Where was Susa, the Shushan of Esther?

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Susa is the mound of Shush in Khuzestan, in south-western Iran, on the plain below the Zagros mountains; the map point stands on it. It lay about 360 km east of Babylon in a straight line and about 1,230 km from Jerusalem, and it had long been a chief city of Elam before the Persians made it one of their royal cities. Three books of the Bible are set there. Daniel sees his vision of the ram and the goat “at Shushan in the palace, which is in the province of Elam… by the river of Ulai”; Nehemiah is cupbearer “in Shushan the palace” when the news from Jerusalem reaches him in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, 445 BC; and the whole Book of Esther plays out in the palace and city of Susa in the reign of Ahasuerus, who is Xerxes (486–465 BC): “the king and Haman sat down to drink; but the city Shushan was perplexed.” Darius I had built the palace at the end of the sixth century; his foundation inscription lists cedar from Lebanon, gold from Lydia and Bactria, lapis lazuli from Sogdiana and ivory from Kush, India and Arachosia, brought together by craftsmen from every part of the empire. Herodotus describes the Royal Road from Sardis to Susa, 111 stations and about ninety days on foot, nearly 2,000 km in a straight line; the king's couriers rode it in relays, as the posts of Ahasuerus “went out, being hastened by the king's commandment”. French excavators dug Susa from 1884 onward: the palace of Darius with its glazed-brick archers, now in the Louvre, and in 1901 the stele of Hammurabi's laws, which an Elamite king had carried off from Babylonia. A shrine beside the mound is venerated as the tomb of Daniel.