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CAIS
ARCHAEOLOGICAL
& CULTURAL NEWS©
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American
Archaeologists Help Excavate the First Ever
Academic Town in
the World
|
15
September 2005
The
ancient city of Jondi Shapur / Gondi Shapur, the
first academic town 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 Sassanid dynasty. When Islam entered
Iran, many scholarly texts began to be translated
from Pahlavi language into Arabic, transferring
the Iranian knowledge to the Arab 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 Sassanid 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 professor of
Chicago University, Dr. 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.
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"History
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Encyclopaedia
Iranica
The
British Institute of Persian Studies
"Persepolis
Reconstructed"
The
British Museum
The
Royal
Asiatic
Society
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