Near East Kingdoms

Konar Sandal (City) (Eastern Iran)

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The city states of Sumer formed one of the first great civilisations in human history (see feature link). This Near Eastern civilisation emerged a little way ahead of that of Africa's ancient Egypt, and up to a millennium before that of the Indus Valley culture.

Southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and the western edge of Iran) was subjected to permanent settlement during the Pottery Neolithic and, by the late fourth millennium BC, Sumer formed approximately a dozen leading city states, by which time other regions were emerging as population centres in their own right. Elam was located to the east of Sumer, with its own selection of city states at its core (and see feature link).

This region was located on an alluvial plan below the Zagros mountains, and its remoteness meant that it took some time for it to assimilate Sumer's groundbreaking social, agricultural, and administrative inventions. Even farther east was the Iranian plateau and what is now central and eastern Iran. A city-building culture emerged here in the third millennium BC, notably through the Jiroft culture and Helmand culture.

Konar Sandal belonged to the former and is the type site for the culture. It is located in the Halil river valley a very short way to the south of the modern town of Jiroft in today's Kerman province of Iran. The site of Tepe Yahya is not too far to the west, about seventy kilometres away, while the industrial production site of Hajjiabad-Varamin is about five kilometres to the north-east of Konar Sandal.

Experiencing a relatively briefly heyday between about 2880-2200 BC, Konar Sandal consists of a north and south mound (or 'Mound A' and 'Mound B') which are situated a few kilometres apart. The north mound reaches a height of thirteen metres while the south mound sits at twenty-one metres. The north mound is the larger at three hundred metres (width and length).

Having slipped into Persia in 1915 to reconnoitre eastern Iran, Sir Aurel Stein was back in 1936 to carry out a preliminary examination of Konar Sandal. The site was examined again in the 1980s, but modern palm agriculture has since destroyed many of the smaller mounds in and around the main mounds, alongside notable looting damage.

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(Information by Peter Kessler, with additional information from Encyclopaedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition, Cambridge (England), 1910), from Historical Atlas of the Ancient World, 4,000,000 to 500 BC, John Heywood (Barnes & Noble, 2000), from The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC, Amélie Kuhrt (Routledge, 2000, Vol I & II), from Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, Michael Road (Facts on File, 2000), from Mesopotamia: Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Enrico Ascalone (Dictionaries of Civilizations 1, University of California Press, 2007), from The Archaeology of Elam, D T Potts (Cambridge University Press, 1999), from The Elamite World, Javier Álvarez-Mon, Gian Pietro Basello, & Yasmina Wick (Eds, Routledge, 2018), from Prehistoric Settlements in the Bardsir Plain, South-Eastern Iran 1976-1977, S M S Sajjadi (East and West 37, No 1-4, pp 11-130, 1987), and Excavations at Konar Sandal in the Region of Jiroft in the Halil Basin: First Preliminary Report (2002-2008), Y Madjidzadeh & H Pittman (Iran 46, pp 69-103, 2008), from Jiroft: The Earliest Oriental Civilization, Yousef Madjidzadeh (Tehran, 2003), and from External Links: Some Thoughts in Neo-Elamite Chronology, Jan Tavernier (PDF), and Archaeology.org, and Inscribed objects found at Konar Sandal (Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative), and Konar Sandal archaeological site (Tehran Times).)

c.4000 BC

The settlement of Konar Sandal emerges around this point in time as the type site for the Jiroft culture. It only really seems to grow and expand as a city by about 2880 BC, as international trade expands with Mesopotamia.

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)

c.3100 - 2700 BC

The Uruk IV influence suddenly fades around 3100 BC (or 3200 BC in some modern sources) for reasons unknown. Older traditions re-emerge in places which had previously taken on board Uruk influences.

The Uruk-inspired centre at Susa in Elam seems to be taken over by immigrants from the Zagros mountains (or at least it witnesses an indigenous return to pre-Uruk political and cultural controls).

A new political entity emerges which discards Uruk IV cuneiform and language to replace it with 'Proto-Elamite' language, a precursor to the usage of all later Elamite city states. This ends the spirit of regional unity which previously seemed to predominate in the surrounding villages and towns, such as Abu Fanduweh, Chogha Mish, and Tepe Sharafabad.

The proto-Elamite period witnesses the development of a semi-pictographic writing system for the east. Susa begins to be influenced by the cultures of the Iranian plateau to the east (see feature link), and it dominates the lowlands to the west of the Zagros mountains. But it also cuts off these access points from post-Uruk IV Sumer, enforcing new trading connections which go through Susa itself.

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)

Approximately four hundred kilometres to the south in the modern province of Fars, the city of Anshan becomes prominent and expands in size, dominating the highlands of the southern mountain range.

Proto-Elamite communities which had played a part in the initial rise of civilisation in Elam and across the Iranian plateau seem to have exhausted their potential soon after 2800 BC. Across the Ramhormoz plains and in the Kur river basin, proto-Elamite records come to an end along with centralised urban life.

Farther east, urban living seems to be abandoned. At the same time, major cities such as those at Shahdad, Konar Sandal (which may only be fully built up around 2880 BC) and Shahr-e Sokhta reach their maximum size, suggesting a kind of absorption of all available resources to the detriment of the surrounding settlements.

The remains of Shahr-e Sokhta in eastern Iran can be seen from the air, while archaeology has explored its secrets since the 1960s, finding evidence of an occupation period which lasted around fifteen hundred years, albeit with at least one century-long break

c.2500 - 2225 BC

At Konar Sandal's southern site the dense urban network and first 'citadel' are abandoned sometime between the twenty-fifth and late twenty-third centuries BC. This is somewhat early to coincide with a general climate and economic downturn in the general area.

However, it could just about coincide with attacks by Eannatum of Lagash and/or Sargon 'the Great' of Akkad, and it certainly coincides with the rise of a Marhashi state which may want to re-imagine it as the state capital.

Konar Sandal's citadel is later rebuilt but the urban core may shift further to the north (the 'North Mound'). A lack of archaeological data has so far prevented a fuller picture being built up here in relation to settlement patterns. Urban life does not return to eastern Iran until after 500 BC, and the Jiroft and Helmand cultures are forgotten.