The latest discoveries of Shahr-i Sokhta, the Pompeii of the East.

The archaeological site of Shahr-i Sokhta, located in the eastern Iranian province Sistan-va-Baluchistan, is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list and is considered the "Pompeii of the East." Since 2016 it has been the subject ofresearch and excavation work by an international mission in which the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Salento is participating. In fact, the latter launched in that year the multidisciplinary project MAIPS - Multidisciplinary Archaeological Italian Project at Shahr-i Soktha aimed at the study of the site and the materials being excavated by the Archaeological Mission at Shahr-i Soktha. Funded by the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Salento, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and private organizations and institutions, the MAIPS project is coordinated by Professor Giuseppe Ceraudo and, over the next few years, aims in particular to return a more complete picture of the proto-state organizations of the Iranian plateau in the 3rd millennium BCE.

The research activities of the Laboratories of the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Salento were presented these days by their respective directors: Giuseppe Ceraudo (Ancient Topography and Photogrammetry), Pier Francesco Fabbri (Physical Anthropology), Girolamo Fiorentino (Paleobotany and Paleoecology) and Claudia Minniti (Archaeozoology).

“International collaboration is fundamental for the enhancement of tangible and intangible cultural heritage,” stressed University of Salento Rector Fabio Pollice, “and it becomes even more so when this heritage is recognized as the legacy of the entire human race. Hence our engagement in the Islamic Republic of Iran, aimed at restoring to that country and to all humankind the history of an area that was the cradle of one of the greatest civilizations of the past.”

The most recent studies have gathered data that change the chronology of the center of Shahr-i Sokhta, restoring it to a new stratigraphic and chronological sequence that ’lifts’ the life of the settlement by about three to four centuries. Significant evidence suggests that the site behaved as a center with a heterarchical structure: clan groups of dissimilar tribal origins coexisted in a state of social equilibrium in which hierarchical aspects were intended only within each individual group, in a regime of economic equilibrium likely dictated by the prosperity that the center must have had during the first half of the 3rd millennium BCE. This heterogeneity, based on an overall social balance within the clan and between groups, prevented the centralization of the settlement’s resources and with them the rise of a ruling class over the site and its region; a missed step that did not produce administrative centralization and the standardization of the tools generally used to control large-scale economic realities. Among the most recent and extraordinary discoveries are hundreds of clay proto-tablets, which were used for accounting records within individual buildings: they must be considered family-based forms of administrative accounting, intended for the calculation and management of the economic surplus produced.

The site of Shahr-i Sokhta represents one of the most coveted centers for archaeological investigation, both for being perfectly preserved due to salt concretions present throughout the surface that have sealed underground artifacts and structures, and for being often associated in archaeological literature with the mythological Aratta, which, located by Mesopotamian texts “where the sun rises,” rivaled the 1st Dynasty rulers of Uruk (including Gilgamesh), masters of Sumer and repositories of kingship after the Sumerian Flood. The latter itself would end a series of dynasties. The Sumerian Flood is thus understood as an element of separation between a mythical and a historical time; a time, the post-Diluvian time, in which history is made by kings, which archaeological investigation has partly recognized, and by cities, which the project is investigating.

In particular, Aratta, mentioned in the major Sumerian poems is presented as a distant and hard-to-reach place, rich, full of gold, silver, lapis lazuli and numerous other precious materials. The city is also presented as the seat of the goddess Inanna, to whom a temple completely built of lapis lazuli was dedicated; the city’s vicissitudes with the Sumerian kings would induce the goddess to choose Uruk, the center of southern Mesopotamia, as her own residence, delivering kingship to Sumer and the dynasty founded by Enmerkar and continued with Lugalbanda and the mythological Gilgamesh.

Pending confirmation of the site’s identification, the discoveries made over the past twenty-three years by Mansur Sajjadi’s Iranian mission and Enrico Ascalone’s new project in the so-called “Pompeii of the East” have confirmed the exceptional nature of Shahr-i Sokhta, which, although the repository of an autonomous path of growth, rises at the juncture of the four great river civilizations (Oxus, Indus, Tigris-Euphrates and Halil) of Middle, Central and South Asia: Sumerian one, whose literary links flow into mythology; that of Jiroft, cradle of a new and forgotten civilization until 2003; that of the great centers of Central Asia; and that of the great settlements of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, with which Shahr-i Sokhta had relations at various levels.

Shahr-i Sokhta returned extraordinary evidence of long-distance trade between the major centers of the Near East. In particular, the evidence of manufacturing activities in the settlement and the discovery of large quantities of unworked semi-precious stones such as lapis lazuli, turquoise, alabaster, and others have made it possible to recognize, in the center of Sistan, a’area of landing, storage, processing, and redistribution of material destined for internal needs and external demand to be recognized in the oases of the Oxus, the fertile valleys of the Halil (Jiroft), the plains of theIndus and in the Mesopotamian alluvial areas, whose archaeological evidence from the major centers of southern (Ur), Diyala (Khafaja), middle Euphrates (Mari) andUpper Mesopotamia (Tepe Gawra), together with those from Inner Syria (Ebla), turn out to be decisive in confirming the presence of two major trade routes that exploited, to the north, the Khorasan route (well known from the later texts of Arab geographers) and, to the south, the Persian Gulf sea route, which, beginning in the second half of the 3rd millennium BCE.C., will gradually replace the northern artery.

By the end of the 3rd millennium B.C. the prosperity of the major center of Sistan had to disappear gradually and suddenly, due to mysterious causes involving the major centers throughout Middle Asia. Shahr-i Sokhta, like the major centers of the Harappan civilization, would cease to exist stricken by a crisis that archaeological research tends to explain, not without uncertainty, by a radical and abrupt climatic change that would have affected those centers, whose subsistence resided mainly in the water resources of the region.

The latest discoveries of Shahr-i Sokhta, the Pompeii of the East.

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.