Ancient Iran

Archaeologists worldwide were having fits in the first decade of the twenty-first century because numerous sites in modern Iran and the surrounding region were giving up evidence of once being home to a long-lived culture with a vast network of societies which constituted some of the first cities.

These cities were helping to redefine the origins of civilisation in the Near East.

Residents of ancient cities in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Iranian plateau, the Indus valley, and southern Central Asia traded goods across distances of hundreds of kilometres and forged parallel but strikingly independent cultures. The social structures, wealth, and used forms of technology within these societies slowly spread along the Nile in the fifth and fourth millennia BC, reaching the Indus valley by the fourth millennium BC.

Archaeologists remain convinced that modern civilisation began in Mesopotamia, where the large Tigris and Euphrates rivers bound a fertile valley which nurtured an increasingly complex society. But it also very quickly sprang up in neighbouring regions too.

'People didn't think you could have large settlements this early in time without having a large, well-fed river which emptied into an ocean. No one knew of these sites,' reporter Andrew Lawler wrote in Science magazine when covering the key findings which were discussed at a 2007 archaeological conference at Ravenna in Italy.

A rival for Ur?

One site proved particularly important when it came to convincing some scientists that civilisation was more widespread than originally thought at an earlier date than was previously accepted.

Locals had been uncovering artefacts in an ancient cemetery at Konar Sandal, near Jiroft, and were flooding the art market with pottery and other goods. Researchers tracked these curiously unique pieces back to their source where, Lawler said, they found 'a vast moonscape of craters made by looters'.

But further exploration of two nearby mounds found evidence of a large city, one which may briefly have rivalled contemporary Ur in Mesopotamia as part of the Jiroft culture (see links in the sidebar). 'These people were trading with the Indus, with Mesopotamia, to the north, and to the south,' Lawler explained.

Elamite cities on the plain to the east of Sumer benefited from direct contact, but cities with more easterly locations also swiftly caught up, connected into a network of trading routes which stretched east to the Indus and north to Hissar and the BMAC (click or tap on map to view at an intermediate size)

According to Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky of Harvard University the site dates back to 4000 BC, signifying that the Jiroft site and its environs were once home to a long-lived culture, one which evolved on parallel lines to that of Mesopotamia, and which therefore was not a brief response to Mesopotamian wealth.

The entire area of interest spreads roughly from the eastern border of Iraq to the Pakistani-Iranian border, and from the Russian steppe southwards through the Persian Gulf area and onto the Arabian peninsula, therefore encapsulating many city states which are already known, such as those of the Elamites on the Persian Gulf.

The potential discovery of a new writing system was perhaps the largest controversy of the many which were discussed at the conference (see 'related links' in the sidebar). Three tablets, the first discovered by a local farmer and the others subsequently unearthed by professional archaeologists, appear to contain a unique iconography which would have to be deciphered.

It took many more years of discovery to be able to confirm the existence of the Jiroft culture, by which time a neighbouring and even more nebulous Helmand culture was also winning support as a method of explaining further new discoveries of ancient cities along the Iranian-Afghanistan border.

The Jiroft culture type site of Konar Sandal consists of two mounds which are located a few kilometres apart from each other, Konar Sandal A (north) and Konar Sandal B (south)

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