The peripatetic English explorer Sir Aurel Stein, famous for his archaeological work surveying large swaths of Central Asia and the Middle East, slipped into Persia at the end of 1915 and found the first hints of eastern Iran's lost cities. Massimo Vidale (right), surveyed the site in 2009. Was excavated by an Iranian team in the 1970s.Īn Iranian-Italian team, including archaeologist Situated at the end of a small delta on a dry plain, Shahdad And the immensity of the region and its harsh climate make it one of the most challenging places in the world to conduct archaeology. Revolution and politics have frequently interrupted excavations. Parts of the area are close to the Afghan border, long rife with armed smugglers. The very existence of this civilization was long forgotten. The reasons for this remain unclear and are the source of much scholarly controversy, but urban life didn't return to eastern Iran for more than 1,500 years. 'They were the world in between.'īy 2000 B.C. 'They connected the great corridors between Mesopotamia and the east,' says Maurizio Tosi, a University of Bologna archaeologist who did pioneering work at Shahr-i-Sokhta. They also appear to have shared both administrative and religious ideas as they did business with distant lands. Detailed laboratory analyses of artifacts and human remains from these sites are providing an intimate look at the lives of an enterprising people who helped create the world's first global trade network.įar from living in a cultural backwater, eastern Iranians from this period built large cities with palaces, used one of the first writing systems, and created sophisticated metal, pottery, and textile industries. More recent surveys, excavations, and remote sensing work reveal that all of eastern Iran, from near the Persian Gulf in the south to the northern edge of the Iranian plateau, was peppered with hundreds and possibly thousands of small to large settlements. In the 1960s and 1970s, they found the great centers of Shahr-i-Sokhta and Shahdad on the desert's fringes and another, Tepe Yahya, far to the south.

Yet archaeologists are finding an impressive array of ancient settlements on the edges of the Dasht-e Lut dating back to the period when urban civilization was emerging in Egypt, Iraq, and the Indus River Valley in Pakistan and India. The forbidding territory in and around this desert seems like the last place to seek clues to the emergence of the first cities and states 5,000 years ago. It also has the hottest average surface temperature of any place on Earth. At the center of this region is the Dasht-e Lut, Persian for the 'Empty Desert.' This treacherous landscape, 300 miles long and 200 miles wide, is covered with sinkholes, steep ravines, and sand dunes, some topping 1,000 feet. 'It's a tough place,' says Mehdi Mortazavi from the University of Sistan-Baluchistan in the far eastern end of Iran, near the Afghan border. The barren landscape was once home to some of the world's first urban societies, which began to develop around 3000 B.C.Įven local archaeologists with the benefit of air-conditioned cars and paved roads think twice about crossing eastern Iran's rugged terrain. Cities like Shahr-i-Sokhta in eastern Iran, remains of which can be seen from the air, developed and flourished at the same time as the population centers in Mesopotamia to the west and the Indus Valley to the east.

Dasht e lut