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Vandals pour paint on Elamite bas-reliefs in southern Iran Tehran Times Culture Desk TEHRAN -- Unidentified men have poured paint on the bas-reliefs of the Elamite Tarisha Temple in the Izeh region of Khuzestan Province, the Persian service of CHN reported on Sunday. In response, the Izeh Cultural Heritage Lovers Society has asked Iranian cultural officials to mobilize security guard teams for the Tarisha Temple, which is also known as Eshkaft-e Salman, and for the nearby Kul-Farah site. The security detail for Izeh’s ancient sites has no means to defend themselves or the ancient sites, society chairman Faramarz Khoshab told...

88 cuneiform inscriptions discovered at Chogha Zanbil Ziggurat Tehran Times Culture Desk TEHRAN -- Eighty-eight brick inscriptions were recently discovered at the 3250-year-old Chogha Zanbil Ziggurat in southwestern Iran’s Khuzestan Province, the Persian service of CHN reported on Wednesday. A team of experts restoring the middle section of the ziggurat discovered the cuneiform inscriptions on the northeastern and southeastern walls. “Only a few of the inscriptions are intact. The inscriptions were discovered when the workers were removing rubble from the bases of the walls,” team director Bijan Heidarizadeh said. French archaeologist Roman Ghirshman had said nothing about the inscriptions in...

“The clay tablet bears some signs some of which depict the types and quantity of shipped goods… it also has signs that are still unfamiliar for us.” ...The figurines include various animal designs, especially cows, as well as human statues, which are in the form of sitting women and standing men... a kiln has been unearthed... not yet determined to be a pottery oven or a metal smelting furnace......archaeologists have already discovered the remains of a prehistoric monkey... Based on surveys and scientific studies on the monkey’s skeleton, the animal was dead in captivity in a cage and it was...

"Five Elamit professional linguists from different countries have studied the brick inscription discovered in Jiroft. According to the studies, they have concluded that this discovered inscription is 300 years older than that found in Susa; and most probably the written language went to Susa from this region. However, more studies are still needed to give a final approval to this thesis," said Yousof Majid Zadeh, head of archeological excavation team in Jiroft... Elamit language is only partly understood by scholars. It had no relationship to Sumerian, Semitic or Indo-European languages, and there are no modern descendants of it. After 3000...

New studies show Jiroft was an international trade center 5000 years ago Tehran Times Culture Desk TEHRAN (MNA) –- Studies by foreign archaeologists and experts on seals recently discovered in the Jiroft area prove that Jiroft was an international trade center 5000 years ago. The head of the excavation team in the region, Yusef Majidzadeh, said on Wednesday that several ancient seals in various shapes were discovered during the most recent excavation at the site. “The twenty-five discovered seals show that the regional people made use of seals in their business. They used to put products inside jars, covered the...

Ancient Iranian site shows Mesopotamia-like civilisation [World News]: Tehran, Nov 16 : Shellfish is not seen on most Iranians dining tables but it was part of the daily diet of the inhabitants of ancient Jiroft in southern Iran 5,000 years ago that showed the existence of an ancient civilisation. Jiroft, located in Kerman province, is one of the richest historical areas in the world, with ruins and artefacts dating back to the third millennium BC and with over 100 historical sites located along the approximately 400 km of the Halil Rood riverbank, according to Mehr news agency. Many Iranian and...

A team of Iranian and Italian archaeologists has unearthed ruins of an ancient temple in an Elymais site in the Kaleh Chendar region in southwestern Iran, the Iranian director of the team announced on Saturday. Most parts of the structure have been built with large stones without mortar in form of a broad platform like those built at Persepolis, Jafar Mehrkian told the Persian service of CHN. The structure also includes platforms made of brick, which were usually built in the ancient temples, he added. Vito Messina of the University of Turin and a number of his colleagues accompanied the...

...several seal impressions and clay inscriptions found at Haft-Tappeh contain the name Kabnak, and it is possible that this was the original name of the city. The team has also been tasked with discovering the exact location of Kabnak, where the Elamite king Tepti-ahar built a temple complex in the fifteenth century BC and was buried at the site. Tepti-ahar, the last ruler of the Kidinuid period (1460-1400 BC), known from inscribed bricks and a sale contract from Susa and a text said to be from Malamir (in Lorestan Province), is mentioned on approximately 55 tablets of Haft-Tappeh, bearing the...

Excavations at an archaeological site in Bahrain are shedding light on one of the oldest trading civilisations. The site in Bahrain, thought to be the location of the enigmatic Dilmun civilisation Dilmun, one of most important ancient civilisations of the region and said to date to the third millennium BC, was a hub on a major trading route between Mesopotamia - the world's oldest civilisation - and the Indus Valley in South Asia. It is also believed that Dilmun had commercial ties with ancient sites at Elam in Iran, Alba in Syria and Haittan in Turkey. "For 4,000 years this...

