Free Republic

Cyrus the Great Cylinder, The First Charter of Human Rights By 546 BCE, Cyrus had defeated Croesus, the Lydian king of fabled wealth, and had secured control of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, Armenia, and the Greek colonies along the Levant. Moving east, he took Parthia (land of the Arsacids, not to be confused with Parsa, which was to the southwest), Chorasmis, and Bactria. He besieged and captured Babylon in 539 and released the Jews who had been held captive there, thus earning his immortalization in the Book of Isaiah. When he died in 529, Cyrus's kingdom extended as...

Archeologists Seek Elamite Treasures in Iran ART & CULTURE DESK TEHRAN - The University of Sydney has initiated Australia's largest-ever act of cultural cooperation with Iran in the hope of unearthing archaeological treasures of the ancient Elamite civilization in the Near East. "Unlimited possibilities" lie ahead, according to professor Dan Potts, chair of Sydney's Department of Archaeology, who is posed to sign an agreement which would see the excavation of rich new archaeological sites in what is now Western Iran. The area and Elamite people are referred to in Mesopotamian texts but are yet to be researched in depth. Under...

Archeological studies have found that the female inhabitants of Iran's ancient site of Burnt City outlived the male members of their community. According to head of the Burnt City archeology team Farzad Forouzanfar, men died between the ages of 35 to 45, while women lived well into their 80s. Forouzanfar said that the area witnessed considerable population drops and that "the number of the female inhabitants of the area was more than the males." "The team also found that the remains of nearly 30,000 burials exist in Burnt City," he added. Demographical studies also showed that over 6,000 people lived...

Archaeologists digging in northern Iran have unearthed evidence that the ancient people who lived there were skilled horsemen. Reports from Iran suggest studies of the pelvises and leg bones of skeletons recovered from excavations in the Gohar Tappeh region had taken on a special shape as a result of a lot of horse-riding. Ali Mahforouzi, who heads the archaeology team... noted that many horse statuettes, some shaped like drinking vessels, had been unearthed among the ruins of the area's religious monuments. The archaeological dig, comprising Iranian, German and Polish experts, is providing researchers with a rare opportunity to study human...

Ramhormoz graves may be Elamite royal burials: experts TEHRAN, May 20 (MNA) -- A team of archaeologists studying two graves discovered in the city of Ramhormoz in southern Iran said that they bear their remains of a girl and a woman who were most likely members of an Elamite royal family. The team led by Arman Shishegar was assigned to carry out a series of rescue excavations in the Jubji region of the city in Khuzestan Province in May 2007 after the Khuzestan Water and Waste Water Company stumbled on two U-shaped coffins containing skeletons of a girl and a...

Jiroft is the ancient city of Marhashi: U.S. scholarWednesday, May 7, 2008 Tehran Times Culture Desk Jiroft is the ancient city of Marhashi: U.S. scholar TEHRAN -- Piotr Steinkeller, professor of Assyriology in Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of Harvard University, believes that the prehistoric site of Jiroft is the lost ancient city of Marhashi. He developed the theory in his paper during the first round of the International Conference on Jiroft Civilization, which was held in Tehran on May 5 and 6. Marhashi, (in earlier sources Warahshe) was a 3rd millennium BC polity situated east of Elam,...

No one should have been surprised that the same Tamils who supply guns to terrorists are collecting money in Canada for the tsunami victims of South Asia. Long before devastating tsunami waves claimed tens of thousands of souls in Sri Lanka, the Canadian Liberal government had established a record for being soft on Tamil Tiger fundraising. Both Prime Minister Paul Martin when he was Minister of Finance and Member of Parliament Maria Minna attended a May 2000, $600-a-plate fund raising dinner organized by a front organization for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Genial dinner hosts to Martin and Minna,...

Date Added:Nov 24 2004Inscribed Bricks Unearthed South of Iran Iran-11/23/2004 In the latest round of archeological excavations at the historical site of Enshan, Fars province, Iranian and American archeologists have unearthed several inscribed bricks and a seal dating back to the mid-Elamite era (1100 BC).Enshan is regarded as one of the capitals of the Elamites and is rich in cultural heritage artifacts ranging from the Elamite to the Achamenid era (3500 BC to 500 AD). Dr. Kamyar Abdi, an instructor of Dartmouth College in the United States told Cultural Heritage News (CHN) agency that in the course of excavations in...

Despite the tendency to see Iran as an Islamic monolith and the attempts of the ruling clerics in Tehran to cast it as such, the full complexity of Iranian identity is little understood and almost never discussed—even by Iranians themselves. Long before it was absorbed into the Islamic empire by Arab armies under Caliphs Umar and Uthman in the mid-seventh century, Persia had been the birthplace of Zarathustianism, or Zoroastrianism, the world’s first monotheistic religion.The religion was forged some 3,500 years ago around the philosopher-prophet Zarathustra’s teachings, which emphasized personal morality and a conscious choice between good and evil. From...

TEHRAN (AFP) -- One of Iran's main historical sites, the ancient Elamite capital of Susa, has been used for the secret nightly dumping of rubbish by the local municipality, a culture official in the area told AFP Tuesday. "We have filed several complaints against the municipality, but it firmly denies its workers have ever done such a thing -- even though they have been frequently spotted by our guards," said the head of the Cultural Heritage Organization in Shush, the modern name for Susa. But the official, Mahdi Qanbari, also complained that the municipality was also planning to build a...