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Rapport préliminaire sur les fouilles de Tépé Sialk, près de Kashan (Iran)
... It comprises two large mounds, the North mound presenting the Neolithic settlements and the South mound presenting an occupation from the Chalcolithic period to the Iron Age with an 800-year hiatus during the 2nd millennium BC (Pollard et al., 2013). The Iron Age is mainly represented by two necropolises: Necropolis A from the Early Iron Age (phase V), located south of the South Mound, and Necropolis B from the Iron Age (Phase VI), located West of the South Mound (Ghirshman, 1939(Ghirshman, , 1938(Ghirshman, , 1935. ...
... The interest in carrying out excavation in the Kashan region during the early 20th century arose from the arrival of particular painted ceramics with long-spout on the local art market, arising from illegal digging in the Kashan plain (Ghirshman, 1935). These vessels exhibited refined red-on-cream decorations (example of typology shown in Fig. 1b). ...
... The graves typically contained only one body, except in a few cases where graves were reused in a later period. In the graves from Necropolis B, several objects were recovered alongside the dead such as ceramic, bronze and lead vessels, bronze and iron weapons, silver and iron jewels, or bronze figurines with variable quality across the tombs allowing to distinguish between the tombs of higher and lower status (Ghirshman, 1935). More excavations were carried out in the 2000s with the "Sialk reconsideration project" but these focused on habitation parts of the site (Helwing, 2005;Sołtysiak and Fazeli Nashli, 2010). ...
... Most of the southern parts of the Central Iranian plateau (i.e., the Kashan and Isfahan districts) are still unknown from the perspective of Iron Age archeology apart from the southern mound of Sialk, which was excavated more than eight decades ago (Ghirshman 1935(Ghirshman , 1938(Ghirshman , 1939. Recently, a reconsideration was carried out through renewed excavation (Malek Shahmirzadi 2002. ...
Until recently, the culture of the late Iron Age in the central Iranian Plateau had only been identified at the southern mound of Sialk. In this study, a newly discovered site, called Qolam Tepe, is introduced in the foothills of western Kashan at a very close distance to Sialk. None of the surface findings of Qolam Tepe show any era other than the Iron Age III, or there is no Sialk VI, so we have ascertained one of the satellite sites of Sialk VI. Since the Qolam Tepe is exclusively a single-period site (Iron III), given the apparent fact that the decorative bricks found in Qolam Tepe in every aspect match the decorative bricks of "la Grande Construction" of Sialk. They can be attributed to a single cultural period and are surveyed as a single chronological horizon, thus again leading to the attribution of the "la Grande Construction" of Sialk to the end of the Iron Age. Surface survey finds from this site indicate that it is contemporaneous to the Iron Age, layers 5 and 6 of the southern mound of Sialk (and Cemeteries A and B).
... Further comparable subjects can be found in portable art examples from more sites of the Iranian plateau, but the strongest links are with the sites of Tepe Hissar in north-eastern Iran (Bakhtiari Shahri, 2009;Schmidt, 1937), Shahar-e Soukhteh in eastern Iran, Suse (Ghasrian, 2017), and Sialk in central Iran (Ghirshman, 1935) (Fig. 6). ...
Despite the distribution of known rock art in Iran showing a main concentration in central and western Iran, research activities undertaken in the very last decades led to the identification of sites in eastern Iran as well. In 2018 a new rock art site was discovered close to Ariyeh, Khorasan Razavi province, NE Iran. Here we present a case report on these newly found petroglyphs that are now in imminent danger due to recent vandalism. According to the represented iconography, its features, style, and patina, it seems that the Ariyeh rock art was produced over a long chronology, from the late Prehistory to the Islamic period. The discovery of the petroglyphs of Ariyeh has strong implications towards the understanding of the relationships among the different sites and their use, function, and meaning, in order to understand cultural connections occurred between the Iranian plateau and the surrounding areas over the millennia.
