IRAN

From 1800 onward, with the arrival of

foreign missions in Persia, an interest in
the identification of places mentioned
in the Bible and by classical authors
grew. In the first half of the
nineteenth century, an effort was made
to provide written descriptions and
hand-drawn illustrations of visible
monuments. By The late 19th century,
despite maintaining its independence,
Iran was nominally transformed into a
buffer zone between the British and
Russian empires in Asia. The Anglo-
Russian mutual understanding opened
Iran to British and Russian agents, some
with archaeological interests. In the
early 1840s, the Russian Baron Th.A.
de Bode and the British Austin H.
Layard traveled in Lurestan and
Khuzestan and recorded some
archaeological sites.
 From 1836 to 1841, Henry C.
Rawlinson copied the trilingual
inscription at Bisotun and made
a major breakthrough in
deciphering the cuneiform
script. Later, based on the
recently translated cuneiform
inscriptions and classical texts,
George Rawlinson published the
first modern history of ancient
Iran from the Median to the
Sasanian periods,in a series
which eventually culminated in
the publication of The Seven
Great Monarchies of the
Ancient Eastern World

Henry Rawlinson
 Bisotun Inscription
The Bisotun Inscription
(also Bistun or Bisutun) is a
multi-lingual inscription
located on Mount Behistun
in the Kermanshah Province
of Iran. The three
different cuneiform script
are old persian, elamite and
Authored by Darius the Great sometime
babylonian
between his coronation as king of the
Persian Empire in the summer of 522 BC
and his death in autumn of 486 BC, the
inscription begins with a brief autobiography
of Darius, including his ancestry and lineage.
Later in the inscription, Darius provides a
lengthy sequence of events following the
deaths of Cyrus the Great and Cambyses
II in which he fought nineteen battles in a
period of one year (ending in December of
521 BC) to put down multiple rebellions
throughout the Persian Empire

Jacques Jean Marie de Morgan 1892
Systematic excavations were begun
later in the century. At the same time,
general surveys aimed at the history of
ancient Persian art and architecture
were prepared. While visiting Iran from
1880 to 1881, French architect and
historian Marcel Dieulafoy met with
some of the close companions of King
Nasr al-Din Shah.
In 1891 Jacques de Morgan visited the
ruins of Susa in the Persian province of
Khuzistan. He persuaded the French
Government that Susa was a site of the
greatest importance archaeologically
and in 1897 the French Government
purchased from the Shah of Persia the
sole right to dig for antiquities in Persia
soil; and in that year the Delegation
Francaise En Perse went out under de
Morgan to start work at Susa.
The work began by de Morgan was continued until the 1914-18 war and
afterwards resumed under the directorship of R. De Mecquenem. Its
results have been published in a series of memories by the
Delegation. The finds from Susa were spectacular, notably the early
painted pottery now in the Louvre. Herzefeld writes of the discovery
at Susa is the oldest elamite civilization of painted potters.
De Morgan distinguish two cultural phases at Susa- I and II

but it now clear from subsequent excavation and comparative

studies of the excavated materials that he had only partly
understood the stratigraphical sequence which the Delegation
was revealing.

In order to protect themselves,

the French archaeologists,
led by Jacques de Morgan,
built a castle in Crusader
style.
McCown proposes to distinguish four phases at Susa:

A -being the earliest settlements and burials that have for long
been known as Susa I, and which he regards equivalent to Al-
Ubaid;

B-equivalent to the uruk phases;

C-to the jamdet Nasr phase and

D- the phase formally known as Susa II and equivalent to the

early dynastic period on Mesopotamia.

The delegation has in addition to Susa worked at other sites in

Khuzistan such as Tepe Musyam described by Gautier and
Lampre in 1905 and Tepe Duvaisyah, Tepe Jafarabad, Tepe Juwi,
Tepe band-i-bal and Tepe buhallan. At all these sites painted
pottery was found comparable with that at Susa I A.
 Sacrifice of a goat Treaty between Naram-Sin of Akkad and
Khita

Pottery from Susa

Persian soldier, from Susa The Awan King List

American R. Pumpelly and the German archaeologist Dr. Hubert
Schmidt excavated in 1904, two occupational mounds at Anau,
near Ashkabad in Russian Turkistan or Transcaspia

