Tag: Archaeology

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Journal

Journal of Iran National Museum (2.2)

The second issue of vol. 2 (2021) of Journal of Iran National Museum is published. It contains 14 papers, exploring aspects of Iranian archaeology.

Table of contents:

  • Sirvan Mohammadi Ghasrian; Iraj Beheshti; Omoalbanin Ghafoori: The Petrographic Analysis of Early Chalcolithic Period J Ware of Mahidasht Stored at National Museum of Iran
  • Sepideh Maziar; Marjan Mashkour; Laura Manca; Homa Fathi; Jebrael Nokandeh; Roya Khazaeli: Study of Yanik Tepe’s Bone Object in the National Museum of Iran
  • Amir Saed Mucheshi; Ali Vahdati: The Bronze Stamp Seals of Marlik in the National Museum of Iran: Evidence of a Connection with the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex in the Bronze Age
  • Marya Tabrizpour; Mohammad Taghi Atayi: Plants of Qasrdasht: Evaluation of Charcoal Samples
  • Pegah Goodarzi; Arkadiusz Sołtysiak; Mostafa Dehpahlavan: Bioarchaeological Studies and Strontium Isotopes Analysis on Human Remains from Historical Period from the Site of Shahr-i Qumis, Semnan Province
  • Farhad Solat; Philip Forsythe; Afshang Parhizi Rad: Notes about a Greek Inscription on a Parthian Period Male Statue in the National Museum of Iran
  • Parsa Hossein Sabri; Gholamreza Avani: Iranian Tradition During 8th AD Century, Through the Dirham Coinage of Abbasid Caliphate: Study a collection of Sasanian clay bullae in the National Museum of Iran, returned from the United States of America
  • Afshin Khosrowsani: The Cultural Landscape of the North of Behbahan (Tashan) from the Sasanian Era to the Present
  • Hossein Sabri; Gholamreza Avani: Iranian Tradition During 8th AD Century, Through the Dirham Coinage of Abbasid Caliphate
  • Fereshteh Zokaei: Egyptian Mamluk Dinar Coins in the National Museum of Iran
  • Hassan Ali Borhani Rarani; Elaheh Noorian: The Influence of the Water Resources Management on Changing the Administrative Geography of Khorasgan of Isfahan from Safavid Epoch to the Present Time: Reconsideration of Tablets Texts‘s Sarcophagus of Shah Isma‘il I in Ardabil and Iran National and The Walters Art Museum
  • Ali Borhani Rarani; Elaheh Noorian: The Influence of the Water Resources Management on Changing the Administrative Geography of Khorasgan of Isfahan from Safavid Epoch to the Present Time
  • Homayoun Khosheghbal: Williamson Surveys in Southern Iran and his Collection
  • Liliy Niakan; Parvaneh Soltani: The National Museum of Iran’s Department of Conservation: The Pioneering Steps
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Online resources

Derbent: What Persia Left Behind

Derbent: What Persia Left Behind, is a documentary directed by Pejman Akbarzadeh. For more information, including a timeline and screening schedules, visit derbentonline.com.

Trailer

Registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the 6th-century Derbent (Darband) fortification complex is considered the largest defensive structure of Sasanian Persia (Iran) in the Caucasus.
“Derbent: What Persia Left Behind”, also explores the unique architecture of the massive fortress, and how it has been preserved for some fifteen centuries by Persian, Arab, Turkish and Russian rulers. Built strategically in the narrowest area between the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea, the fortification includes the northernmost Middle Persian (Pahlavi) inscriptions in the world, which are in danger of destruction. The 42-km defence wall of the complex that extended toward the Black Sea had already been destroyed in the Soviet era.

From the film’s website
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Books

Gandhāran Art in its Buddhist Context

Rienjang, Wannaporn & Peter Stewart (eds.). 2023. Gandhāran art in its Buddhist context. Oxford: Archaeopress Archaeology.

This book considers Gandhāran art in relation to its religious contexts and meanings within ancient Buddhism. Addressing the responses of patrons and worshippers at the monasteries and shrines of Gandhāra, papers seek to understand more about why Gandhāran art was made and what its iconographical repertoire meant to ancient viewers.

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Books

The Rediscovery and Reception of Gandhāran Art

Rienjang, Wannaporn & Peter Stewart (eds.). 2022. The rediscovery and reception of Gandhāran art. Oxford: Archaeopress Archaeology.

From the archaeologists and smugglers of the Raj to the museums of post-partition Pakistan and India, from coin-forgers and contraband to modern Buddhism and contemporary art, this fourth volume of the Gandhāra Connections project presents the most recent research on the factors that mediate our encounter with Gandhāran art.