... The residents of the Iranian plateau were familiar with metal objects since 9th millennium BC as evidences were unearthed in Shanidar cave (9th millennium BC, North West Zagros, Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraq; Moorey, 1982) and Ali Kosh (7th millennium BC, Central Zagros, Ilam Province, Iran; Smith, 1970), by gathering natural metal-containing stones and hammering them into decorative objects. The primitive metal-working, mainly on the basis of copper, were found to be practiced in the 6th millennium BC, in locations such as Tepe Zagheh (South Alborz, Qazvin Province; Nashli & Moghimi, 2013) and Tepe Sialk (Central Iran, Esfahan Province; Ghirshman, 1935). However, the widespread use of metal objects in agricultural activities began only after the revolutionized expansion of metallurgical methods and the increase of metal ore mining and smelting in 3rd to 2nd millennia BC (Bassampour, 2014;Moorey, 1982). ...
Wheat and barley are among the most important staple foods, originally exploited, cultivated and domesticated in the Near East, in places between the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and Western slopes of the Zagros Mountains, at the beginning of the Holocene epoch. Almost all wild progenitors of the domesticated species of wheat and barley naturally grow in Iran, a Near Eastern Country, and were frequently exploited by the residents of the Iranian plateau throughout history. The cultivation of grains was initiated by hunter-gatherers dwelled in Iran as a supplementary source of food in the 12th millennium BP; however, the domestication of wheat and barley, in the 10th millennium BP, revolutionized life-style of the Iranian people, and led to a gradual but steady increase in the complexity of human societies in Iran. Every aspects of grain cultivation and its technical difficulties pushed forward human societies to develop more and more efficient methods of cultivation, irrigation, transportation, storage and reservation, food preparation, trade and commercialization, governmental taxation and scientific exploration and invention, which were reviewed briefly in the current manuscript on the basis of the available archaeological and archaeobotanical literature, covering a timespan from 12th millennium BP to 1st millennium AD.
... Images of caprines, particularly ibex, have been present in the art of centuries. It can be seen on the prehistoric ceramics from different parts of the country such as Bakun in Fars (Langsdorff and McCown, 1942); Tepe Hessar in Damghan in central Iran (Schmidt and Kimball, 1937); Susa in southwest (Pottier et al., 1900); Sialk in central part of the country (Ghirshman, 1935), etc. Ibex was also a common motif in the historic and Islamic art of the country (Afzaltousi, 2012) and even in contemporary Iranian art on Persian carpets and on the traditional rugs made by Iranian nomads (Qanad, 2001). Therefore, the meanings of ibex can be very contextual and may vary from one period and place to another. ...
It would not be exaggerated to claim that the "Gray Ware Culture" of the second millennium B.C. was one the most important phenomenon in history of archaeology of Iran. Apart from all its intricacies and complexity, its exact dating and chronology has also been a major challenge for archaeologists. Most of the literature is still based on very old dating and chronology, and even recent publication do not have any coherent idea about the dates of its begging and expansion. This paper first tries to show that the early dating of this culture was not as precise as it should be, due to different causes, and then proposes a more precise date for the begging and the expansion of the "Gray Ware Culture" and cemeteries of the second millennium B.C. in central Iran. Contrary to early dating, our revision of old literature and new chronological evidences, show the beginning of this famous archaeological culture and appearance of first detached (independent or dependent form a known settlement) cemeteries does not go back to 13-14 century B.C., but they originated in 18-17 century B.C. Hence, if our evidences and analysis would be compelling to other scholars, it would be the time, after more than 8 decades, to claim that the famous "Iron Age Gray Ware Culture", actually is a Middle to Late Bronze Age phenomenon that continue to develop through the Early Iron Age. Finally, if the claim of this paper will come to be true, based on more absolute dating of the begging of this archaeological culture in the recent future, then a new model for socio-cultural dynamics of central Iran in the first half of the second millennium B.C. would be necessary.
The Iron Age communities of the Iranian Central Plateau have often been thought of as comprising nomadic pastoralist groups that lack organised political and administrative institutions, a conclusion largely based on the small number of settlement sites. New data obtained from excavations at settlement sites dating to this period are, however, demonstrating the existence of socio-economic and political institutions in well-organised communities. The discovery of grey ware potsherds with seal impressions along with other materials such as seals, tokens, large pottery vessels, remains of vessel rim sealings in storage rooms, and the existence of spaces for special functions in large and important Iron Age settlement sites, sheds new light on the poorly understood social and economic organisation of the late second-millennium BC settlements in the Iranian Central Plateau.
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