{"id":1095,"date":"2004-05-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-05-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wp-a_lawler\/?p=1095"},"modified":"2004-05-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-05-01T00:00:00","slug":"rocking-the-cradle-cover-may-2004","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/rocking-the-cradle-cover-may-2004\/","title":{"rendered":"Rocking The Cradle"},"content":{"rendered":"

AIn Iran, an archaeologist is racing to uncover a literate Bronze Age society he believes predates ancient Mesopotamia. Critics say he may be overreaching, but they concede his dig will likely change our view of the dawn of civilization.<\/span><\/p>\n

Swathed modestly in a black head scarf and wearing black sunglasses and a black visor, Akram Gholami is standing in the bottom of a trench, carefully brushing at a tiny section of an exposed earth wall. It is one of the last days of a six-week archaeological excavation this past January and February in a rugged part of southeastern Iran, and most of the other workers are leaving the high dusty mound on foot or straddling old motorcycles. But the Iranian archaeologist is too intent on this bit of dirt to call it quits just yet. Her intensity attracts the attention of Holly Pittman, an
\nAmerican archaeologist, who wanders over from a nearby trench. To the untrained eye, the spot in Gholami\u2019s wall is just a slightly darker bit of soil in a precise rectangular hole. The two archaeologists, though, think it might be a precious clue to a civilization that vanished more than 4,000 years ago and is only now coming to light.Using brushes and toothpicks, Pittman begins coaxing the discolored chunk out of the wall. An hour later, she adjusts her white-and-black head scarf and triumphantly shows off the results of their labor: a chunk of dried mud about the size of a bar of soap. To Yousef Madjidzadeh, the expatriate Iranian archaeologist who is leading the expedition, it\u2019s a triumphant moment, providing further evidence that he has found the remains of the mysterious Bronze Age culture of Aratta\u2014a lost city celebrated in a four-millennia-old epic for its colorful architecture and excellent craftsmanship. \u201cThis is magnificent!\u201d Madjidzadeh says, so overcome he takes a seat on a ledge in the trench. \u201cI\u2019m going to cry.\u201d<\/p>\n

The earthen clod contains an impression probably made by a scribe, priest or merchant rolling a cylindrical seal on damp clay. It is one of a dozen such impressions discovered here in the past month. But what has brought tears to Madjidzadeh\u2019s eyes are the curious markings on the imprint\u2014the first clear sign that this civilization had achieved literacy.<\/p>\n

The last-minute discovery and others made during the dig have convinced Madjidzadeh that this desolate valley, watered by the Halil River, was once home to a thriving\u2014and literate\u2014community. He calls it nothing less than \u201cthe earliest Oriental civilization.\u201d It\u2019s a dramatic assertion, but if he\u2019s right, it would mean the Halil River site could be older than Mesopotamia, a thousand miles to the west in what is today Iraq and long acknowledged as one of the earliest civilizations. Confirmation would enhance the understanding of the critical period when people began to live a literate urban life. It would also bestow prominence to this forgotten corner of Iran.<\/p>\n

Others are more cautious. The age of the site has not been scientifically established, and there isn\u2019t enough research on the area to conclusively cross-reference the finds with other sites. Even Pittman gently suggests that there is not enough evidence yet to back up Madjidzadeh\u2019s claims. \u201cHe\u2019s a typical archaeologist,\u201d she says with a smile and a shrug. \u201cHis site is the center of the universe.\u201d Still, she adds, it is \u201ca very exciting site. The fact that this was a third millennium civilization adds tremendously to our knowledge of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

It took an unlikely combination of events\u2014a flood in this region, combined with a political thaw in distant Tehran, the Iranian capital\u2014to bring Madjidzadeh here in the first place. In 2001, local villagers began plundering ancient graves exposed by a flash flood. Iranian police confiscated hundreds of finely worked stone vessels carved with images of animals and architecture and decorated with semiprecious stones. Because the vessels were not scientifically recovered, their age and origin are open to debate. But Madjidzadeh strongly believes most were made in this valley more than 4,000 years ago. If so, they can provide clues about how the Halil River people lived, died, worked and prayed.<\/p>\n