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Books

Concepts of Resilience for the Study of Early Iranian Societies

Bernbeck, Reinhard, Gisela Eberhardt & Susan Pollock (eds.). 2023. Coming to terms with the future: Concepts of resilience for the study of early Iranian societies. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

The collection of essays in this book focuses on the highlands of Iran in pre-modern times, reaching from the Paleolithic to the medieval period. What holds the diverse contributions together is an issue that is closely related to debates in our own times: crises and how societies in the past dealt with them. We start from the premise that general circumstances in the fractured topographic structure of the Iranian highlands led to unique relations between ecological, social, economic and political conditions.

In three sections entitled “Climate and palaeoenvironment”, “Settlement, subsistence and mobility” und “Political and economic institutions”, the authors ask what sorts of crises afflicted past societies in the Iranian highlands, to what extent they proved resilient, and especially what strategies they developed for enhancing the resilience of their ways of life. Looking for answers in paleoenvironmental proxy data, archaeological findings and written sources, the authors examine subsistence economies, political institutions, religious beliefs, everyday routines and economic specialization in different temporal, spatial and organizational scales.

This book is the first volume of a series published by the German-Iranian research cooperation “The Iranian Highlands: Resiliences and Integration in Premodern Societies”. The goal of the research project is to shine a new light on communities and societies that populated the Iranian highlands and their more or less successful strategies to cope with the many vagaries, the constant changes and risks of their natural and humanly shaped environments.

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Articles

The Goddess on Lion at Hasanlu

Letteria Grazia Fassari & Raffaella Frascarelli. 2022. Embodying the Past: The Case of the Goddess on Lion at Hasanlu. In: Katrien de Graef et al. (eds.), The Mummy Under the Bed . Essays on Gender and Methodology in the Ancient Near East, 253-287. Münster: Zaphon.

Rooted within the Central Asian iconography of the sacred from the 3rd millennium BCE until the arrival of Islam, also related to the mixed pantheons that combine Central Asian, Iranian, Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese divinities, the image of the goddess riding a lion in the Hasanlu bowl offers the chance to investigate its origin. Posture, attire, lion, divine emblems mark her belonging to a cultural horizon that seems to allude to the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe. The Iranian, Assyrian, Syro-Hurrite, Elamite, Hurro-Urartian, Transcaucasian influences make Hasanlu a privileged observatory to analyze the regulatory apparatus affecting gender hierarchies. Eluding the boundaries imposed by the binary vision, the nomadic lifestyle seems to free the body in favor of fluid strategies necessary to deal with harsh natural conditions. Indeed, some iconographic details of the Hasanlu bowl might reveal a social dimension related to an unconventional gender performativity caused by the mobilization of cultural resources that identified nomadism. Furthermore, the presence of the riding goddess at Hasanlu suggests scrutinizing the cyclical infiltration of nomadic cultures within Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Exploring gender, questioning its epistemic boundaries, enquiring how gender stereotypes have crystallized over time, this paper proposes an inception towards a different history whose traces may have been lost in the unwitting binarism of expertise.

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Books

Sasanian Archaeology

Simpson, St John. 2022. Sasanian archaeology: Settlements, environment and material culture. Oxford: Archaeopress.

The Sasanian empire was one of the great powers of Late Antiquity, and for four centuries ruled the vast region stretching from Syria and the Caucasus to Central Asia. Classical, Armenian, Jewish and Arab written sources throw light on its history, and studies of its rock reliefs, stuccoes, silver, silks, coins and glyptic have created a picture of a rich courtly culture with a strong Iranian character. However, the everyday material culture is much less understood, as is the economy which sustained and supported the Sasanian empire and underpinned its consistent military superiority over its western rivals. This collection of essays looks at these aspects and offers an approach based almost entirely on archaeological and scientific research, much presented here for the first time. This book is divided into three parts which in turn examine evidence for Sasanian sites, settlements and landscapes, their complex agricultural resources, and their crafts and industries. Each section is preceded by an essay setting out the wider research questions and current state of knowledge. The book begins and ends with a general introduction and conclusion setting out why this new approach is necessary, and how it helps change our perceptions of the complexity and power of the Sasanian empire.

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Articles

An Elamite Duck Weight

Wicks, Yasmina & Javier Álvarez-Mon. 2022. An Elamite Duck Weight in the Susa Museum: New evidence for the Behbahan Plain in the late seventh/early sixth century BCE. Arta 2022.004.

Arjan duck-shaped weight, Susa Museum. Photographs kindly provided by: [a, b, d] Ehsan Yaghmaie and [c, e, f] Loghman Ahmadzadeh, courtesy of the Susa World Heritage Base.

