Ctesiphon

Activities of the Institute of Archaeological Sciences
and of the Centre for the Restoration of Monuments
in Baghdad

Ctesiphon

Project: Photogrammetric survey and restoration of the Taq-Kisra
(Khosraw’s palace)
Site: Salman Pak (Ctesiphon)
Directors: Giorgio Gullini, Andrea Bruno, Roberto Parapetti

The city of Ctesiphon is situated on the left bank of the Tigris (approximately 20 km Southeast of Baghdad), near the present village of Salman Pak, facing Seleucia. In 141 B.C. the Arsacid Parthians conquered Babylonia and chose Ctesiphon as the king’s winter residence.

The site is famous for the remains of a vast vaulted hall (spanning 26 m and 31 m high), the Taq-Kisra, or palace of Khosraw II (591-628), king of the Iranian Sassanian dynasty, which from 224 succeeded that of the Parthians. The city was conquered by the Arabs in 637, and tradition has it that the conquerors gathered in prayer in the famous hall. In 763, when Caliph al-Mansour founded Baghdad, the new political and administrative centre of Islam, the city was abandoned. The brick façade of the great hall, opening towards east onto a large court, remained intact until the end of the 19th century, when the northern half of the façade and the central arch collapsed. Most parts of the great parabolic barrel vault, made from baked bricks without a bearing crossmember, according to the ancient Mesopotamian tradition, and the south semi-façade, which is missing only the top part, have survived. Nothing remains of the magnificent decorations described by historical sources.

Since 1964, the Italian Mission in Seleucia has carried out excavation soundings in Khosraw’s palace, surveyed it, performed a photogrammetric survey of the vault’s intrados and began the conservative restoration of the surfaces. In 1966, a restoration project drafted by A. Bruno was submitted to the Antiquities Department; as yet unimplemented, the project has the aim of consolidating the surviving façade in order to remove the buttress that had been built in 1942 and the inappropriate concrete base added in 1922.

In 1972 the Antiquities Department decided to reconstruct the missing part of the façade of Khosraw’s palace in Ctesiphon. Prior to the works’ commencement, the Baghdad Institutes performed a photogrammetric survey of the foundations’ remains and of the detached parts of the collapsed structure, approximately two metres below ground level. Since then, one can observe the unfortunate contrast between the preserved southern segment of the façade and the new one to the north, limited to the first of the three overlapping tiers of blind arches. After the war in 2003, several considerable modifications to the old cracks in the walls of the important monument were observed, and material was found to be missing.