Archeologists Seek Elamite Treasures in Iran ART & CULTURE DESK TEHRAN - The University of Sydney has initiated Australia's largest-ever act of cultural cooperation with Iran in the hope of unearthing archaeological treasures of the ancient Elamite civilization in the Near East. "Unlimited possibilities" lie ahead, according to professor Dan Potts, chair of Sydney's Department of Archaeology, who is posed to sign an agreement which would see the excavation of rich new archaeological sites in what is now Western Iran. The area and Elamite people are referred to in Mesopotamian texts but are yet to be researched in depth. Under...

Ramhormoz graves may be Elamite royal burials: experts TEHRAN, May 20 (MNA) -- A team of archaeologists studying two graves discovered in the city of Ramhormoz in southern Iran said that they bear their remains of a girl and a woman who were most likely members of an Elamite royal family. The team led by Arman Shishegar was assigned to carry out a series of rescue excavations in the Jubji region of the city in Khuzestan Province in May 2007 after the Khuzestan Water and Waste Water Company stumbled on two U-shaped coffins containing skeletons of a girl and a...

Jiroft is the ancient city of Marhashi: U.S. scholarWednesday, May 7, 2008 Tehran Times Culture Desk Jiroft is the ancient city of Marhashi: U.S. scholar TEHRAN -- Piotr Steinkeller, professor of Assyriology in Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of Harvard University, believes that the prehistoric site of Jiroft is the lost ancient city of Marhashi. He developed the theory in his paper during the first round of the International Conference on Jiroft Civilization, which was held in Tehran on May 5 and 6. Marhashi, (in earlier sources Warahshe) was a 3rd millennium BC polity situated east of Elam,...

EIN GEDI, Israel — Five miles out, nearly to the center of the Dead Sea, an international team of scientists has been drilling beneath the seabed to extract a record of climate change and earthquake history stretching back half a million years. The preliminary evidence and clues found halfway through the 40-day project are more than the team could have hoped for. The scientists did not expect to pull up a wood fragment that was roughly 400,000 years old. Nor did they expect to come across a layer of gravel from a mere 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. That finding...

More than 3,200 years ago, life was abuzz in and around what is now this modern-day Israeli metropolis on the shimmering Mediterranean shore. To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all. Yet...

An int'l research team at urging of TAU, Hebrew U. professors will drill half a kilometer to study year-by-year climate change from 500,000 years ago... The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program chose the Dead Sea as the site of its next drilling at the urging of Tel Aviv University's Prof. Zvi Ben-Avraham and the Israel Geological Survey's Dr. Mordechai Stein... sponsored by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities... "We will be taking out a vertical piece about half a kilometer long which will allow us to get a picture of climate change on a year-by-year basis going back 500,000...

A large crack that has suddenly appeared in Kenya’s Rift Valley is evidence that Africa will eventually break apart. The crack already stretches several miles and continues to grow, but it does not go all the way across the surface. If it does, it will split the continent into two. The crack has caused part of the Nairobi-Narok highway to collapse and also accelerating seismic activity in the area, leading researchers to believe that something dramatic could happen in the future. “The Great Rift splits Africa into two plates. With what is happening we have established one plate which is...

Mummy tar in ancient Egypt For millennia, ancient Egyptians used oil tar to preserve bodies. New geologic research shows that the tar came from several sources, shedding light on how trade routes of old compare to those of today. New research suggests that ancient Egyptians used oil tar from Gebel Zeit in Egypt, shown here, and from the Dead Sea to preserve mummies. Image courtesy of James Harrell. All tar sands — crude oils, asphalts and bitumen — contain source-specific compounds, known as biomarkers, which have unique chemical signatures that are closely related to the biological precursors of the oil....

Paleobotanists exploring a site near the Dead Sea have unearthed a startling connection between today's conifer forests in the Southern Hemisphere and an unimaginably distant time torn apart by a global cataclysm. Exquisitely preserved plant fossils show the podocarps, a group of ancient evergreens that includes the massive yellowwood of South Africa and the red pine of New Zealand, thrived in the Permian period, more than 250 million years ago. That's tens of millions of years earlier than thought, and it shows that early podocarps survived the "great dying" at the end of the Permian, the worst mass extinction the...

The level of the Dead Sea is currently dropping by more than a meter every year. But this is not new, according to German and Israeli researchers who maintain that the level of the salty lake also dropped millennia ago. At the end of the last ice age, for example, the water level dropped by 250 meters within a few thousand years...Dr. Daniela Müller and Prof. Achim Brauer from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam, together with Dr. Yoav Ben Dor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studied 15,000-year-old sediments from the Dead Sea and the surrounding...

British scientists have deciphered a mysterious ancient clay tablet and believe they have solved a riddle over a giant asteroid impact more than 5,000 years ago. Geologists have long puzzled over the shape of the land close to the town of Köfels in the Austrian Alps, but were unable to prove it had been caused by an asteroid. Now researchers say their translation of symbols on a star map from an ancient civilisation includes notes on a mile-wide asteroid that later hit Earth - which could have caused tens of thousands of deaths. The circular clay tablet was discovered 150...