| home
: index
: picture
archive : Iran
: photos by Marco Prins ; text Jona Lendering © |
|
Haft Tepe
|
|
|
Unless
otherwise indicated, pictures on this page © Marco Prins and Jona
Lendering. Photos can be downloaded and used for non-commercial purposes,
but you have to acknowledge Livius. |
|
|
Haft Tepe ("seven hills" - in fact twelve) in modern Khuzestan (ancient
Elam) is probably identical to the ancient town Tikni. The site is halfway
Susa
and Chogha
Zanbil and dates back to the fifteenth century BCE. Three parts have
been identified: a temple with the royal tomb, the palace area, and the
artisans' quarter. Many identifications are uncertain. |
|
|
The temple. The period between 1500 and 1250 saw a divided and weak
Elam, and local potentates like Tepti Ahar were able to build up small
states. Haft Tepe was one of these, and it was only after the rise of Susa
and Chogha Zanbil after 1250 that it lost its independence. |
|
|
This is probably the ruin of a ziggurat.
It was very irregular but archaeologists were able to establish that it
rose to a height of 30 meters. |
|
|
And this is the same ruin. Not far from here is a museum that suffered
badly from the First Gulf War (1980-1988). |
|
|
These ruins belong to the palace. In 2004, several cuneiform texts,
written in Babylonian, were discovered. |
|
|
Royal tomb, containing the skeletons of twenty-one (or twenty-three)
people, packed in ritual red ochre. There's a platform in it that covers
a large part of the 10¼x3¼ meters of the floor of this room;
the remainder is occupied by a channel. At the end of the room is a doorway
that leads to the temple. This is one of the oldest Elamite example of
a vaulted room, at least 200 years older than similar constructions at
Chogha
Zanbil. Below, three death masks, which can be seen in the museum of
Susa. |
|
|
|
| |
home :
index
: Iran
|
|
|
 |
 |
