PERIOD GUIDE · Iran (Persia)
The Met's timeline dates the Neolithic in Iran about 8000-5000 BCE and opens it with the domestication of sheep and goats at Ali Kosh. The site's Iranian frame therefore starts some 2,000 years after its Levant and Mesopotamia frames, whose boundaries are not copied here.
Approximately 8000-5000 BCEMove through the periods
The whole scheme with this period marked; the periods before and after are its neighbours in the row. Boundaries follow the sources and are not to scale.
The Met's timeline for Iran, 8000-2000 BCE, divides the Neolithic in two: a Pre-Pottery Neolithic of about 8000-7500 BCE and a Pottery Neolithic of about 7500-5000 BCE. According to the overview on the same page, agricultural communities form in western Iran beginning in the eighth millennium BCE, and "it is not clear" whether they represent an indigenous development or the result of outside influences. The site follows this timeline for Iran because it gives one dated scheme for Iran as a whole, from the Neolithic to the end of the Early Bronze Age. Source 1.
On this site the Levant's Neolithic page begins at approximately 10,000 BCE, and the Mesopotamian frame also begins at 10,000 BCE. The Iranian frame begins some 2,000 years later, at about 8000 BCE, and is set by its own source: the Levant's boundaries are not copied onto Iran, and the same date can belong to differently named periods in different regions. Inside the Iranian frame, too, the line is soft: the timeline places what it calls the earliest known clay vessels, at Ganj Dareh, in "ca. 8th millennium B.C.", a wording that does not say whether they come before or after its own boundary of about 7500 BCE between the Pre-Pottery and the Pottery Neolithic. The end of the period, about 5000 BCE, is the start of the Chalcolithic in the same source. Source 1.
Two articles are placed in this period. "Ali Kosh and Ganj Dareh: early herding and clay vessels in Iran" reads the timeline's two earliest entries, the domestication of sheep and goats about 8000 BCE and clay vessels and terracotta figurines in the 8th millennium, and separates what they say from what they do not. "Hajji Firuz: painted pottery and contact with Mesopotamia" examines a single sentence on about 6000-5000 BCE in which resemblance to finds from sites in Mesopotamia is presented as evidence of contact between distant settlements. No documented museum object is placed in this period yet.
Source
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art · 2000 · Checked
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