Susa is one of the oldest cities on earth, and the town of Shush in Khuzestan stands on top of it, a low, hot, flat place near the foothills of the Zagros where the Karkheh and Dez rivers water the plain. People have lived here for about six thousand years. It was the capital of the Elamites, and later the winter capital of the Achaemenid Persian kings, and Darius the Great built a vast palace here around 500 BC, with an audience hall whose columns were crowned with bulls. Its workers came from all over the empire, and a famous foundation text records that cedar came from Lebanon, gold from Sardis and ivory from India.
The mound is huge, and at the top of it stands an odd building, a fortress-like castle of brick built by French archaeologists in the 1890s to protect their expedition, in an unlikely mix of Mesopotamian and Gothic styles. The French dug here for decades and carried off treasures to the Louvre, including the Code of Hammurabi, which was found at Susa in 1901 in the form of a black basalt stele, carried off as loot by an Elamite king long before. The museum next to the mound has pottery, seals and sculpture, and a walk around the site shows foundations, brickwork and the outline of Darius's palace.
Nearby is the tomb of the prophet Daniel, a white cone-shaped dome on the riverbank that is a place of pilgrimage for Muslims, Jews and Christians. About forty kilometres to the south-east stands the ziggurat of Chogha Zanbil, another World Heritage Site, built by the Elamite king Untash-Napirisha in the thirteenth century BC.
Riding in Khuzestan is mostly about heat. Summer temperatures can pass fifty degrees, and midday riding is dangerous, so go between November and March, when the air is mild. The roads are flat, straight and often busy with trucks, with long, empty stretches, and in the south the oil industry leaves its mark in flares and pipelines. Shush has about fifty thousand people, with fuel, restaurants and hotels. Try kebab and a glass of dough, the sour yoghurt drink, and the dates that are sold everywhere. Check the foreign-vehicle rules before you plan to bring a bike.