Two cultural levels Anau I and II were distinguished in the north

Kurgan and Two later cultural level III and IV, in the south
Kurgan and these were fully published by Pumpelly and Schmidt
and others

then McCown proposes to distinguish two phases A and B in Anau

I. Anau I A is a formally Neolithic culture with painted pottery
and appears contemporary with Halaf and Anau I B is the phase
in which pins and other objects of copper appear and carries on
the painted pottery tradition through Al-ubaid and into Uruk
times being roughly contemporary with Susa A
Tepe Hissar is a the site of an ancient settlement in north-
eastern Iran. The site was investigated around in 1931 and 1932,
excavations were undertaken by the University of Pennsylvania
Museum by Erich F. Schmidt (1931–1933) and Robert H. Dyson, Jr.
et al. (1976). Occupation has been divided into three major
periods. The earliest dating is uncertain but established as after
5000BC and the latest at around 1900BC.
Tall-i-Bakun or Tall-e Bakun (in modern Fars Province, Iran) was a
prehistoric site in the Ancient Near East about 3 km south of Persepolis.
The site consists of two mounds, A and B. In 1928, exploratory
excavation was done by Ernst Herzfeld, of the University of Berlin.
Alexander Langsdorff and Donald McCown conducted full scale
excavations in 1932. Additional work was done at the site in 1937 by
Erich Schmidt leading the Persepolis Expedition of the Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago.

Painted bowl dated to 4000 B.C. from Tall-i-Bakun

 A view of the south façade

Tepe Sialk in central Iran was excavated for three seasons

(1933, 1934, and 1937) by a team headed by Roman Ghirshman and
was fully published in Fouilles de sialk in 1938 (vol 1) and 1941 (vol
2)
 Ghirshman dug two mounds
at Tepe Silak and
distinguish four successive
cultural periods

Sialk IV

Sialk III

Sialk II

Sialk I
Ghirshman's team in Sialk in 1934
Sialk I is characterized by Pise Houses with contracted burials
under the houses generally without grave goods but covered in red
ochre and at least two kinds of painted pottery, a clear light ware
and a rare black ware.

The villagers of Silak I had slings, stone maces, stone axes and
adzes as well as pins and kneedles of hammered copper. They bred
sheep and cattle and may have grown cereals, reaping them with
sickles mounted in bone handles very like those of the Natufian and
grinding them in saddle querns. It is quite clear that the Sialk I
villagers were hunters and collectors as well as domesticators of
animals and perhaps cultivators of grain. Indeed it may well be a
transitional culture between food gathering Mesolithic folk and the
food producing chalcolithic cultures well known in the near and middle
east. Sialk I is formally Neolithic and equated with the pre Halaf
phase in Mesopotamian prehistory.
Sialk II contemporary with the Halaf and Samarra cultures of
Mesopotamia is essentially a continuation of the village economy of Sialk I
but contains new features such as hand made mud bricks, concave based
whorls and a new repertoire of pottery designs as well as imported objects
from the Persian gulf such as Pterocera shells, turquoise and carnelian.
Food gathering now seems to have occupied a less important part in the
economy and the pig and horse have been domesticated.

Painted bowl from Sialk II

Sialk III is a fully Chalcolithic culture with caste tools including a shaft –
whole, adzes, the potter’s kiln and the construction of more complicated
buildings with buttresses. A thick layer of ashes indicates the destruction
of Sialk III at the end of its last occupation levels
Above these thick layers of ashes was built Sialk IV, a city of the
Jamdet Nasr period with bichrome pottery and early inscribed tablets
presumably an outpost of the literate urban civilization of the Elamite.

Seventy years later, a team of Iranian archaeologists led by Sadegh

Malek Shahmirzadi launched the Sialk Reconsideration Project,
investigated the two hills again (1999-2004). He has distinguished six
main phases

Phase I- belongs to the first half of the fifth millennium BCE. The
inhabitants, primitive peasants, lived in simple huts, made of reeds
and covered with mud. Among the finds are stone axes and objects
made of
bone.

Phase II- The villagers lived in houses, made of irregularly-shaped

mud bricks. They were capable of making some primitive ceramics,
which was made to resemble baskets. The dead were buried, painted
red and laid down in a contracted position, under the floors of their
houses, a custom that is also known from Iraq. The smiths had, by now,
fully mastered their art; the quality of the metal objects of this age
is higher than in the preceding period.
Phase III- the houses were made of rectangular bricks. The dead were
still buried underneath the floors. The most impressive cultural advance
was the introduction of the potter's wheel: the new ceramics, decorated
with animal and human figures, were dazzlingly beautiful, comparable to the
fourth millennium pottery of Susa. The smiths were now capable of
handling silver, and people were trading with the inhabitants of
Khuzestan: archaeologists have found shells. A great fire put an end to this
town

Phase IV- was more or less contemporary with the Early Dynastic Period
in southern Iraq, and lasted from about 3000 to 2500 BCE. Although
the ceramics of this age were plainer. Cylinder seals prove that
interregional trade flourished, there is evidence that the people had
learned to read and write in a proto-Elamite cuneiform script, and the
inhabitants were now capable of making bronze.