Even more intriguing, the artifacts resemble vessels that have been found from today\u2019s Syria all the way to the Indus River Valley and definitively date to the middle of the third millennium b.c. The identity and center of the culture that made these stone vessels have never before been pinpointed, but in the 1970s Harvard archaeologist Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky discovered a workshop for making the distinctive stone vessels while digging at a site called Tepe Yahya, just over the mountains from here.<\/p>\n

The third millennium b.c. was a critical and even romantic time in human history, when writing flourished for the first time. One of the oldest recorded stories describes a
\nstruggle between the king of Uruk\u2014a thriving port in southern Mesopotamia where writing is believed to have begun around 3200 b.c.\u2014and the lord of a land called Aratta. \u201cAratta\u2019s battlements are of green lapis lazuli, its walls and its towering brickwork are bright red, their brick clay is made of tinstone dug out in the mountains where the cypress grows,\u201d the epic reads. Uruk\u2019s king Enmerkar asks the lord of Aratta to submit to him. The lord refuses, despite the drought ravaging his land, and instead wrests much-needed grain from Uruk, staving off the Mesopotamians until the rains return. Enmerkar\u2019s defeat is interpreted as a parable of the arrogance of power.<\/p>\n

Some scholars argue that Aratta was a powerful, artistically advanced kingdom located in Armenia or western Iran. Others say it is merely the stuff of myth. Madjidzadeh, a vigorous man in his 60s with a neatly trimmed beard, has long believed that a great culture flowered in Aratta\u2014and that the ancient kingdom was located here in southeastern Iran. Lamberg-Karlovsky\u2019s discovery at Tepe Yahya inspired Madjidzadeh, then a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, to pursue Aratta\u2019s origins when he returned to Iran to teach at Tehran University in 1970.<\/p>\n

His plans were dashed by the toppling of the Shah of Iran during 1979\u2019s Islamic Revolution. Foreign archaeologists were no longer welcome in the country, and Madjidzadeh\u2014 married to a French woman and Western-educated\u2014was labeled a counterrevolutionary and stripped of his professor ship. It would take nearly 25 years for him to resume the search for Aratta.<\/p>\n

I meet up with pittman, a professor and museum curator at the University of Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles from the dig, in the sprawling metropolis of Tehran. From there, we hop on a packed commercial jet, flying over pale deserts and brown mountains, to Kerman, where a driver from Madjidzadeh\u2019s team meets us for the three-hour journey south to Jiroft. With a population of 300,000, Jiroft is the biggest city in the Halil River Valley, known for its succulent fruits, fresh vegetables and independent-minded people.<\/p>\n

The sun is setting across row after row of snowcapped peaks as Pittman and I ride down into the Halil River Valley. High mountain ramparts enclose the valley on three sides, and the snaking Halil River winds across the bottom before vanishing in a distant desert marsh. The region\u2019s remoteness has kept it out of history\u2019s limelight, save for a possible visit by Alexander the Great on his disastrous return from India in 325 b.c. and a Mogul invasion 1,500 years later. The unforgiving environment, more than marauding troops, has shaped the place. Summer temperatures regularly soar above 120 degrees\u2014ideal weather for the date harvest, since it is too hot even for flies. Droughts can last for years. Earthquakes and floods have littered the valley with the ruins of settlements stretching from Neolithic times to the 19th century. Yet as we drive out of the mountains, there are patches of astonishing dark green vegetation. Date palm groves and citrus orchards mingle with long plastic greenhouses.<\/p>\n

Madjidzadeh\u2019s compound, or dig house, is nestled in a lovely grove of orange trees. But this is no idyll. Two dozen crew members are crowded into two concrete buildings, sharing rooms and computers and eating at a long communal table. At precisely 6:30 every morning, a rickety bus takes the sleepy researchers south along the river, through palm-shaded villages with mud-brick houses. Women in black chadors can be seen carrying flatbread, and donkeys with children on their backs clip-clop down alleys. The bus stops in one village and unloads a dozen people near a high mound before moving a mile down the road to a second massive mound.<\/p>\n

