Shahr-i Sokhta, When myth becomes history.
From 13 to 28 July, in the Olivetan Monastery of Lecce, the exhibition “Shahr-i Sokhta. When myth becomes history”, which tells the story of the UNESCO heritage site, famous as Pompeii of the East, in Sistan-va-Baluchistan, south-eastern Iran.
A journey between myth and history, which retraces 5000 years with 141 photos, explanatory panels and a reconstruction of the latest scientific evidence, recounting the stages of the international studies conducted on the archaeological site. Thanks above all to the research of Enrico Ascalone and Mansur Sajjadi, it was discovered that it was inhabited by a cosmopolitan and pacifist people: it was an example of a civilization open to cultural exchange, in one of the most significant sites of the entire Bronze Age.
Enrico Ascalone: “It is an important site also because the recent discoveries carried out by Italian and Iranian archaeologists since 2016 have made it possible to understand a non-hierarchical society like those of Egypt and Mesopotamia but a matrilineal center in which apparently peaceful and linear relationships must have developed in the Iranian Bronze Age”.
A center that from 3500 to 2000 BC was able to develop not only trade, but was also important as a literary centre. “The discovery of a tablet in 2021 is explanatory of how it was organized within an administrative accounting and therefore also through textual evidence that is decisive for understanding the role and complexities of the center in the proto-urban period, we are talking about the end of the XNUMXth millennium BC” he explains Ascalon again.
“Shahr-i Sokhta. When myth becomes history” represents the culmination of a scientific collaboration begun in 1970 by an Italian mission led byIsMEO (today IsIAO). The mission continued its activity until the victory of the Islamic revolution in Iran which stopped its activity. Since 2016 following an agreement between Enrico Ascalone, professor of Archeology and Art History of the Ancient Near East at the University of Salento, and Mansur Sajjadi of the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research, director of excavations at the site since 1997 the research activity resumes its path up to today..
The Research Institute for Cultural Heritage and Tourism, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research and the University of Salento participated in the project, under the direction of Enrico Ascalone and Mansur Sajjadi.
