Product Code Database
Jiroft (; ) is a city in the Central District of Jiroft County, Kerman province, serving as capital of both the county and the district. It is south of the city of Kerman, and south of Tehran along Road 91.
In the past it was also called Sabzevaran, and on account of its being very fertile land it is famous as Hend-e-Koochak (the little India). The early Bronze Age civilization found in Jiroft County is one of the oldest human civilizations (according to some, the oldest) and the script found there may antedate the cuneiform discovered in Mesopotamia.
There is a large dam (Jiroft Dam) upstream the city (40 km North-East of Jiroft) on the Halil River. It has been operational since 1992, With a reservoir of more than 410 million cubic meters of water it irrigates 14,200 hectares of land downstream and generates electricity.Abdolreza Bahremand, 1997, MSc thesis, Flood routing through the Jiroft Dam reservoir, Tehran University, Iran. However, uncontrolled groundwater pumping has lowered the water table and caused increased subsidence.
The Melenti River bed was originally eighty to ninety meters wide, but due to construction of buildings and the dumping of waste it had constricted to under twenty meters. In 2024 this resulted in extreme flooding in Jiroft and fifteen people lost their lives. Neither the City nor the Water Authority had undertaken any maintenance or regulatory authority even though the problems had been noted in a detailed 1999 report.
The proposed type site is Konar Sandal, near Jiroft in the Halil River area. Other significant sites associated with the culture include; Shahr-e Sukhteh (Burnt City), Tepe Bampur, Espiedej, Shahdad, Tal-i-Iblis and Tepe Yahya.
Since February 2003, archaeologists have recovered a wealth of artifacts from the necropolis which they had named Mahtoutabad. For example, one grave contained "animal bones and food offerings, ceramics, and stone and copper items ... indicating a coherent cultural and chronological framework, around 2400–2200 BC".
Two nearby mounds were also excavated, named Konar Sandal South and North. A 2013 research paper about the South mound states that work during 2006 to 2009 "revealed the remains of three successive settlements dating to the fourth millennium BC".
Excavation re-commenced in 2014 and revealed art works of "complexity and beauty" and artifacts that proved that the society had several writing systems. According to National Geographic, the content of the mounds is significant:
They turned out to contain the remains of two major architectural complexes. The northern mound included a cult building, while in the southern one were the remains of a fortified citadel. At the foot of the mounds, buried under many feet of sediment, were the remains of smaller buildings. It’s believed that the two mounds had once formed part of a unified urban settlement that stretched many miles across the plateau ... artifacts "have been dated to between 2500 and 2200 B.C. They the "development of a complex civilization".
==Gallery==
|
|
