the architectural monuments, landscape features and urban settlements, which are mostly reflected in the archaeological corpus.

The perception of space in its broadest sense is specifically reflected in the textual resources, like the direction of Zoroastrian rituals, and the description of places visited by Greco-Roman historians. However, with a glance into written sources, in this research the primary focus is put on the archaeological evidence, by analysing several examples of spatial constructs in ancient Iran, such as paradises and anthropogenic landscapes, palaces and ceremonial and royal residences, urban settlements, fire temples, royal mausoleums and tombs, cemeteries, military castles, and defensive walls.

The different approaches of the ancient kings toward the organization of large-scale spatial constructs (places) can be demonstrated by analyzing and comparing these diverse types of archaeological complexes associated with these two historical periods in terms of their plan, layout, organization, and distance from other adjacent or nearby constructs. In addition, the orientation of small-scale architectural constructions can provide further clues about spatial perception in a more practical sense.

This comprehensive study therefore sheds light on the transformations, continuities, and discontinuities in the spatial perception of each period compared to the preceding and subsequent periods, and further elucidates the factors that influenced such shifts in spatial perception and spatial constructions over the centuries.