The Archaeology of Iran from the Palaeolithic to the Achaemenid Empire

Roger Matthews, Hassan Fazeli Nashli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780415691697
• eBook ISBN: 9781000570915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1 The archaeology of early Iran: perspectives from the past for the present

DOI: 10.4324/9781003224129-1

The archaeology of Iran as a field of study

Why study the distant past of Iran? In this introductory chapter we address this basic question by considering a range of issues concerning which the archaeology of Iran has immense potential to inform and enlighten us. Our first answer is that the study of ancient Iran can greatly enhance our appreciation and understanding of Iran today, and that in itself is an aim worth devoting time and attention to. In contemporary geopolitics (Chipman 2019) and throughout recorded history (Axworthy 2007), Iran has played a key and distinctive role in world affairs, a place where ideas, ideologies, movements, technologies and practices have been generated, developed, consumed, imported, reworked and exported in new forms through networks of engagement often spanning much of Asia and well beyond. In historic times Iran performed a central role through the long lifespan of the Silk Roads (Frankopan 2015), a role it sustains within a contemporary successor, the Belt and Road Initiative connecting China to the Mediterranean (Griffiths 2017). Iran is also a country that has frequently been misunderstood on the world stage, often because of ignorance of its history and its culture and of the ways in which they have shaped modern Iran and the world around it. While the ancient pasts of Greece and Rome form staple fare on school and university curricula, and the visually magnetic monuments and mummies of ancient Egypt captivate generations of school-children, “the vast Iranian panorama in which our ancestors arose and flourished seems as remote to the majority as the moon” (Iliffe 1953: 1), a statement from decades ago that is perhaps even more valid today than it was then. Our first reason for studying ancient Iran, therefore, is in order to expand and enhance our understanding of Iran today through appreciation of its deep-time history and culture.

More directly, in this book we propose to employ the archaeology of Iran as a portfolio of case-studies, period by period and diachronically, with which to address major concerns that archaeologists have increasingly foregrounded in recent years. A 2014 review of “Grand Challenges for Archaeology” articulated 25 issues for future archaeological investigation, focused on “dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems” with the aim “to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology” (Kintigh et al. 2014: 5). The authors grouped these issues, which might more aptly be titled “Global Challenges,” into five themes: (i) emergence, communities and complexity; (ii) resilience, persistence, transformation and collapse; (iii) movement, mobility and migration; (iv) cognition, behaviour and identity; (v) and human-environment interactions. The archaeology of Iran has special potential to contribute to all these major areas of concern, as we attempt to illustrate throughout this book.

At the same time, archaeologists, anthropologists and historians have begun to explore the deep-time origins and early development of social inequality, articulating trends and patterns through analysis of material attributes such as size and complexity of household dwellings, access to storage space and variation in quantity and type of grave goods, on the basis that the pervasiveness of inequality across much of the world today (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009) can only be understood through historical understanding of how we got here: “Inequalities develop through historical processes that operate on many levels, from the individual to the society, from the kin group and neighbourhood to the state” (Smith et al. 2018: 5; Fochesato et al. 2019). Again, the past of Iran provides a wealth of case studies with which to investigate issues of social inequality within the context of trajectories of change and continuity across millennia. Many of the earliest written records of Mesopotamia and Iran, dating from c. 3200 BC onwards, are concerned with the administration of slaves, male and female, adult and child, who were put to work on massive state projects or exchanged as gifts amongst the dynastic urban elite groups residing in the cities and palaces of southern Iraq and south-western Iran (Bartash 2020). How significant was the role of slave labour in the development of early Iranian societies, and how can we deploy archaeology to assist in understanding early steps in the development of social inequalities?

Along with Iran’s neighbour to the west, Iraq or ancient Mesopotamia, it is hard to name another country of the contemporary world that, on the basis of what we already know about its past, can contribute such rich and detailed historically contingent case-studies with which to inform and address these global challenges and issues, all of which can be framed within a discourse of deep-time perspectives on planetary sustainability (Satterwhite et al. 2016), the single most urgent and important research field across today’s academic disciplines.

From Iran’s key role in the development of hominin and early human communities and their initial diffusions into and across Asia, to its unique significance in the early domestication of wild animals such as goat, the intensification of plant cultivation leading to full agriculture, and the increasing sedentarisation of human societies more than 10,000 years ago, and from the pristine development of early state-level societies accompanied by some of the world’s earliest complex bureaucracy and writing practices from 5,000 years ago, to the growth and expansion of some of the most impactful and diverse empires from 2,500 years ago, Iran makes a very special and fundamental contribution to the history, culture and contemporary conditions of humanity on planet Earth. We could not agree more with the words of an authority on Iran in the periods following those covered in our study: “There are aspects of Iranian civilisation that, in one way or another, have touched almost every human being in the world. But the way that happened, and the full significance of those influences, is often unknown and forgotten” (Axworthy 2007: xiv). We plan to illuminate and illustrate those unknown and forgotten influences and ways throughout this book, which is our second reason for studying ancient Iran.

