Check this out this link for a nice CNN presentation on NGM's August cover story on Iran and an interview with yours truly.

A huge rock pinnacle in the Alamut Valley is the setting chosen by the Assassin cult's founder, Hassan-i Sabah, as his headquarters in a fight against a host of perceived enemies. The rock is too large for the castle to be seen at this scale. Photo by Newsha Tavolakian.

Did you know that the notorious Assassin cult originated in Iran? Their founder’s headquarters and the valley from which they operated for almost two hundred years is not far from Tehran. I was surprised to hear that archaeological research was going on there, so I made a point of visiting Alamut, the fortress castle of Hassan-i Sabbah, as my first stop outside Tehran.

The Assassin Cult, a name that may be derived from the Arabic “hashashin,” meaning hashish user, is surrounded in mystery and legend. This is in part because they were secretive, but also because the historical record we have of their activities is written from many different and conflicting perspectives. One of the best known of these, and probably least accurate, is that of Marco Polo. He is supposed to have visited Alamut in 1273, seventeen years after it was destroyed by the Mongols. The Mongols, under Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis, had proceeded from Alamut to sack Baghdad in 1258 and Damascus in 1260.

Marco Polo passed on a story about an “Old Man” luring young men to his castle and plying them into a stupor and three day sleep with hashish. When they awoke, they found themselves in a contrived paradise of wine, women, and song. The Old Man would then tell the young men that they could enjoy such a paradise permanently if they became assassins and died as martyrs.

The fortress at Alamut was woven into natural rock. Numerous caves, pits (used as cisterns), and tunnels suggest how the place was used to withstand seiges. It is said that the fortress ultimately fell to the Mongols because of an outbreak of cholera. Photo by Newsha Tavolakian.

Alamut is one of the most impressive settings for a fortress that I have ever seen. It sits 200 meters above the valley floor atop a rock so big that it makes the ruins of the castle on top look like the work of ants. Hassan-I Sabbah only lived here from 1094 to 1124, but the setting shows why it is no wonder that his followers were able to hold onto this place for so long. From the vantage point of the castle one can see the surrounding valley for miles. An invading army would first have to take a long trudge from the valley floor up to the rock. The side of the rock facing the valley is virtually vertical. An army would have to climb further, around back, where the big rock is less precipitous. With fortifications the back side would have been as daunting as the front.

When I visited Alamut, I met Hamedei Chubai, an archaeologist and director of excavations there. She had been working there for about five years and had established, from what I could tell, a very professional operation. There was an immaculate headquarters building with plenty of space for labs and visitors. A number of Iranian archaeologists and students were involved in research there.

Chubai accompanied me to the excavations on top of the rock. I saw that the whole top of the rock was covered in ruins. Chubai explained that after Hassan-i Sabbah’s castle was destroyed in 1256, others came and rebuilt. She took me down a ladder into rooms that ancient architects had built into a hole in the rock or on a ledge. She showed me how the brick workmanship of the lowest archaeological layer was superior to that of later times. This, she said, was the palace of Hassan-i Sabbah. He probably received visitors in that very room.

Dr. Hamedei Chubai isn't shy about her respect for Hassan-i Sabbah. She is shown here at the project headquarters with artifacts that may help her sort the truth from the fiction about the Assassins. Photo by Newsha Tavolakian.

Chubai doesn’t buy the hashish and paradise stories about Hassan-i Sabbah. “Really, I think he was a religious man, he was very insistent on his idea of rescuing Iran and the world from the oppressions of kings.” The religion she refers to is Isma’ili, a branch of the Shi’a community of Islam. Hassan-i Sabbah apparently identified himself as an imam with authority to pronounce new teachings to his sect that justified assassination as a religious duty. Among the kings Hassan-i Sabbah fought were the Abassid Caliphs of Baghdad and the Seljuk Turks who were occupying Persia at the time. She went on to explain how he was a very learned man, familiar with medicine, chemistry, and astronomy. He had an interest in educating others and most likely behaved as a strict role model. “I think this was the center of resistence for Iranian culture,” she said. For that reason, she says, Hassan-i Sabbah is famous in Iran, if not a hero.

It is interesting how someone can appear as a hero in one culture and a villain in another. There are obvious parallels today. This is part of what makes the story of the Assassin cult fascinating. It is a complex piece of the complex political and religious dynamics of the time. It involves the Caliphate of Baghdad, the Seljuk Turks, the Fatimid rulers of Cairo, Saladin (who suffered two Assassin attacks), and even the Crusaders, who the Assassins frequently saw as allies.

What do you think? Was Hassan-I Sabbah a hero or a villain?