Phase V- The site appears to have been abandoned for the remainder of
the Bronze Age, and when people started to settle again in c.1200 BCE.
the new settlers leveled the top of the mound, to make space for a large,
palace-like residence. The southern hill was surrounded by a wall. By now,
people were able to melt iron and made an easily recognizable grayish type
of pottery. The dead were buried on cemetery
Phase VI- started about 900 BCE, when the fifth town was
destroyed. The conquerors build a new city on top of the old one

Beak pot

cup
Tepe Giyan a large tell was excavated in 1931 and 1932 by Georges
Contenau and Roman Ghirshman. A succession of five cultural periods was
distinguished.

The deepest level of the mound, Giyan V, which had almost no traces of any
substantial architectural remains, produced pottery comparable to Sialk II
and III, with Buffware pottery appearing in the latter half of Giyan V and
continuing into level IV

There is a long gap between the end of Giyan V and the beginning of the
Giyan IV level, just preceding or into the Akkadian period, around the
second half of the 3rd millennium B.C

Giyan III supplements the culture of Giyan IV, and then another gap
appears in the tomb sequence between Giyan III and Giyan II

Giyan II begins about the time of the First Dynasty of Babylon, around the
early 2nd millennium B.C.E, and its end dated to the 14th century B.C

Giyan I shows a transition from Giyan II with its end, dated by

architecture near the top of the mound, around the 8th century B.C
 Persepolis

Persepolis was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire (ca.

550-330 BC). Persepolis is situated 70 km northeast of the modern city
of Shiraz in the Fars Province of modern Iran. In contemporary Persian,
the site is known as Takht-e Jamshid (Throne of Jamshid).
Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, a variety of amateur
digging occurred at the site, in some cases on a large scale. The
first scientific excavations at Persepolis were carried out by Ernst
Herzfeld and Erich Schmidt representing the Oriental Institute
of the University of Chicago. They conducted excavations for
eight seasons beginning in 1930 and included other nearby sites

The buildings at Persepolis include three general groupings:

military quarters, the treasury, and the reception halls and
occasional houses for the King. Noted structures include the
Great Stairway, the Gate of Nations (Xerxes the Great), the
Apadana Palace of Darius, the Hall of a Hundred Columns, the
Tripylon Hall and Tachara Palace of Darius, the Hadish Palace
of Xerxes, the palace of Artaxerxes III, the Imperial Treasury,
the Royal Stables and the Chariot House.
Persian and median Soldiers
Great stairway
Apadana palace
ImperialTreasury
The nearby site of Pasargadae, capital of Cyrus the Great, also
attracted the attention of early travelers such as Robert Ker Porter and
Marcel Dieulafoy. Herzfeld visited the site in 1905 and undertook the first
excavations there in 1928. Further studies were made in 1955 by Sami. A
definitive excavation was carried out between 1961 and 1963 by David
Stronach, director of the newly established British Institute of Persian
Studies
In 1940, the first group of students of archaeology graduated from the
Department of Archaeology of the Faculty of Letters at Tehran
University. Some of these graduates later studied at prestigious
universities in Europe and the United States, as did Ezzat Negahban,
for example, who at his return to Iran began excavating the Royal
Cemetery at Marlik in the province of Gilan
Golden Cup dated to First Golden necklace of three Swastikas
half of first millennium BC. found in Marlik, dates back to first
millennium B.C
One of the important archaeological discoveries during recent decades
is Jiroft culture in the Kerman region
A "Jiroft culture" has been postulated as an
early Bronze Age (late 3rd millennium BC)
archaeological culture, located in what is
now Iran's Sistan and Kermā Provinces. The
hypothesis is based on a collection of
artifacts that were confiscated in Iran and
accepted by many to have derived from the
Jiroft area in south central Iran, reported
by online Iranian news services, beginning in
2001.

The proposed type site is Konar Sandal,

near Jiroft in the Halil River area. Other
significant sites associated with the culture
include; Shahr-e Sukhteh(Burnt City), Tepe
Bampur, Espiedej, Shahdad, Iblis, and
Tepe Yahya.
Vase from the Jiroft region. A "two horned"
figure wrestling with serpents