What has been excavated of the "ceremonial complex" shows no obvious traces of a permanent settlement. The "gallery of paintings" in the corridor surrounding the central core, where inscriptions identify certain figures as kings, and featuring a horse procession scene, definitely points towards the great New Year audiences, with perhaps a ritual tribute paid to the royal ancestors (venerated, like all ancestors, during the immediately preceding festive cycle of the Frawardīgān). The center of the complex yielded an ivory throne base much more elaborately decorated than anything known from Nisa and Aï Khanoum; in the absence of further excavation, two possibilities remain open: that of a royal throne or a Fire altar throne. Finally, the hypostyle hall separating this area from the main entrance contained colossal painted images [1], two of which can be identified as Zoroastrian deities: Srōsh and a personification of the Fravashis. Here again, there are several possibilities: a complete gallery of calendar deities, or a selection of deities associated with the New Year?
The other ceremonial building excavated in the upper city, of which it occupies the center, is a platform accessed by a ramp, reminiscent in more monumental terms of those at Dingil'dzhe and Pasargadae (see above). The excavators suggest that this was a place of public worship of the Fire [2].
In our present state of knowledge, Akchakhan-kala appears to us, perhaps exclusively, as the bearer of a political message, which we can assume had several addressees: to the southern empires, architectural monumentality and decorum; to the steppe from which the dynasty may have originated [3], inherited regalia (Pazyryk-type headdresses, spiral torques); to both, defensive military power. To this semantic complex we must undoubtedly add the Zoroastrian reference, which on the contrary is hard to detect in all that we know of Achaemenid and Parthian art.
