American Archaeologists Participate in Excavation of the First World Academic City - CAIS Archaeological & Cultural Daily News of Iran©

The ancient city of Jondi Shapur (Gund-dez-i Shapur - - the military fortress of Shapur), the oldest academic city in the world, will undergo a series of excavations by a joint team of American archaeologists from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and Iranian experts.

Jondi Shapur is located in the southern province of Khuzestan and was a major academic town at the time of the Sasanid dynasty. After invasion of Iran by Arabs, many scholarly texts began to be translated from Pahlavi (Middle-Persian) language into Arabic, transferring the Iranian knowledge to the Islamic world.

Many areas of the 300-hectare ancient site are damaged due to farming activities, and now the joint archaeological studies attempt to save the site from further deterioration, explained head of Iran’s Archaeology Research Center, Dr. Masoud Azarnoush.

The excavations aim to discover the buried artifacts and historical remains and to estimate the extent of the damages of the site which houses the remnants of the first major Iranian academic town dating to the Sasanid and early Islamic era, added Dr. Azarnoush.

The joint project is approved by the Iranian Foreign Ministry and based on a mutual memorandum of understanding, it will be launched in January 2006.

The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is one of world’s key archaeology institutes and has carried out various projects in the Middle East for some 80 years now. The Institute started working in Iran in the 1930s in different ancient sites including the Persepolis, but was urged to leave the country due to the 1978 Islamic Revolution of Iran.

However, it is two years now that the cooperation of Iranian and American archaeologists is resumed as a result of attempts by an Iranian Archaeologist from Chicago University, Professor Abbas Alizadeh. Even for Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, who has frequently traveled to Iran in the past two years, the joint projects are a dream come true.