Alexander's sack of Persepolis stripped roughly 120,000 talents (nearly 4,000 tons) of gold from the imperial treasury, destroying the financial machinery that had powered the Achaemenid administrative system.

304:00either deliberately or as a drunken accident,  according to some sources, Alexander then burned down the royal palace of the great king and  much of the city around it. The flames would have been visible for miles, and a great column of  black smoke would have climbed into the sky. The thick cedar rafters of the 100 columned halls  would have smoldered and finally fallen in. The gold looted from the treasuries  of Persepolis supposedly weighed 120,000

304:40talents, or nearly 4,000 tons. The Macedonians  needed thousands of camels to carry it away. This gold had been the treasury of the  empire that kept its well-oiled machine running, and in looting it, Alexander had  ripped the heart out of the Achaemenid system. Next, Alexander marched to Pasargadae,  where he briefly stopped at the tomb of Cyrus the Great, as Strabo describes. Alexander then went to Pasargadae, and this, too, was  an ancient royal residence. Here he saw also in a

305:38park the tomb of Cyrus. It was a small tower and  was concealed within the dense growth of trees. He passed through the entrance and saw a golden  couch, a table with cups, a golden coffin, and numerous garments and ornaments set  with precious stones, and that he saw all these things on his first visit, but that  on a later visit, the place had been robbed and everything had been carried off, and that the  robbers had removed the corpse to another place.