Reterritorializing Persepolis in the First English Travellers’ Accounts
Résumé
This chapter addresses the evolving processes of textual memorialisation of a key Eastern cultural site in Western imagination, Persepolis, as addressed in the writings of three types of early English visitors, actual or supposed: a company agent (Geoffrey Ducket, agent of the Muscovy company), a churchman (John Cartwright) and an antiquarian-minded gentleman-diplomat (Thomas Herbert). These collective, heavily intertextual memories overwhelm the actual experience of the visit and make cultural expectation result in mis-identifications of other sites for the actual Persepolis or in biased or fanciful descriptions of what the travellers had before their eyes.