The Iron Age Revealed

The growth of archaeological research in Iran in the last quarter century has been one of the most exciting developments of Near Eastern history and anthropology. It has spanned vir­tually the entire period of man’s presence on the plateau, and has provided a flood of new data and new problems, as the articles included in this volume testify. But within this continuum of archaeological work stretching from the palaeo­lithic to Islamic times, one period stands out, the Iron Age.

The Iron Age in Iran occupies a relatively short time span in archaeological terms, begin­ning somewhere prior to 1250 B.C. and running through to the Achaemenids. But within this span, more work has been concentrated than on any other period in Iranian history, and the work has touched almost every corner of the country. Over thirty sites have been excavated, stretching from Seistan in the east to the Zagros in the west, and from the lowlands of Khuzistan to the shores of the Caspian. The result of these many efforts, combined with the work of others doing survey or reviewing historical sources, has led to a new picture of Iran in the Iron Age. This picture has many gaps yet to be filled, but is even now emerging as a coherent pattern.

The beginnings of Iron Age archaeology in Iran after World War II were small and can al­most be characterized as by-products of other research. On the shore of the Caspian, Carleton Coon, while excavating for evidence of early man, discovered Iron Age deposits in Hotu Cave. At about the same time T. Burton Brown ex­cavated and published the important site of Geoy Tepe on the western shore of Lake Rezaiyeh. Both of these sites, however, were somewhat peripheral to the central concerns of Iranian Iron Age archaeology at the time. The same cannot be said of R. Ghirshman’s excavation of the Achaemenid Village at Susa. Ghirshman added the information gained from this new excavation to that from sites dug before World War II such as Tepe Sialk, Persepolis, and Pasargadae. The result was the formulation of a broad hypothesis concerning Iron Age Iran. Viewing the period as the time during which Iranians first reached the plateau, Ghirshman postulated a gradual migration from the northwest through the Zagros, with stopping points at the sites just mentioned, and with Fars as the eventual destination of the Persians. The picture presented certain prob­lems, but was plausible given the evidence avail­able at the time. Further information was necessary to test the hypothesis.

This new information began to appear a dozen years after the war. In the summer of 1957, Robert H. Dyson, Jr. began the excava­tions at Hasanlu Tepe, which can be character­ized as the departure point of Iron Age archaeol­ogy in Iran in the post-War period. Dyson chose Hasanlu for a number of reasons. The previous brief work at the site by Sir Aurel Stein and by M. Rad and A. Hakimi had established that co­herent results could be expected even with an excavation of limited scale. In addition, the Uni­versity Museum had already dug in the Caspian region at Tureng Tepe and Belt and Hotu Caves, and at Tepe Hissar near Damghan. Work in Azerbaijan would serve to complement these ear­lier efforts. Azerbaijan was little explored and was an important region in both the Iron Age problem and in the greater Near Eastern picture. Finally, Hasanlu held forth the promise of serving as a focal point for exploring the archaeo­logical sequence in Solduz, from Neolithic through to the Iron Age, and thus helping to establish a firm basis to which other work in western Iran could be tied.

The results of the first season’s excavation at Hasanlu proved Dyson’s choice a wise one. Coherent results were achieved and the material did indeed complement that from eastern Iran. But, while Dyson’s plan for using Hasanlu as an anchor in the western Iranian sequence was not abandoned, the discovery of the Period IV de­posit, with its wealth of material, meant that the emphasis in the plan had to be changed. A sub­stantial area of the Period IV deposit had to be cleared. This then became the goal of the next few seasons, and these seasons established Has­anlu as the Iron Age par exellence in western Iran, a position it retains even now.

Soon after the launching of the Hasanlu Project, a second effort in Iranian archaeology was undertaken. David Stronach, after two sea­sons at Yarim Tepe in Gurgan (a site which also contained Iron Age deposits) turned his atten­tion to problems of Achaemenid origins. Seeking a site which could hopefully be used to pin down the earliest Achaemenid traditions, and thus serve to elucidate some of the problems of the Iranian migrations and the beginnings of Achaemenid society and religion, Stronach chose to excavate at the capital of Cyrus the Great, Pasargadae. Thus, Stronach’s approach was far different from Dyson’s. Attention was focused on a specific site because it could serve to answer questions directly related to the Iron Age. The plan was to be one of working backwards, establishing the classic tradition and then seeking its antecedents. Stronach hoped, in other words, to anchor the end of the Iron Age sequence.

