The carving in Iran that shows a Roman emperor captured | THE KING WHO CAUGHT A CAESAR Part 3

History Onion · Part 3 · 3:00

At Naqsh-e Rostam in Fars there is a cliff you can stand under and look up at two Roman emperors in front of a Persian king on horseback — one on his knees, one held by the wrist. The king is Shapur I. The man he is holding is the emperor Valerian, captured at Edessa in 260, and Shapur had the whole thing cut into the rock while he was still alive. Beside it, on a stone tower, he left an inscription in three languages so that Romans could read it too. That is his account. This video follows it. What the carving does not show is what he did with the army. Shapur did not kill them — he moved them. The captured army and the populations of whole cities were marched hundreds of miles east and resettled where he wanted them. That was policy, and it was brutal. It was also productive. Roman engineers laid out Bishapur on a rectangular grid. Roman prisoners built the Band-e Kaisar at Shushtar — Caesar's dam — roughly 500 metres of Roman engineering across the Karun. It is still there, and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Near his capital he built a city for Antioch's deported population and named it Weh-Antiok-Shapur: Shapur's Better-Than-Antioch.