Clues to the Presence of an Assyrian Administration in the Mahidasht Plain, Kermanshah, Iran.

• Author: Alibaigi, Sajjad

INTRODUCTION

The presence of the Assyrians in the central Zagros from the ninth to seventh centuries BCE, well known from royal inscriptions and other texts, has been increasingly corroborated by archaeological finds in Iran. A number of monuments commissioned by the Neo-Assyrian kings have been discovered over the past decades. In particular, the rock reliefs located in the present-day provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah. Ham. and Hamadan testify to Assyrian campaigns in these areas. This activity has to be understood in the context of Assyrian efforts to assert control over the Great Khorasan Road, which had already functioned as the dominant artery of commercial traffic through the region for millennia.

This factor is at the heart of Assyrian involvement in western Iran. While a number of the earlier Neo-Assyrian kings--particularly Shalmaneser III, Adad-nerari III, and Shamshi-Adad V--carried out forays into Media, which implies crossing the Zagros into present-day Iran, these did not result in the establishment of any permanent presence. The definitive consolidation of such an Assyrian presence was left to Tiglath-pileser III, who campaigned in the region in his second (744 BCE) and ninth (737 BCE) regnal years, paving the way for the creation of the new provinces of Parsua and Bit-Hamban.

The political reconfigurations that this entailed have been studied by numerous scholars. (1) Assyrian control was consolidated and extended under Sargon II, who created two new provinces centered on Kharkhar and Kishesim. (2) The written sources for these developments are varied and rich, comprising royal inscriptions, stelae, letters from the royal correspondence, the eponym chronicle, oracular enquiries, and administrative texts. This picture is moreover corroborated by a body of archaeological evidence that has been slowly accumulating over the past decades. This includes the discovery of rock reliefs at Shikaft-i Gulgul. (3) Tang-i Var, (4) and Mishkhas, (5) a stele of Sargon II at Najafabad, (6) and the unprovenanced pieces of a stele of Tiglath-pileser III. (7) There is also a steadily increasing inventory of artifacts discovered in the region that are either Assyrian or betray Assyrian influence, including the Shilisrukh plaque. (8) glazed pottery, (9) cylinder and stamp seals. (10 )seal impressions, (11) bronze coffins, (12) and a number of other bronze objects, such as weapons, vessels, and jewelry. (13) It has to be stressed that these artifacts cannot necessarily be taken as evidence of an Assyrian political presence, and that they might, on their own, be the product of trade and cultural interaction between Iran and Assyria.

There is, however, other evidence that is incontrovertible. The first lead comes from Tapeh Giyan, where Georges Contenau and Roman Ghirshman carried out excavations in 1931-32, publishing the results in their monograph Fouilles du Tepe-Giycm pres de Nehavend. While Contenau and Ghirshman believed that they had found an Assyrian fortified palace, the statement passed largely unnoticed and in any case was not supported with archaeological evidence. It was not until 1995 that Julian Reade identified a door socket from the site (14) (Fig. 1) as characteristically Assyrian, noting the strong resemblance to examples from Khorsabad and leading him to propose that Giyan was home to an Assyrian administrative center. (15) This has been accepted by scholars such as Radner, Frame, and others as clear proof of the extension of Assyrian rule into this part of western Iran in the Iron Age III. (16) More recently, research and preliminary investigations at Khaiber Tapeh suggest that this too may be the site of a major Assyrian center, tentatively identified as Kharkhar/Dur-SharrukTn, the city captured by Sargon II and refashioned into the capital of the new province bearing that name. (17)

To this evidence for Assyrian presence in the western central Zagros we now add a door socket discovered in the course of recent visits to the site of Quwakh Tapeh in the Mahidasht plain (Fig. 2). This new socket is also likely to have come from a major Assyrian building and therefore provides an important new addition to our limited knowledge of the Assyrians in the Mahidasht.

QUWAKH TAPEH

Quwakh Tapeh is a relatively large mound located 43 km west of Kermanshah and just under 4.5 km southeast of the small town of Kuzaran. The main mound measures 330 m long by 220 m wide and rises 15 m above the surrounding plain (Fig. 3). Numerous other low elevations in the immediate vicinity indicate that the site as a whole covers an area of approximately 500 x 500 m, i.e., 25 hectares. The existence of a canal in the eastern part of the mound and a dried-up spring in the southwest indicate the availability of water in the area.

Quwakh Tapeh was first identified by Schmidt in his 1934 survey and the location of the site is indicated in one of the maps in Flights over Ancient Cities of Iran. (18) It was subsequently surveyed and visited by Stein (19) and then re-examined by Ali Akbar Sarfaraz together with Mohammadrahim Sarraf and Ehsan Yaqmaei in their surveys of the Mahidasht plain in 1968. (20) leading them to register it as site number 865 on the National Heritage List of Iran on July 10, 1969. In 1998 Abbas Motarjem visited Quwakh Tapeh while carrying out his work in the Kuzaran plain, and attributed it to the Parthian period. (21) Stein and Schmidt did little more than simply list the site and give its name. Sarfaraz, Sarraf, and Yaqmaei on the other hand noted the presence of ceramics from the Median, Parthian, and Sasanian periods. (22) while Motarjem makes particular mention of the abundance of Parthian ceramics over a large part of the site.

Coin Hoard

A significant addition to the archaeological knowledge of Quwakh Tapeh was made in December 1992, when a student visiting the site discovered a small ceramic vessel containing a coin hoard 130 meters east of the central high mound. The Cultural Heritage office of Kermanshah was made aware of the discovery following the prompt reporting to the Kuzaran police station. This ensured that the hoard survived intact, and the contents were collected and made available to the government. The discovery was mentioned in a two-line entry in the Iranian Journal of Archeology and History of the following year, which reads "On 16/12/1992 in Quwakh Tapeh of Kuzaran, Kermanshah province, 141 coins were recovered, which belonged to the Seleucid period and dated back to over two thousand years ago." (23)

According to locals, the vessel containing the hoard had lain about one meter below the surface and had been revealed by floods following the digging of a canal through the site. The recovered coins included those of Alexander the Great, imitating Athenian-style "owl and olive" drachmas, together with coins of Alexander's satrap of Babylonia Mazaeus ("lion coins"), and of the Seleucid king Antiochus I or II, with a total weight of approximately two kilograms. The very small amount of green copper oxides on the surface of the coins shows that they were minted with high-grade silver. (24) Given the absence of any later material, it seems probable that the hoard was deposited in the early Seleucid period.

Ceramics

In 2014, with the agreement of the Cultural Heritage office of Kermanshah province, Sajjad Alibaigi, in collaboration with Alireza Moradi Bisotuni, undertook a visit to the site in order to investigate the location where the hoard was discovered, and five years later visited the site once again, at which time a number of new finds were made. The ceramics collected during the 2014 and 2019 inspections date to the Middle and Late Bronze Age. Iron Age III, Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian periods. The abundance of surface material from the Parthian period indicates a major settlement at that time, very much...