Craftsmanship, unusual imagery of Lorestan bronzes fascinating to experts
During the Iron Age, the Iranian highlands were home to numerous peoples and petty kingdoms that maintained intensive political, cultural and economic relations with the neighboring civilizations of Mesopotamia and Elam. As there are almost no written documents from the region itself, any reconstruction of the local circumstances has to rely on Assyrian, Babylonian or Elamite accounts.
According to these sources, the inhabitants of the highlands were often vassals and tribute-bearers, sometimes they were trading partners for the resource-poor lowlands, and in many cases bitter enemies.
Today, Lorestan is one of Iran’s 31 provinces. As far as archeology and cultural history are concerned, however, the term ‘Lorestan’ covers a much larger geographical area, encompassing large parts of the Zagros Mountains in the western and southwestern parts of the country. This area is traditionally divided into two distinct regions: Pish-e Kuh (‘in front of the mountain’) to the east of the main Zagros range, and Pusht-e Kuh (‘behind the
mountain’) in the direction of Iraq.
As a remote, barely penetrable region with no known archeological sites, it is hardly surprising that archeologists had paid little heed to it for quite a long time, notwithstanding its geographical proximity to the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and Elam. This changed suddenly when ancient objects, ostensibly from Lorestan region, appeared on the international art market in ever larger numbers in the late 1920s. As most of these items were bronze artefacts such as weapons, horse harnesses and metal vessels, they were soon referred to collectively as the ‘Lorestan bronzes’.
The outstanding craftsmanship and unusual imagery of these objects made them fascinating to experts and interested lay people alike, generating quite a stir on the art market. The sharp rise in demand promptly sparked a wave of illegal excavations and looting on a grand scale in the alleged area of their origin, putting the cultural heritage of the whole region in jeopardy.
The situation escalated still further when, in the 1930s, the Iranian authorities introduced a system of ‘commercial excavations’, under which the payment in advance of a certain sum of money was sufficient to secure an excavation permit. Some of the finds from such digs became the property of the permit-holder, who consequently had the right to resell them.
Since most permit-holders were themselves art dealers who were principally pursuing their own pecuniary interests, this system turned out to be disastrous. It later emerged that looted objects had been smuggled in among the legitimate finds so that they, too, might be offered for sale with the same illustrious provenance. But as neither the looters nor the art dealers had any interest in revealing the details of how and where their finds had come to light, the exact place of origin, the archeological
record and the historical background of these objects remained shrouded in mystery.
In May 1938, a small convoy of American limousines came to a halt at the banks of a river in southwestern Iran. Here, the dusty country road ended, obliging the archeologists and their team to continue on horseback. Their journey of several weeks’ duration took them hundreds of kilometres through the rugged gorges and remote high valleys of the Zagros Mountains. It was one of the first attempts to conduct an archeological expedition in Lorestan region. The head of the group was the German-american archeologist, Erich Friedrich Schmidt.
For weeks on end, he and his team had to endure one setback after another. The countless gaping holes at prehistoric find spots were all too clearly the aftermath of an archeological gold rush. But eventually Schmidt did indeed strike what he himself called his ‘archeological bonanza’. This was Surkh Dum in the Pish-e Kuh region, where he succeeded in salvaging over 2,000 finds from a large building complex. This was the first time that Lorestan bronzes were found in an archeological context in their region of origin. Schmidt had probably chanced upon a kind of temple or sanctuary, in whose stone walls and floors countless artefacts had been deposited as offerings. The outbreak of the World War II soon afterwards unfortunately prevented the team from continuing work at this promising site, leaving them with no choice but to once again relinquish the field to commercial excavators and looters.
Many decades were to pass before archeological fieldwork in this region could be resumed. During the 1960s and 1970s, several archeological expeditions
to southwestern Iran were undertaken by teams of various nationalities. Most Lors in those days were still pursuing a nomadic way of life that entailed migrating between permanent winter quarters in the lowlands and temporary summer encampments on mountain pastures.
This was also noticed by the Belgian archeologist Louis Vanden Berghe, who on his first expeditions into the Pusht-e Kuh region discovered numerous ancient cemeteries but almost no signs of human settlement.
Hypothesizing that the makers of the bronzes had likewise been nomads without any permanent settlements, he henceforth concentrated on excavating the burial sites. While these yielded little in the way of classical Lorestan bronzes, Vanden Berghe and his assistants were nevertheless able to work out a chronology for Iron Age Lorestan that is still of service to us today.
We know that there have been larger settlements and fortified places during this period from the state archives of the neighboring Assyrian Empire that mention the land of Ellipi, which is most probably located somewhere in today’s of Lorestan Province. From the ninth to the seventh century BCE, Ellipi with its shifting alliances apparently formed a kind of buffer zone between the Assyrian and Elamite spheres of influence in the southwestern part of Zagros Mountains.
The excavations of a site at Baba Jan Tappeh in the north of the Pish-e Kuh region, carried out during the late 1960s, afforded insight into the magnificent world at that time. British archeologist Clare Goff was able to unearth several large architectural complexes, including a ‘manor’ that must have undergone multiple remodelings and was fortified with towerlike projections. Inside another, larger complex with massive mud-brick walls she found what she called the ‘Painted Chamber’: A small columned hall with a ceiling decorated with terracotta tiles painted in different colors. This complex must have burned down towards the end of the eighth century BCE and was little used thereafter.
In recent decades, Iranian teams have been able to intensify their exploration of Lorestan, and in 2005 they made a remarkable discovery in the south of the Pish-e Kuh region. There, on a remote, 1,650-metre-high mountain ridge they chanced upon a dry-stone circle measuring some 50 metres in diameter enclosing various architectural structures. Several thousand classical Lorestan bronzes were found in many parts of the site, having obviously been deposited there together at some point. Thus it seems likely that during the late second and early first millennium BCE, this was the site of a hilltop sanctuary where valuable metal objects were deposited as offerings.
The finds from Sangtarashan, an archeological site located in the heart of the Zagros Mountains in the southern part of Lorestan Province, could fundamentally change our view of the Lorestan bronzes. Hitherto it was generally assumed that most of these objects had been looted from burials, but this hypothesis is contradicted by the fact that archeological excavations of burial sites and settlements have so far yielded very few such bronzes. The literally thousands of finds from sanctuaries such as Surkh Dum and Sangtarashan, by contrast, were clearly deposited there deliberately as part of a ritual. It is thus entirely conceivable that the vast bulk of the Lorestan bronzes known to us from the art trade came from similar, hitherto undiscovered sites.
The above is a lightly edited version of the a chapter of ‘Five Millennia of Art and Culture’, coedited by Ute Franke, Ina Sarikhani Sandmann, and Stefan Weber, and published by Museum of Islamic Art in Germany in 2021. The photos originally appeared in the book.