Leather bearing drawings discovered in Burnt City

TEHRAN -- A piece of leather bearing drawings has been discovered in the 5200-year-old Burnt City in southeastern Iran.
 
A team of archaeologists led by Professor Seyyed Mansur Sajjadi has unearthed the leather during the new season of excavation currently underway at the site.

“Due to extensive corrosion, some experts and the archaeologists are trying to save the leather,” Sajjadi told the Research Center for Cultural Heritage and Tourism on Monday.

No more details were mentioned about the artifact.

Ruins of a structure were also unearthed in the urban area of the Burnt City, which has two walls each one meter thick that are supported by nine buttresses.

“The signs of fire are clearly seen in some rooms of the building,” Sajjadi stated.

He also said that the team discovered a small room in building, which is surmised to have been used as a place for offering sacrifices.

The team also found some pieces of plain and colored textiles in the rooms.

The Burnt City, which was registered on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in June 2014, is located 57 kilometers from the town of Zabol in Sistan-Baluchestan Province.

The city, which was the largest urban settlement in the eastern half of the Iranian Plateau, burned down three times and was not rebuilt after the last fire in around 1800 BC.

Despite the excavations and studies carried out at the site, the reasons for the unexpected rise and fall of the Burnt City still seem to remain a mystery.
 
A 10-centimeter ruler with an accuracy of half a millimeter, an artificial eyeball, an earthenware bowl bearing the world’s oldest example of animation and many other artifacts have been discovered among the ruins of the city in the course of the many seasons of archaeological excavations conducted by Iranian teams.
 
MMS/YAW
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