The Middle Bronze Age and Old Elamite period in Iran: two Elamite dynasties

The frame

The Met's timeline for Iran, 2000-1000 BCE, dates the Middle Bronze Age about 2000-1500 BCE and the Old Elamite period about 2700-1500 BCE. This page covers the centuries in which the two overlap. According to the timeline's overview, the period is dominated by conflicts between the Elamite state and neighbouring Mesopotamia, and the cultural connections between them show in the use of Mesopotamian cuneiform to record the Elamite language, in cylinder seals and in the building of ziggurats. Susa appears there as a locus of cultural and commercial interchange between the mountain folk of the Zagros and the inhabitants of the Mesopotamian plain. Source 1.

Boundaries and overlaps

The Old Elamite period does not begin on this page: at the Met it starts about 2700 BCE, on the Early Bronze Age page, and the site does not restart it at 2000 BCE. The Encyclopaedia Iranica dates it differently: "The Old Elamite period (ca. 2600-1600 B.C.E.)", within which the time of the Awan and Shimashki (Simaški) dynasties corresponds approximately to periods IV-V at Susa (about 2600-1900 BCE, after Schacht), followed by "The Sukkalmah Period (ca. 1900-1600 B.C.E.)". The Met gives the Sukkalmah dynasty about 1900-1500 BCE and starts the Middle Elamite period about 1500 BCE; Iranica starts it about 1600 BCE. The century between 1600 and 1500 BCE is thus Old Elamite in one source and Middle Elamite in the other; the site follows the Met's 1500 BCE for navigation and does not decide between them. Sources 1, 2.

After 1500 BCE: two tracks

After about 1500 BCE the site's timeline for Iran splits into two parallel tracks rather than one sequence: Elam in the southwest, with the Middle Elamite period (about 1500-1000 BCE at the Met), and the Iron Age of northern and western Iran, which begins with Iron Age I (about 1450-1250 BCE at the Met). The two run side by side, not one after the other. Source 1.

On this site

Three articles are placed in this period. "The Shimashki dynasty: Elam and the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur" deals with the dynasty that, according to the Met, overthrew the Third Dynasty of Ur about 2000-1900 BCE, and with the question of where Shimashki lay. "The Sukkalmah dynasty: Elamite rule in the highlands and the plain" compares the Met's account with Iranica's archaeological account, from the expansion of Susa to irrigation canals. "Shahr-i Sokhta: rise and abandonment of a city in eastern Iran" brings to this page the end of occupation at the city, up to 1800 BCE, and its abandonment in the early second millennium; it is the page's only item from outside the southwest and the Zagros.