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These monuments rest on remains from the first half of the millennium. In the second half of the 3rd millennium, a “citadel” and a high terrace of gigantic proportions were towering over it.
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The settlement spreads over several thousand acres surrounded by a powerful crude brick fortification wall. The site seems to have been occupied without interruption from the beginning to the end of the 3rd millennium. It is difficult, however, to imagine the population density and the high level of civilization that have been revealed by the current surveys and excavations conducted by Youssef Madjidzadeh on the site of Konār Ṣandal, located 28 km south of Jiroft ( Figure 2). Tepe Yahya and Shahdad (Šahdād), 200 km to the north-northeast of Kerman, were occupied at the end of the 3rd millennium and hint at a culture specific to the south of Iran. It is located at a distance of 1000 km from the valley of the Euphrates in the west and from the Indus River in the east. The region of Jiroft, lying far away from the large centers of civilization, had not until now attracted the attention of researchers. In its southern part of Kerman, tablets have been identified 75 km away to the west of Jiroft at the small site of Tepe Yahya (Yaḥyā), located at about 130 km north of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. In the first half of the 3rd millennium, Fars appears as the development center of the first writing, called “proto-Elamite,” which was soon used throughout Iranian plateau. 45 km north of Shiraz), then the capital city of the Fars and the zone of contact with Mesopotamia via Susiana and Luristan. To the north were the so-called “grey ware” area with Tureng Tepe in the Gorgān Plain leading to the present-day Turkmenistan, and Tepe Hissar (Ḥeṣār) to the south of the Alborz Range (q.v.) to the east, bordering the Helmand Basin, was Šahr-e Suḵta, through which lapis lazuli from the Afghan mountains travels and to the west lay Malyān (now a large mound ca.
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The Iranian plateau, at that time, looked like a mosaic of cultural areas. Many settlements are found along the trading routes used for the export of their productions, and this is the case for the Jiroft vases. In the first half of the 3rd millennium B.C.E., the Iranian plateau ( Figure 1) was at the crossroads of trade with its neighboring regions. However, the material has been collected from illegal excavations and has therefore, unfortunately, lost some of its scientific value. This discovery is of particular importance since little is known about the past of the region on the eve of historical times. In the region of Jiroft, a large number of stone (chlorite) vases and objects, carrying human and animal motifs inlaid with semi-precious stones, have recently been discovered.