Politics unfortunately overshadow the important information inscribed in one of cilvilization's most important historical archives. The inscription in Old Persian comes as a complete surprise to scholars who have studied thousands of similar tablets in an archive excavated from the ruins of Persepolis. Photo courtesy of the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago

While I was in Tehran, meeting with officials and getting ready for my road trip, I was struck by how much a certain project I was aware of epitomizes the current state of relations between Iran and the United States. It is the Oriental Institute’s Persepolis Fortification Archive project. It involves old relations between countries, extremist politics, the horror of terrorism, and brinksmanship. All this swirling around what should be simply “archaeology.” Here’s the back story.

Until now, scholars thought that Old Persian, the spoken language of the Achaemenid Persian kings, such as Darius and Xerxes, was written down only to commemorate the kings in royal statements on monuments. Last year grantee Matthew Stolper of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and colleagues discovered a clay tablet that tells a different story. The tablet is one of 25,000 clay records in a collection known as the Persepolis Fortification Archive.

The tablets were retrieved from excavations in the 1930s at ancient Persepolis, or Takht-e-Jamshid, in Iran and then loaned by Iran to the Oriental Institute for long-term study. The archive is an invaluable record of administrative activities, such as storage and payouts of food, in the heart of the Persian Empire around 2500 years ago. Yet the records weren’t actually kept in the Persian language. Most of them were written in Elamite or Aramaic, languages that had already been used for this kind of administrative recording for hundreds of years.

This is the first of the tablets from the archive that is inscribed with Old Persian. In fact, it is the first tablet of this kind ever found anywhere. According to Stolper, this may be an indication that Old Persian was used as a practical written language in Darius’s time after all.

In February of 2007, National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration, with strong support from committee member and prominent Near Eastern archaeologist Melinda Zeder, supported a request from Stolper to contribute toward an emergency effort to document the remaining one-third of the archive of clay tablets and fragments in preparation for their return to Iran.

This urgency exists because the portion of the archive remaining in the custody of the Oriental Institute has become a target in an unfortunate legal battle involving American victims of a 1997 Hamas bombing attack in Israel. A U.S. court ruled that the Islamic Republic of Iran is liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The plaintiffs in the case are attempting to seize the Persepolis tablets and essentially hold them for ransom in the hope that Iran will pay the damages.

The families of U.S. marines killed or wounded in a 1983 bombing in Beirut have joined the suit and want to apply any receipts garnered from the valuable tablets against a $2.7 billion judgement against Iran which they received last year. In supporting the Oriental Institute’s project, the National Geographic Society is making a strong statement in support of the principal that issues of cultural heritage should rise above politics.

The tension surrounding these tablets reminds me of the current tension between the nations of Iran and the U.S.. There is a lot of old baggage, politics, pain and loss, and blustering. Cultural heritage should not be used as a weapon against nations. It is world heritage we're talking about.

Should Iran’s tablets be sold or held for ransom to pay damages to terror victim’s families?

Not only are multiple burials like this rare, but Paul Sereno and his team
have gone a step futher by preparing both the upper and lower sides of this
burial as a two sided cast, creating a unique display. The upper side, shown here on the left, shows what is assumed to be a mother (on the right), clasping the hands of her children. Photograph by Mike Hettwer.

Back in 2000 photographer Mike Hettwer was wandering around the fossil strewn desert of Niger near where Paul Sereno, whose expedition he was photographing, was excavating dinosaurs and giant crocodiles. Hettwer stumbled across an unexpected treasure trove of fossils. Today Paul Sereno announced the stunning discovery. Another dinosaur? No. This time it is a Neolithic graveyard containing the bones of dozens of people who lived between 10,000 B.C. and 5,000 B.C.. Sereno and his colleagues say it may be the largest collection of Neolithic bones ever discovered at a single site in Africa. And no, these people did not live with dinosaurs, the geology shows that the burials are on a Neolithic "island," which dates back about 12,000 years, in a desert that has otherwise been scoured down to Cretaceous sediments over 100 million years old. You can read all about the significance of the people living at the Gobero site in our National Geographic magazine article in the September issue. But you may not read elsewhere about the extraordinary methods Sereno used to collect and protect archaeological remains from this site.

Sereno is a vertebrate paleontologist and is accustomed to wrapping fragile dinosaur remains in plaster "jackets" as a way to protect them for transport them to a laboratory where they will be opened and "excavated" under microscopes and dental drills. This is the treatment he prescribed for a few of the two hundred or so human burials unearthed at Gobero, with the consent of the project's co-director, archaeologist and Sahara expert, Elena Garcea. This contrasts to what is most often practiced by archaeologists in the field, which is that human remains are exposed by careful brushwork and noodling with small tools and then removed, bone by bone, to be carted off for study in the lab.

