5,000 Site Discovered in Iran

5000-year-old site discovered in southeastern Iran
Tehran Times Culture Desk
June 8, 2008

TEHRAN -- A broad site dating back to the third millennium BC was discovered during the latest excavations in Bampur region in Sistan-Baluchestan Province, southeastern Iran.

“In the Bampur valley, there is an ancient site covered with sand mounds, which is as large as the Burnt City and may belong to a civilization as great as the civilization of that the city,” Mehdi Mortazavi, an archaeologist of the University of Sistan-Baluchestan, told the Persian service of CHN on Saturday. According to Mortazavi, the site measures 1x1.5 kilometer. “I feel sure that there are a large number of sites like this here. Such sites may even exist in nearby regions like Saravan,” he stated.

Mortazavi refused to give more details about the location of the site for security reasons. “It’s better for the site to remain covered for the time being, because it will be plundered by illegal excavations if the precise location of the site is revealed,” he argued. [Psssst...it probably already has been discovered by the looters...]

Twenty sites -- mostly prehistoric -- have been discovered by the archaeologists of the University of Sistan-Baluchestan over the past few years. Covering an area of 152 hectares, the Burnt City, located 57 kilometers from the city of Zabol in Sistan-Baluchestan Province, is the largest prehistoric site of the province. It was one of the world’s largest conurbations at the dawn of the urban era and was well developed during the third millennium BC. It thus constitutes one of the country’s most important prehistoric sites. The city, which was burnt down three times, shows evidence of four stages of civilization. Since it was not rebuilt after the last conflagration, it has been named the Burnt City.
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The Burnt City (Shar-i Sokhta, various spellings) was where the wooden serpent game board was excavated in 1983 (image above). The serpent game board dates to about 2400 BCE, making it about 200 years younger (more or less) than the famous 20-squares boards excavated by Woolley at Ur.

On the Iranian side of the border, the area is called Sistan va Baluchestan; on the Pakistani side of the border the area is called Baluchistan. In older times, the larger area (encompassing lands in the border regions of Iran, Pakistan and India, all the way south to the Indian Ocean) was called Baluchistan. Several chess historians have pointed to Baluchistan as being the birth place of chess.