Freya Stark at Phraaspa

Freya Stark (1893-1993) was a British traveler of the old school, well read in the classics and eager to follow the march of Alexander, sail the Tigris, and walk the ground of ancient battlefields. In one of her many books, published in 1966, she described her search for the Parthian summer capital of Phraaspa, where Mark Antony's legions came to grief in 36 BC:

The Germans, who are now excavating there, have thrown doubt on Taht-i-Sulaiman as the actual site of Phraaspa. Unaware of this, I took much trouble to reach it, a place of pilgrimage more ancient than the history we were dealing with, where the landscape rises like an altar to a flat-topped hill and the cone of a dead volcano, and the calcereous streamlets seep down on raised beds of their own making, through ancient walls still twenty-five feet or so in height. Their gates north and south enclose what is visibly left -- a few pink sandstone bits of pillar of door-jamb faintly carved. The Sassanian fire temple was destroyed by Heraclius in the seventh century, and what else is standing is Muslim of a later age; and the whole circular panorama is like the raised rim in the middle of a Chinese saucer, overlooked by a higher skyline which in May was barred with snow. . . .

Our track as we rose was fit only for jeeps in good weather, and the air grew cold and brilliant as the nomad emptiness intruded upon it. Black turbans and padded waist-coats of the Kurds appeared, and a Mongol look in the horsemen, sitting wide and squat with saddlebags on squat ponies, with rifles aslant. The villages grew farther apart, clustered on beds of torrents round the mountain massif as if on the spokes of a wheel: between plantations of wheat and ghostlike willow white as aluminum, a clean wind blew across the untended heights.

We met nothing else on wheels; and saw the circular walls of Phraaspa, as I thought it, in failing light. Close by is a hamlet called Nusratabad which belongs to Arslan Afshar Aga who kindly helped me, and here in one guest-room all together, two drivers and a friend and the headman, we slept. The Kurdish homes are not humanly comfortable like the peasants' houses in Turkey, and when I went out hoping to find a more private refuge with the women, I met nothing but darkness and an open court of mud and stones where an oil lamp showed the wife in a corner cooking -- a sad plain woman speaking Kurdish only, bowed under the shame of having produced six daughters to one son. Behind her on a tall loom was her unfinished carpet: some dim unconscious joy had found its way through her rough fingers in the squalor, and glowed on its reds and blues, rich as cathedral glass in the poor flicker of the wick.

From Rome on the Euphrates: the Story of a Frontier.

I should note that opinion has swung back to Takht-e-Suleyman (in northwestern Iran) being the actual site of Phraaspa, I gather because although there is not much evidence from Parthian times at the site, no other good candidates have been proposed.

Imagine how much history a woman who was born in 1893 and died in 1993 lived through.