The results, as Sereno presents them, are spectacular. Two such jacketed specimens steal the show. The first is a young woman who lies in fetal position with a hippo-bone arm bracelet on her upper arm, the earliest example of this found in situ, according to Sereno. The second is what will undoubtedly become famous as the first example of a Neolithic triple burial. The threesome is likely a mother buried with her children, an eight-year-old and a twelve-year-old. If that were not heart wrenching enough, Sereno and colleagues have shown, through pollen analysis, that it is likely that the threesome were laid on a bed of beautiful flowers. The display of the triple burial is remarkable. It has been prepared as a two sided display, where viewers can get a look over and under the burial. This two sided approach is reminiscent of how some mammal and fish fossils from the famous Messel site in Germany are displayed.

This photograph shows the state of the fossil as it was found. Notice that
the skulls of one of the children and the mother are quite eroded. Artist
Tyler Keillor was able to reconstruct the missing skulls and some extremities to create the cast shown at the top of this post. Photograph by Mike Hettwer.

There are certainly up sides and down sides to Sereno's unusual approach. The up side is that we now have a memorable and evocative display that will be preserved indefinitely. The downside is that the bones might not be easy to study, since they are fixed in position. This does not overly concern biological anthropologist Chris Stojanowski, who has studied the Gobero bones and is a coauthor of the paper released today in PLoSOne. He feels that the jacketing method is actually a good technique for protecting the fragile fossils. The biggest problem, he says, is that the technique requires time and budgets far beyond those of the standard archaeological project.

What do you think of Sereno's approach?

For lots more information about this project, check out Sereno's Project Exploration web site.

Yousef Madjidzadeh is a happy man. He thinks he's found Iran's own Bronze Age culture. Photo by Newsha Tavolakian.

On a recent visit to the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul, Turkey I came across a display of artifacts brought back from Mesopotamia by Ottoman sultans. Within one of the cabinets I saw an artifact that was out of place. It was a vase carved from a smoky grey stone known as chlorite. Its color and shape, and moreover the carvings on it, were similar to dozens of similar objects I had seen just months before in another country. But I had not seen them in Iraq, the country that now covers most of ancient Mesopotamia. I had seen them in eastern Iran.

This little discovery made me recall the interesting case of Jiroft, a town in Kerman province that I made a special effort to visit in 2007. I was very curious to see Jiroft because, since 2000, an abundance of artifacts, including hundreds of chlorite objects, had been found there. One interpretation is that a major Bronze Age culture once existed in the area. That's what the leader of current excavations at Jiroft, Dr. Yousef Madjidzadeh, thinks. He suggests that the few chlorite vessels found at Mesopotamian sites, apparently including the one that appears in the museum in Istanbul, were either imported from the Jiroft area or manufactured by craftsmen from Iran who had relocated.

Excavations at Konar Sandal B are exposing what might be a Bronze Age citadel. Not far from this site, a flash flood exposed numerous ancient graves. Photo by Newsha Tavolakian.

The main excavations Madjidzadeh runs are at Konar Sandal A and B, two mounds only a short drive from downtown Jiroft. The mounds aren’t much to look at, but the information coming out of them and other nearby sites is stunning. One mound appears to have been, perhaps in the Bronze Age, a “citadel” and the other a “zigurrat.” A citadel implies a fortress and a zigurrat implies tiered platforms. I couldn't really see either as layman, but I was impressed that if the "zigurrat" is really a zigurrat at Konar Sandal A, then it is one of the earliest in the world. And at the "citadel," Konar Sandal B, archaeologists have uncovered a life size, or larger, human figure sculpted from mud or mud brick. It had been painted to look like it was wearing a feline pelt. If this sculpture is associated with Bronze Age layers, it will be among the earliest of such figures in the world. Unfortunately it is missing its head. The earliest known statue of this sort from Egypt, and I believe the world, is from Heirakonpolis. It dates from 3000 B.C. It is also incomplete, but in much worse shape. It is in over 500 pieces.

Madjizadeh suggests that the Jiroft culture represents what is actually Aratta, a place referred to by Mesopotamian scribes, but lost to time. This view is not universally accepted and other lost cities have been suggested as its true identity. Many scholars await further publication of results. Holly Pittman of the University of Pennsylvania, a close collaborator of Madjizadeh, put "Aratta" in perspective at a recent archaeology conference. She described how the idea of Bronze Age culture consisting of a few isolated mega-cultural centers, ie; Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley was simplistic. She showed a map illustrating numerous more or less contiguous cultural pockets stretching from Egypt to the Indus Valley. Aratta, or whatever Jiroft was, was one of these.

