Konar Sandal is a

Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second prin ...

archaeological site, situated in the valley of the Halil River just south of Jiroft, Kermān Province,

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

Description

The site consists of two mounds a few kilometers apart, called Konar Sandal A and B with a height of 13 and 21 meters, respectively. At Konar Sandal B, a two-story, windowed citadel with a base of close to 13.5 hectares was found. Also found in Konar Sandal were tablets with scripts of unknown nature. Near Konar there are several other ancient sites from the same time period such as Hajjiabad-Varamin, the graveyards located at Mahtoutabad, and the mounds of Qaleh Koutchek.

Jiroft culture

The site is associated with the hypothesized "

Jiroft culture The Jiroft cultureOscar White MuscarellaJiroft(2008), in: Encyclopedia Iranica. "For archeological accuracy the terms "Jiroft" or "Jiroft culture" employed to define a specific ancient Iranian culture and its artifacts should only be cited within ...

", a 3rd millennium BC culture postulated on the basis of a collection of artifacts confiscated in 2001, criticized for conjecture about material not found in secure archaeological contexts and probably including forgeries. So the excavation of Konar Sandal is important in discovering artefacts in context. Yousef Majidzadeh, head of the archaeological excavation team in Konar Sandal which began work after the 2001 confiscation, has identified the site as an "independent Bronze Age

civilization A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by the development of a state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system). ...

with its own architecture and language". Majidzadeh suggests they may be the remains of the lost

Aratta Aratta is a land that appears in Sumerian myths surrounding Enmerkar and Lugalbanda, two early and possibly mythical kings of Uruk also mentioned on the Sumerian king list. Role in Sumerian literature Aratta is described as follows in Sumerian ...

Kingdom. Other conjectures (e.g. Daniel T. Potts, Piotr Steinkeller) have connected the site with the obscure city-state of

Marhashi Marhaši ( Sumerian: ''Mar-ḫa-šiKI'' , ''Marhashi'', ''Marhasi'', ''Parhasi'', ''Barhasi''; in earlier sources Waraḫše. Akkadian: "Parahshum" ''pa2-ra-ah-shum2-ki'') was a 3rd millennium BC polity situated east of Elam, on the Iranian platea ...

. A 2013 research paper about the South mound states that excavations during 2006 to 2009 "revealed the remains of three successive settlements dating to the fourth millennium BC". Excavation re-commenced in 2014 and revealed art works of "complexity and beauty" and artifacts that proved that the society had several writing systems. According to National Geographic, the content of the mounds is significant:

They turned out to contain the remains of two major architectural complexes. The northern mound included a cult building, while in the southern one were the remains of a fortified citadel. At the foot of the mounds, buried under many feet of sediment, were the remains of smaller buildings. It’s believed that the two mounds had once formed part of a unified urban settlement that stretched many miles across the plateau" ... rtifacts"have been dated to between 2500 and 2200 B.C. hey are said to be evidence ofthe "development of a complex civilization".

Description

Jiroft culture

References

Further reading