In 2001, flooding near the city of Jiroft in southeastern Iran exposed a vast Bronze Age cemetery. Large quantities of vessels made from a dark soft stone known as chlorite or steatite began to appear on antiquities markets, the majority of which were successfully repatriated by Iranian authorities. These events spurred new archaeological exploration in the Jiroft area, leading to the discovery of a previously unknown urban polity located just south of the modern city in the valley of the Halil Rud river. The discovery also prompted scholars to recontextualize these distinct objects, found across the Middle East in the later 3rd millennium BCE and formerly referred to by the appellation “Intercultural Style,” as grave goods of the so-called Jiroft Civilization. This project explores the aesthetic values expressed within this class of artifacts, using an example now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a window into evocations of sensory experience, funerary otherworlds, and an extremely early tradition of landscape depiction I argue they present.

This Robert J. Braidwood Lecture is presented by Breton Langendorfer.