Top: An intricately patterned cup. Middle: a cup with a horned "devil" figure wrestling with two snakes. Bottom: a Scorpion-shaped object whose purpose is unknown to me. Photos by author. Courtesy of the Jiroft Museum.

I’m rooting for Jiroft as a center for early culture. The art style is among the most engaging that I’ve seen from this period. The chlorite objects, mostly vessels, housed in museums in Jiroft, Kerman, and Tehran, have a charm to them that I find captivating. Among the patterns that caught my eye were wonderful scenes of desert antelope and palms; struggles with men, snakes, and big cats; and intricate patterns made of scorpions. There’s even some writing, as yet undeciphered, which, if it survives criticism that it is faked, would shift this culture from a proto-historic ranking to historic.

And there’s the catch. Many of the artifacts found at Jiroft were found by locals who grabbed them after a flash flood had exposed many tombs. The antiquities market was flooded with material from Jiroft. Other than the artifacts excavated by Madjizadeh, it might be hard to know where things came from, and what is real vs. fake. Even the tablet on which the writing was discovered has been criticized as a fake.

Iran held its Second Annual Jiroft conference on May 5. If Jiroft can be all Majizadeh and others want it to be, it will be a real archaeological coup for Iran. There’s nothing like being one of the cradles of civilization.

Is Jiroft all it is pumped up to be? What do you think?

Check out some video of the Jiroft Museum and Konar Sandal B at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG8W3tmJ-U0.

Iran's Vice President for Cultural Heritage and Tourism, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, center, says Iran has much to tell the world, if they'd only listen. Dr. Hassan Fazeli is on the right and author is on the left. Photograph by Newsha Tavolakian.

I’m a listener. In the days before I left Tehran on a 2,500 mile road trip I got an earful from two individuals who made a deep impression on me. One was Dr. Taha Hashemi, deputy of Iran’s Cultural Heritage and Tourism organization (ICHTO) and the other was Iran’s Vice President for Cultural Heritage and Tourism, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie.

The background to these two meetings is that the National Geographic Society generated significant ire in Iran when it published an atlas including the name “Arabian Gulf” as a secondary name for the Persian Gulf. The name “Arabian Gulf” is favored by some Arab nations.

There is no way to over-estimate of strong feelings that the Iranians have about this body of water. Just Google “Arabian Gulf” and you will find a site that states boldly, “The Gulf You Are Looking For Does Not Exist. Try Persian Gulf. The gulf you are looking for is unavailable. No body of water by that name has ever existed. The correct name is Persian Gulf, which always has been, and will always remain, Persian.”

Needless to say, it took major efforts to assure the Iranians that there was no political agenda behind the name change. Once that situation had been addressed, National Geographic approached the Iranians about preparing the story that appears in the August issue. They were gracious enough to trust us and invited a team to Iran that included a photographer, a writer, and me.

The Cleric Who Runs Archaeology in Iran
Dr. Hashemi is the top cleric at ICHTO. From what I understand, it is common to have a cleric in a top role at government institutions. Hashemi is also, from what I was told, a formidable scholar and physician. He had the air of being a tough taskmaster and seemed to command the respect of his colleagues as he entered the meeting room. All rose as we do for judges in a courtroom.

Unfortunately, Dr. Hashemi’s remarks had to be translated. Apparently he was tougher on us than his translator let on. During the meeting I was handed a note by our own translator which said, “The translator forgot to say that Dr. Hashemi mentioned, ‘Your magazine made a mistake by being influenced by politics and used a wrong name for this body of water, the Persian Gulf.’” So, although we may not have heard it from the translator, Hashemi reminded us of the sore spot National Geographic had poked.

Dr. Hashemi was bullish on archaeology and was proud of the efforts of Iranian scientists, like Dr. Hassan Fazeli, to bring Iranian science onto the world stage. When asked about the relevance of Persia to Iranians living in an Islamic republic today, Hashemi used a metaphor that I was to hear many times during my short visit to Iran. He described how Iranian history is like a tree. At the tree’s roots are the earliest parts of Iranian experience, such as the prehistoric cultures that Fazeli studies. The trunk is made up of the glory of the Persian Empire and the branches and leaves represent the fullest expression of the Iranian experience, that of an Islamic Iran. For Hashemi, ancient Persia was not an alien thing, but part of the growing process.

Iran's Veep: We Have Something to Say
I was told that Vice President Mashaie is a right hand man of Iran’s controversial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The two men's styles couldn't be more different. Where Ahmadinejad’s style is confrontational, Mashaie’s is pleasant, thoughtful, and intellectual. 

