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Selected case studies and useful reading questions: what was found, how was it studied and what follows from the evidence?
The articles and guides here connect case studies with methods: layers and dating, critical reading, pottery, coins, inscriptions and raw materials. Choose a question, then follow the sources and related reading. Checking an abstract is never presented as reviewing an entire paper.
In 1982 a bulldozer levelling the ground for a road to a dam on the Marun river, near Behbahan in southwestern Iran, cut through a stone-walled funerary chamber holding a bronze coffin. According to Encyclopaedia Iranica it is a late Neo-Elamite elite burial, ca. 630-550 BCE.
UNESCO credits the founding of Chogha Zanbil to the Elamite king Untash-Napirisha and gives him the years 1275-1240 BCE; the Met's timeline dates the building of its ziggurat to about 1340-1300 BCE. What is known about the site, and what the gap means.
At Susa a dynasty renewed building in the city and kept Mesopotamian monuments taken as booty; at Kabnak an inscribed stele ties a funerary complex to King Tepti-ahar. Two kinds of royal evidence, and a date that precedes the start of the period on the Met's timeline.
Encyclopaedia Iranica assigns levels of a sounding at Susa to two Neo-Elamite phases, and the Met's timeline records the Assyrian sack of the city about 646 BCE. What the sources allow us to say about Susa before and after the sack.
3 min read, approximately
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