Somewhere in these two man-made hills, Madjidzadeh believes, are the keys to the mysterious civilization that built Aratta. He has fielded a large crew to work in January and February, the coolest time of the year. In six weeks, 16 archaeologists and more than 200 workers will dig 18 trenches and open an acre and a half of earth. Most of the workers are local, and when the bus arrives many are already waiting, shovels in hand and wearing checkered head scarves around their necks to ward off the morning chill.<\/p>\n

Madjidzadeh points to the dusty remains of unusual scalloped walls around the edge of the second mound. Else Elsewhere, workers have revealed drainage channels and stone foundations. Madjidzadeh says this site may have been the protective citadel and administrative center of Aratta. The elaborate walls and multistoried buildings are reminiscent of details etched on stone vessels recovered 900 miles away. And this was no isolated fortress. In a trench close to the hill, workers uncovered the remains of a 14-room house; the citadel appears to have been ringed by residences.<\/p>\n

Madjidzadeh\u2019s work at the other hill revealed what was once a massive mud-brick platform with at least one and possibly two smaller platforms on top. The structure\u2019s exact age is uncertain, but based on potsherds found at the site, it may have been built around the middle or end of the third millennium b.c. The structure resembles a Sumerian ziggurat. In distant Mesopotamia, such structures usually stood at the center of a temple complex. Even by Mesopotamian standards, this mound is impressive; Madjidzadeh says the complex required some three million to four million mud bricks. Today, the mound remains sufficiently formidable to provide refuge for local villagers during floods.<\/p>\n

In 2001, after the raging Halil River uncovered an ancient cemetery, an orgy of looting ensued, with hundreds, even thousands, of locals raiding graveyards south of Jiroft. \u201cWe guess that 100,000 objects were looted,\u201d Madjidzadeh says one evening at the dig-house dinner table. \u201cIt\u2019s a sad story. Looters made 10,000 holes over one and a half years.\u201d Based on information he\u2019s collected from villagers, each grave contained at least one stone vessel; the largest grave held 30.<\/p>\n

All that\u2019s left of one cemetery are hundreds of ugly round holes, some as deep as 16 feet, pockmarking the plain alongside the shallow river. Nothing seems to have survived the raids but broken potsherds closely resembling those that Madjidzadeh is finding at the mounds. Two policemen appear suddenly when I visit a looted cemetery with two team members one afternoon. Both have their shirttails out and neither is old enough to grow a real mustache, though one has a rifle. But they are guarding only empty holes.<\/p>\n

Later that day, a young man stops by Gholami\u2019s trench to chat with the workers. He says his name is Ali. His clothes are a notch nicer than his compatriots\u2019, and his motorcycle, waiting beside the road, is shiny and new. Why isn\u2019t he part of the digging team? \u201cDo you prefer traveling in a minibus or a Mercedes?\u201d Ali asks slyly. He says he digs too\u2014not in the midday heat for archaeologists but at night, for his own gain. He\u2019s heard that others found a fish made of lapis lazuli just five nights before. \u201cThere are always guys showing up to buy things we dig up,\u201d Ali says. \u201cIt\u2019s normal.\u201d Local and national authorities were slow to halt the looting when it began, and the protection in place now is hardly effective. \u201cPolice have come, but they aren\u2019t doing anything serious,\u201d Ali says.<\/p>\n