At the same time that work proceeded at Pasargadae, the Hasanlu Project continued its investigation of the Iron Age materials in Azer­baijan. It not only defined the Hasanlu IV assem­blage, but added Hasanlu III and V to the pic­ture. Hasanlu MA and B were crucial in filling in the gap between the monumental assemblage at Hasanlu IV and the work of Stronach at Pasar­gadae. Hasanlu V, preceding IV, marked the be­ginning of the Iron Age in Azerbaijan, and pointed up the continuity between the earliest Iron Age materials and those of Period IV.

While these two major expeditions were in progress, two other smaller projects also added to the growing corpus of information about the Iron Age in Iran. The first was the excavation at Zendan-i Sulaiman, an adjunct to the much larger effort of the German expedition at the Sas­sanian site of Takht-i Sulaiman. The Zendan served to fill in part of the gap between Hasanlu IV and IIIB, and at the same time provided in­formation on the Iron Age in Kurdistan. The second project was a small excavation at the site of Khorvin to the west of Tehran, where an Iron Age cemetery was being plundered. L. Vanden Berghe stepped in and properly excavated some of the graves himself, and then in his publication also recorded much of the unscientifically exca­vated material with that which he had salvaged.

Enough material had by this time become available for a new synthesis of the Iron Age to be undertaken. The work of this synthesis fell to T. Cuyler Young, Jr., who had been serving as assistant director at Hasanlu since the incep­tion of the project. Young was specifically in­terested in the problem of the migration of the Iranians onto the plateau, and the relationship of this historic phenomenon to the archaeological record. Using the materials from Hasanlu and Pasargadae as his anchor points, he surveyed large areas in central western Iran and Fars, and combined this with an ongoing survey of Solduz.

The synthesis of these surveys, taken with the Iron Age materials excavated both prior to and following the war, were combined in a series of articles in the journal Iran. These were of far-reaching importance in two ways. First, Young set out three basic divisions within the Iron Age: the “Early Western Gray Ware Horizon,” the “Late Western Gray Ware Horizon,” and the “Late Buff Ware Horizon” (for which Dyson proposed in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies in 1965 the terms Iron I, II, and III), which were followed by the Achaemenid period. Thus for the first time order was introduced into the larger picture of the Iranian Iron Age. Second, Young completely reinterpreted the old and new evidence for Iranian migrations, and proposed an east-west movement rather than a north-south one. Thus, the Bronze Age materials from the cast were related to the Iron I materials in the west, Iron II was seen as the infusion of new ele­ments into the Iron I assemblage, and Iron III as a development from Iron II. Parts of the new picture, such as the transition from the eastern Bronze Age materials to Iron I in the west and the transition from Iron II to Iron III were still sketchy. The new evidence was too limited for certainty, but the hypothesis was convincing given the facts available.

In as far as any point in the ongoing process of archaeological discovery can be said to be a recognizable transition, Young’s articles were such. The stage initiated by Dyson had reached a plateau; the problem was redefined and a basic sequence was laid out. What was to follow was a new departure once again, although some of the old concerns continued to be apparent.

The new work on the Iron Age was much more specifically directed than that which pre­ceded it, and was aimed at filling in some of the gaps. In a sense, western Iran continued to be the focal point, since here, on the fringes of his­tory, were problems that held an added dimen­sion. The most glaring omission on the western front was the almost total absence, aside from survey data, of material from the central Zagros. Here, in the area of ancient Media and the prov­ince of Luristan, the archaeological map was a virtual blank. The lack of work in Media was surprising because of the central role the Medes had played in Iron Age history, and the geo­graphically pivotal area they had occupied. The absence of excavation in Luristan was also un­usual, for the Luristan bronzes, which had long since been current on the antiquities markets of the world, were recognized as an important as­pect of Iron Age Iran. Thus, it is not surprising to find at this point a number of expeditions em­barking on programs of excavation in central western Iran. Two of these expeditions, those at Godin and Nush-i Jan, were direct outgrowths of earlier personal research, and both were fo­cused upon the Medes. Others, concerned with Luristan, were undertaken by new students.