But where and what is “ancient Iran”? We talk of “Iran” as if the term relates to a consistent geographic entity through time. The idea of “Iran” in the most ancient past is of course an anachronism. As we will explore in this volume, it is impossible to investigate the archaeology of Iran without considering at the same time the situation of Iran, as defined today, within a malleable matrix of lands near and far. Thus, the notion of “Iran” must be highly fluid through time, just as fluid as the contours and borders of the ancient societies dwelling in “Iran” at any time in the past. The lifeways of Neolithic human societies living in the high Zagros mountains at 8000 BC can only be apprehended in the context of contemporary developments across the modern border in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan, while early state-level developments such as the origins of bureaucracy and early writing on clay tablets in Late Chalcolithic Khuzestan only make sense when we also take account of evidence from sites in the south of Iraq such as Uruk and Jemdet Nasr. The distinctive Early Transcaucasian Culture of the Early Bronze Age has to be studied as a large-scale transregional phenomenon spanning lands of the southern Caucasus, north-western and western Iran, eastern Turkey, northern Syria and into the Levant, while for the thriving craft and trade centres of south-eastern Iran in the later third millennium BC our field of view expands to the east to include Central Asia and into South Asia. As the first “world empire,” the Achaemenid Persian empire of the Iron Age also of course demands such a transregional approach. Our third reason for studying ancient Iran, then, is because of its special importance in enhancing understanding of much larger-scale socio-cultural phenomena in whose origins and development many other lands and peoples were involved.

Characterising Iran: a land of “prismatic diversity”

That said, our book is first and foremost about Iran and about what happened in prehistory and early history within the lands of Iran as defined by its modern borders. Within all the transregional cultural phenomena discussed in the preceding section, and in many more investigated through this book, we contend that there is a core and distinctive “Iranian” element that can be associated with the physicality of place that is Iran and with the human societies living there, throughout the deep-time patterns and processes we are about to trace, while eschewing unfounded assumptions of ethnic, linguistic, genetic or any other form of continuity, as well as assumptions of a uniform or predictable relationship between landscapes and peoples settled thereon. Indeed, as discussed below, throughout this book we reject a so-called longue durée approach to Iran’s ancient past that asserts underlying structural continuities as shaping fundamental elements of Iranian societies while allowing variations on a theme. How then might we characterise “Iran” in this sense of its distinctive, core contributions to the great episodes of the past? We should begin by acknowledging the clear challenges in undertaking such a task, as adroitly phrased by Lara Fabian (2018: 1120): “a central characteristic of the stories of ancient Iran lies in the region’s prismatic diversity and confounding complexity. As hard as they are to capture, it is these traits that we should make central as we expand our scholarly engagements with the space.” What, then, are those central traits?

As we discuss in Chapter 2, the landscapes of Iran are highly diverse, providing special challenges and opportunities for their resident human communities. The lands of Iran have impacted in so many ways the lives of the peoples, animals and plants that have made their homes there, prescribing some limits to existence and behaviour while stimulating human creativity and resilience in negotiating or overcoming those limits, in a complex, nonlinear relationship through time. Any study of Iran’s past has to take account of ancient landscapes, climates and environments in attempting to reconstruct past lifeways, as we do recurrently in this work. Many writers have commented on the significance of Iran’s physical geography, climates and environments in impacting the lives of the peoples living therein and their socio-political structures. In his classic work Iran from the Earliest Times to the Islamic Conquest, the archaeologist Roman Ghirshman (1954a: 114) set out his thoughts on this topic:

Iran is not watered by rivers like the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates which by their yearly floods bring fertility to the country. Nor does it enjoy a regular season of beneficial rains stimulating the earth to production. From earliest antiquity, the question of water has been vital, for man could settle only where irrigation was possible. Thus the inhabitants were perforce scattered, and the population was far less dense than in Egypt or Mesopotamia. This is well illustrated by the dispersion of tells or artificial mounds, remains of ancient settlements, which the modern traveller finds lying scores of miles apart. Physical conditions thus led to the development in each district, and even in each valley, of a kind of particularism, traces of which have not even yet disappeared. This is the reason why Iran contained, and still contains, so many nomadic, semi-nomadic, and sedentary tribes who have preserved their dialects, manners, and customs. This is why, politically, the unity of Iran depended, and still depends, on the character of the ruling dynasty.

As we will explore in particular in the later chapters of this book, the character of ruling elite groups can indeed be fundamental to structuring and unifying the daily lives of the peoples ruled by them, as well as to their proneness to frequent overthrow and reformulation. But, more generally, while Iran’s physical and environmental attributes have always constituted a set of circumstances, time after time, within which human societies have lived as best they can, we interrogate the predictability of specific human responses to those attributes. Above all, in this book we aim to show that the variability, diversity and often fragility of the manifold societies of Iran’s past vividly demonstrate the ingenuity, innovativeness, agency and historical contingency of the human social soul in devising new ways to live together, to cope with the challenges and to generate and seize new opportunities for individual and social development.