The importance of the Behbahan plain within the political framework of Elam was assured by its geographic position as a crossroads of routes connecting Susiana, Fars, and the Persian Gulf. However, the only archaeological cited for this view remains the elite late seventh/early sixth century BCE tomb unearthed near Arjan during the damming of the Marun river in 1982. Another find from the area that adds evidence for the role of the plain at this time is an inscribed limestone duck weight in the Susa Museum, recently published erroneously as coming from Susa. This paper corrects the provenience of the weight, clarifies its date, describes its iconography and manufacture, and contemplates its significance for evaluating the history of the Behbahan plain and the pre-Achaemenid Elamite administration.

Categories
Journal

Journal of Iran National Museum

The second volume (2021) of Journal of Iran National Museum is published. Whereas the previous volume was published in Persian, its current issue contains paper in English. This is an open-access journal.

Table of contents:

  • Sarah Piram: André Godard’s Archives at the Louvre Museum and Their Significance for the Study of the National Museum of Iran
  • Sepehr Zarei: Quartz Usage as a Raw Material and Its Influences on the Strategy of Lithic Technology: Thibault’s Survey Assemblage at the Northern Littoral of Strait of Hormuz 1977; Collection of Iran National Museum
  • Laura Manca; Marjan Mashkour; Sanaz Beizaee Doost; Roya Khazaeli: The technical knowledge of Early Neolithic Iranian Societies. The bone industries of Tappeh Sang-e Chakhmaq and Tepe Abdul Hosein, Iran National Museum
  • Steve Renette; Omolbanin Ghafoori; Sirvan Mohammadi Ghasrian: The Mahidasht Survey Project (1975-78) Revisited: Initial report of new collaborative efforts to catalogue and publish legacy data at the National Museum of Iran
  • Judith Thomalsky: Foliate lithic points from the Bronze Age of NE Iran, A techno-typological analysis
  • Omid Oudbashi; Mathias Mehofer; Sepehr Bahadori; Javad Tayyari: Technical Studies on Two Copper-Based Objects from the Bronze Age of Iran
  • Ali Zalaghi; Sepideh Maziar; Bayram Aghalari; Marjan Mashkour; Mozhgan Jayez: Kohne Tepesi: A Kura-Araxes and Parthian settlement in the Araxes River Basin, Northwest Iran
  • Sara Khalifeh Soltani: Antemortem Health Indicators And Burial Status: A Summary of Thesis Research of the Tepe Hasanlu Bronze- Seleuco-Parthian Period Burials, Iran.
  • Yasmina Wicks: Two Elderly Funerary Figurines and Related Models from Susa: A Case Study in Engaging with the Legacy Records of Roland de Mecquenem
  • Javier Álvarez-Mon: Between Picasso and Piradi On tour with Saltimbanques and Musicians from ancient Iran (c. 600 Bc)
  • Bruno Genito; Lucia Cerullo: Aspects of “Median” and Neo-Elamite Archaeology. New Considerations on Some Aržan, Jubaji, and Kalmakarra’s Metal Findings
  • Zahra Alinezhad: A Plated Seleucid-type Coin in National Museum of Iran
  • Gunvor Lindstroem: The Portrait of a Hellenistic Ruler and Other Bronze Sculptures from Kal-e Chendar/Shami. Results of the 2015 and 2016 studies in the National Museum of Iran
  • Cyrus Nasrollahzadeh: *Sadārap [Sadāraf/b] of *P/Frēnag”, Ardaxšēr ī Papagān’s brother or his son, Another inscription of *Sadārap [Sadāraf] on Silver Plate in National Museum of Iran.
  • Ali Aghaei; Michael Josef Marx: Carbon Dating of Seven Parchment Qurʾān Manuscripts and One Syriac Bible of the National Museum of Iran
Categories
Books

The Archaeology of Iran from the Palaeolithic to the Achaemenid Empire

Matthews, Roger & Hassan Fazeli Nashli. 2022. The archaeology of Iran from the palaeolithic to the Achaemenid Empire. London: Routledge.

The Archaeology of Iran from the Palaeolithic to the Archaemenid Empire is the first modern academic study to provide a synthetic, diachronic analysis of the archaeology and early history of all of Iran from the Palaeolithic period to the end of the Achaemenid Empire at 330 BC.

Drawing on the authors’ deep experience and engagement in the world of Iranian archaeology, and in particular on Iran-based academic networks and collaborations, this book situates the archaeological evidence from Iran within a framework of issues and debates of relevance today. Such topics include human–environment interactions, climate change and societal fragility, the challenges of urban living, individual and social identity, gender roles and status, the development of technology and craft specialisation and the significance of early bureaucratic practices such as counting, writing and sealing within the context of evolving societal formations.

Richly adorned with more than 500 illustrations, many of them in colour, and accompanied by a bibliography with more than 3000 entries, this book will be appreciated as a major research resource for anyone concerned to learn more about the role of ancient Iran in shaping the modern world.

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