Mashaie didn’t scold us as Hashemi had, but brought the discussion to a different level. He acknowledged the role that organizations such as the National Geographic Society can play in improving understanding between peoples. Mashaie was hopeful that National Geographic magazine would tell the world that Iran is a country with a long history and that over the millennia its people have made innumerable contributions to science, art, literature, medicine, and many other fields. He was also hopeful that the magazine article would serve to cause people of the world to pause, especially in this era of tension and sabre-rattling, and open their minds. “We’ve been here for thousands of years,” he said. “We feel we have something to say to the world that is worth listening to.”

The Vice-President graciously gave us a pass that provided access to sites and cooperation from officials everywhere we went. “I wish you sweet dreams of Iran,” he said as we parted. I promised him that we would listen hard, and that we would tell the truth.

The spring at Cheshme-Ali is now part of an archaeological urban park. Such pleasant results are rare; dozens of sites around Tehran are threatened by the city's growth. Photo by Newsha Tavolakian.

The plain of Tehran stretches from the foothills of the Alborz mountains north of the city of Tehran to the fringe of the Great Salt Desert. It is not a huge area, but it is significant that there is a high concentration of prehistoric archaeological sites there. Dr. Hassan Fazeli Nashli, director of the Center for Archaeological Research in Tehran, has been conducting surveys of the area since 2003. He specializes in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, which occurred just before historic times. It is during these periods that people began to live together and form the foundations for what would, around 3000 B.C., become historic cultures. Fazeli suspects that the plain of Tehran was an important area for these developments, but systematic study of the area is in its infancy. He now finds himself in a rush to identify sites of importance before they are lost to the demands of Iran’s growing capital.

Fazeli accompanied me to Cheshmeh-Ali and Tepe Pardis. Cheshme-Ali is embedded within the neighborhoods of southern Tehran, and Tepe Pardis is less than 40 kilometers from downtown. Fazeli began studies with international teams at Cheshme-Ali in 1997 and at Tepe Pardis in 2003. Before Fazeli had these two sites radiocarbon dated, there were no absolute dates for any site on the plain of Tehran.

Dr. Hassan Fazeli Nashli, shown here at Cheshme-Ali, wants to focus world attention on Iran's important prehistoric sites. Photo by author.

Ten years after Fazeli’s excavations, Chesme-Ali is a now a charming urban park. The archaeological mound itself, the tell or tepe, is no higher than the surrounding apartments and stores, and it is of the same color. It blends in so well I wonder how many Tehranians even know it is there. Archaeologists such as Fazeli like to point to such parks as an ideal solution to the struggle between preserving cultural heritage and providing room for urban expansion.

Cheshme-Ali, meaning Ali Spring, has been flowing for thousands of years. It forms a large pool at the base of a stone cliff. Fazeli says a reliable water source might be the reason why people lived at this site for so long. On the cliff face above the pool is a frieze showing royalty from a much later period. These royals, the Qajars, were the same who established Tehran as a capital in 1795. They could not have known that the ancient inhabitants of this spring had paved the way for royalty when their differentiation of labor skills and long-distance trade networks set the stage for social stratification among humans.

Tepe Pardis is a very different story from Cheshme-Ali; there is no charming park here. The tepe stands in the middle of a dusty quasi-industrial, quasi-agricultural area. You can tell it was being used as a garbage dump. A road had been hacked into the tepe on one side and a brick clay quarry was literally scooping the past away on the other before Fazeli and his team started studying the site in 2003. They discovered that Tepe Pardis had been a major ceramic center thousands of years ago. The area is still a center for brick making; the tall smokestacks of kilns form the skyline looking north from atop Tepe Pardis.

“Most sites have 400 or 600 years of history,” Fazeli told me at Tepe Pardis. “Cheshme-Ali and Pardis had 3,000 years of constant occupation.” According to Fazeli, between about 5500 B.C. and 2500 B.C., people at Cheshmeh-Ali and Tepe Pardis farmed, traded over long distances, had trade tokens, made high quality pots fired in advanced kilns, and built large settlements. “These people prepared the context for civilization,” he said.

Civilization, in the form of modern Tehran’s 12 million people, is what now threatens ancient sites on the plain of Tehran. For Fazeli, prehistoric sites on the plain, indeed all over Iran, should be immediately identified and protected for study because of their importance to understanding human history. He sees international collaboration as one of the keys to this effort. But it is a race against time. Like many modern cities, Tehran’s need for urban and industrial expansion is insatiable. And when there is a choice between the present and the past, it is the past that most often loses.

When do you think cities should stop construction and preserve the past? When should they get out the bulldozers?