What happened during all these decades on the sites of Persepolis and Susa in Fars and Khuzestan, and their larger imperial context? Very much like their neighbors in Mesopotamia, they have much to offer in a fresh perspective on the recovery of polychromy and on the competing factors and tensions between presentation and preservation since the nineteenth century. The objective of the next chapters is to offer an historical, historiographical, and largely documentary overview of evidence for polychromies at the imperial centers of the Achaemenid Persian world within the context of debates around ancient polychromies as introduced in Chapter 1. I will present relevant information from ancient sources and then proceed first to the testimony of early modern travelers. This survey will be followed by an introduction of nineteenth-century antiquarians’ and excavators’ comments on the original polychromy. The documentary evidence collected here is critical to a fuller appreciation of the original reemerging polychromies of the Achaemenid Persian palatial environment. It also provides additional thoughts and reveals the significance of perceptions (1) of the polychromy of ancient palace architecture in general, and (2) of the polychromy of ancient Persia within the larger general discourse on the historiography of the archaeology of Achaemenid imperial sites. Heretofore, with few exceptions the importance of polychromy in that discourse has remained largely hidden.