A number of villagers have reportedly been arrested for a trial later this year. \u201cI was told I was a looter, and they said they found opium in my car,\u201d he says during a visit to the dig house. He denies the charges of looting and drug possession, insisting he is a political scapegoat. \u201cPeople here like to have money, and they know there was an ancient city here\u2014but they don\u2019t understand anything about ancient culture or archaeology.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the looting continues. One day, a chartered helicopter doing aerial photography for the archaeologists spots illegal diggers in broad daylight. They flee, but the pilot trails them right to their homes. \u201cThe police chief was onboard,\u201d Madjidzadeh laughs. \u201cAnd he says he will arrest them tomorrow.\u201d Such arrests, however, do little to stop the flow of artifacts from these cemeteries to dealers abroad.<\/p>\n

To some locals, Madjidzadeh is simply one more treasure hunter muscling in on a good thing. To change that perception, the archaeologist gives lectures and slide shows in a different village each week to educate people about their heritage and its importance. It\u2019s a tough sell. \u201cThis is your history, your grandparents\u2019 legacy,\u201d he tells one group gathered a few miles from Jiroft. His speech, in a mud-brick hall, is met with polite attention and indifference. The hundred or so men in the audience\u2014no women are present, save for several of the archaeologists\u2014get up when he finishes and shuffle away without asking any questions.<\/p>\n

Madjidzadeh rarely acknowledges defeat. For years after Tehran University dismissed him, he fought the school in court before going into self-imposed exile in France with his wife and their two children. In 1997, the election of the reform- minded president Mohammad Khatami loosened the conservatives\u2019 hold on the Iranian government. When the looting around Jiroft reached epidemic proportions, Iranian officials asked Madjidzadeh \u2014 now a French citizen \u2014 to return and conduct scientific excavations in the region. \u201cThere was a lot of danger,\u201d he says of his initial visit in 2001. At one point, soldiers shot and killed a teacher who\u2019d been digging illegally. He worried looters would shoot archaeologists.<\/p>\n

The first thing he did was examine hundreds of looted objects, mainly funerary vessels, that police had confiscated. \u201cI drew them, photographed them, slept with them,\u201d he says. When he was finally ready to dig in early 2003, he made a calculated decision to avoid the cemeteries and focus on the two mounds.\u201cPeople thought we were crazy. They asked, \u2018Why dig there? There\u2019s no treasure there, just potsherds.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

But by digging at the mounds, he gained the trust of area villagers, showing them that archaeology was about understanding the past, not treasure hunting. And by giving villagers steady work, he encourages them to protect the site.<\/p>\n

While educating area villagers, Madjidzadeh is also trying to train young Iranian archaeologists. Because of the 1979 revolution, which closed the door to the outside world, an eight-year-long war with Iraq and a struggling economy, most of them are poorly paid and have scant knowledge of modern techniques. Madjidzadeh drives the team hard. Every night there is a lengthy seminar, and everyone is expected to put in long hours drawing, cataloging and analyzing their finds. A believer in women\u2019s rights, Madjidzadeh also encourages the participation of female archaeologists, such as Gholami.<\/p>\n

For Gholami, 36, and the dig\u2019s other women, 56-year-old Penn archaeologist Pittman is a model. Gholami and Pittman spend what little free time they have chatting over glasses of tea. Pittman is among the very first American archaeologists to dig in Iran in nearly a quarter-century. At the moment, she\u2019s
\nin the workroom, leaning her spare frame over a rickety drafting table while wearing a stamp-collecting visor to examine a clod of dirt. The room is a jumble of desks, chairs, potsherds and the occasional stunning artifact. Abronze dagger, uncovered by one of two University of Pennsylvania graduate students<\/p>\n

Pittman brought along, rests in a pot of sand near her feet. Outside, a muezzin is calling evening prayers while occasional cars swish by, leaving a faint smell of exhaust in the room. \u201cI spend all my time going through mud balls. Ninetynine percent of the time, they\u2019re just mud balls,\u201d she says. \u201cAnyone who says time is money would think I\u2019m crazy.\u201d Pittman dropped out of Bryn Mawr in 1969 to travel through Europe. In Florence, Pittman found art; in Crete, hanging out with a team of French researchers digging at a Minoan palace, she found archaeology. \u201cI desperately wanted a life where I could spend half of my time outside the country,\u201d she recalls. She went back to Columbia University to get her doctorate, and by the mid-1970s she was digging at a site in western Iran.<\/p>\n