Ghirshman (1954a: 50) highlighted another geographic attribute of Iran that he saw as persistently impacting its resident human societies – its key location between Mesopotamia, Anatolia and, ultimately, Europe to the west, and all of Asia to the east, and its consequent role as a cultural mediator and communicator between these great regions of the Old World: “Iran, as we have seen, was a highway for the movement of peoples and for the transmission of ideas. From the prehistoric period onwards, and for 1,000 years more, it held this important position as an intermediary between East and West. In return for what it received it never ceased to give; its role was to receive, to recreate, and then to transmit.” Through this book we will examine case studies of how Iran recurrently acts as a cultural communicator and mediator by its engagement with contemporary societies around its borders.

In a concluding chapter, boldly entitled “The Personality of Iran,” to the magisterial The Cambridge History of Iran I. The Land of Iran, in itself a rich collection of expert essays on all aspects of Iran’s geography, the geographer W. B. Fisher (1968b: 734) was also keen to emphasise the connection between Iran’s “special geographical character” and its “historical tradition.” Pointing to Iran’s pronounced physiography, its extremes of climate, its dearth of great rivers, its suitability for integrated food production systems of agriculture alongside seasonal pastoralism and its relative abundance of desirable natural resources, Fisher detected certain continuities of cultural response, at least in recent historical times, generating a distinctive Iranian identity through time (1968b: 739). Fisher’s final comments closely echo those of Ghirshman cited above: “If we seek to define Iran’s function as a state and as a human grouping in terms of a ‘personality,’ then the country can be said to generate, to receive and transmogrify, and to re-transmit.” Let us explore throughout this book, by meticulous examination of the material remains from its past, these bold and profound statements regarding the character of Iran and its peoples.

What is this book about? Scope, themes, issues

In this book we investigate the archaeology of Iran from the very earliest times, the Lower Palaeolithic period, when prehuman hominins began to leave their material traces across much of the land, through the Upper Palaeolithic, and all of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age periods of Iran’s past. These periods are of course conventional archaeological divisions of the past which need not bear significant relation to genuine socio-cultural episodes of that past. Nevertheless, we believe it is possible to articulate distinctive characteristics and features of Iranian societies through these various periods, drawing on the often rich but always patchy archaeological evidence and, when we have it, on the historical evidence too, if only indirectly and contextually. We close the book with the end of the Achaemenid empire at c. 330 BC. We have chosen this end-point partly because study of the post-Achaemenid periods of Iran’s past requires a major reorientation of approach that must incorporate fully the historical and archaeological evidence, which would require a whole additional volume, and partly because the end of the Achaemenid state can reasonably be viewed as a genuine end-of-era event: “When Persepolis went up in flames at the feast of the Macedonian conqueror, a world lasting several millennia finally expired” (Burney 1977: 204), in the evocative words of one pioneering investigator of Iran’s ancient past, with whom we empathise. At the same time, we salute those scholars bold, skilled and knowledgeable enough to treat regions or aspects of Iran’s past across the rather arbitrary dividing lines of our archaeological and historical classificatory systems. Daniel Potts’ The Archaeology of Elam. Formation and Transformation of an Ancient Iranian State (Potts 1999, 2016; see also Potts 2011a) is exceptional in this regard.

Mention of Potts’ book prompts us to express at the outset our alignment with his views on deep-time history, broadly understood, as expressed at the conclusion of his volume on Elam. In examining the archaeology of Elam over millennia of prehistory and history, Potts (2016: 430–432) rejects the interpretive historical framework of la longue durée, with its notions of deep-time structures of continuity underpinning shifting historical cycles, in favour of la courte durée, where “periodic realignment and transformation” marked by “e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 The archaeology of early Iran: perspectives from the past for the present
• 2 Placing Iran: land, environment and ecology
• 3 Approaching the past of Iran: a history of archaeological investigation
• 4 Peopling Iran: the Palaeolithic period, 500,000–12,000 BP
• 5 Domesticating Iran: the Neolithic period, 10,000–5200 BC
• 6 Early social complexity in Iran: the Chalcolithic period, 5200–3200 BC
• 7 Iran’s first state? The Proto-Elamite horizon, 3200–2900 BC
• 8 People on the move: prehistoric networks of Bronze Age Iran, 3400–1100 BC
• 9 Iran beyond borders: Bronze Age societies of eastern Iran, 3100–1250 BC
• 10 Elam in the world of Bronze Age Southwest Asia, 2900–1100 BC
• 11 Iran imperial: villages, cities, states and empires of the Iron Age, 1250–330 BC
• 12 Themes and issues in the archaeology of early Iran
• Bibliography
• Index