Nursery of Civilizations

A new take on the origins of civilization

Archaeologists once thought of Mesopotamia as the cradle of civilization, but art historian Holly Pittman says that scholars are becoming more convinced the ancient Sumerians were part of a much larger nursery of civilizations that spanned the Old World from Anatolia to the Indus Valley. Pittman spent the first three months of this year at Jiroft in southeastern Iran analyzing the remains of a long vanished culture. The artifacts are from huge excavations that are uncovering hundreds of intricately carved dark-stone vessels. The engravings suggest that monumental buildings resembling ziggurats may lie beneath some 80 giant mounds. There are also strange scorpion men emerging from the site. "We donít know yet how far back itís going to go," Pittman says, "but I think it's going to be yet another very important Bronze Age civilization like the Indus Valley, like Mesopotamia, like Egypt."

The Jiroft site is one of several centers of human habitation that, 6000 years ago, developed intensive agriculture, centralized government, institutionalized religion, and all the other complexities that characterize a civilization. Pittman has studied a couple artifacts with stamp impressions that look like an unknown scriptówriting being a key marker of civilization. Some of the objects she handles are stamped with impressions of long forgotten gods. And the scorpion man, so abundant in Jiroft, is a prominent icon in Sumerian ideas about death. She expects the excavators will discover that some ideas and materials and cultural traditions in Mesopotamia will have been imported from Jiroft.

A story about the Jiroft excavation can be found in "Rocking the Cradle,"Smithsonian Magazine, May 2004.