When the revolution forced her out, Pittman worked in Turkey, Syria and Iraq before Madjidzadeh invited her back to Iran this year. \u201cJiroft is perfect for me,\u201d she says. \u201cI know the material and have experience in the areas of Mesopotamia and Anatolia as well as the Iranian plateau.\u201d In a cardboard box under her bed are fragments of a dozen seal impressions. After many painstaking hours at the table, she has almost completely reconstructed two. The next step is drawing them, at a scale of two or three to one. This work is critical to teasing out the details of Jiroft\u2019s trade and bureaucracy, preserved in damp clay for thousands of years.<\/p>\n

Like signet rings from later times, such seals often marked an individual of rank. Typically made by an intricately carved cylinder worn around the neck and rolled across wet clay to mark a document or protect a box or storage jar, a seal might show scenes of gods and humans and animals. More than architecture or pottery, the fine details on cylinder seals provide a look into the lives of the ancient world\u2019s rich and famous. \u201cYou have to know what to look for,\u201d Pittman says, brushing away a bit of dirt from a seal fragment. \u201cI can look at this little piece and know if it is an architectural detail,\u201d perhaps a throne\u2014a sign of royal splendor. \u201cIn the absence of writing, seal impressions are articulate\u2014you can reconstruct a tale from these things.\u201d<\/p>\n

In its heyday, Madjidzadeh says,this society may have closely resembled larger civilizations along the Indus River and in Mesopotamia. The archaeological evidence suggests that the Halil River settlers built monumental structures as well as modest homes out of mud bricks, and developed complex irrigation systems to support fields of grain. Though the Halil River is smaller than the great Indus, Tigris and Euphrates rivers, it watered a prosperous land, with its own mythology and unique architecture.<\/p>\n

Madjidzadeh further believes the valley was a bustling center with well-developed art forms as early as 2700 b.c. with a history possibly going back four or five centuries earlier. He thinks it may have influenced nascent cultures in places like Uruk, based on myths and art from Mesopotamia that he believes echo the Halil River people.<\/p>\n

Many scholars find Madjidzadeh\u2019s claims fanciful. \u201cI don\u2019t want to diminish this discovery,\u201d says Oscar Muscarella, an archaeologist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. \u201cIt could be a major find, but this is not world-shaking.\u201d He says Harvard University archaeologist Carl Lamberg- Karlovsky\u2019s dig three decades ago at Tepe Yahya, 60 miles from Jiroft, already demonstrated that dark stone vessels came from this region. Oxford University cuneiformist Jeremy Black says identifying Jiroft as ancient Aratta will have to wait until its seal impressions and other markings are better understood.<\/p>\n

Just dating the site is a formidable challenge. No radiocarbon tests have yet been carried out, and the other common method of determining age\u2014cross-referencing pottery\u2014 is difficult in this largely unexplored region. Lamberg-Karlovsky himself says he would be surprised if the heyday of the Jiroft site predates 2500 b.c., and says he is \u201cskeptical about [Madjidzadeh\u2019s] interpretations.\u201d Still, he agrees that the finds are \u201cterribly important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if Madjidzadeh\u2019s claims turn out to be exaggerated, he feels he is helping to free Iran from decades of isolation and fostering a new generation of archaeologists eager to uncover the region\u2019s past. When I reach him in Tehran a few weeks after the dig season is over, he is about to head back to Jiroft, whose city leaders are naming a square after him. Few archaeologists can boast such an honor, and giving it to a man once considered a counterrevolutionary makes it all the more surprising. The irony is not lost on Madjidzadeh. But given that his efforts could revolutionize the way we understand the ancient world, it seems a fitting tribute. looting, but only one official: Hesam Arefi, the local representative for the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization, which is responsible for overseeing the country\u2019s historic sites. Arefi was jailed for 18 days before being freed pending<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
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