Welcome to Aratta The earliest reports of human settlement in Iran go back at at least 10000 years,

And the country's name derives from Aryans who migrated here beginning around 1500 B.C. Layers of civilization tens of thousands of archaeological sites-are yet to be excavated.One recent find quickening some hearts was unearthed in 2000 near the city of Jiroft,when flash floods along the Halil River in the southeast exposed thousands of old tombs.The excavation is just six seasons old,and there isn't much to see yet.But intriguing artifacts have been found including a bronze goat's head dating back perhaps 5000 years,and Jiroft is spoken of as possibly an early center of civilization contemporary with Mesopotamia.Youssef the archaeologist,an authority on the third millennium B.C.,directs the digs.He used to run the archaeology department at the University of Tehran but lots his job after the revolution and moved to France.Over the years,he said,things changed.Interest in archaeology revived,and he was invited back to run Jiroft.Youssef thinks it may be the fabled lost Bronze Age land of Aratta,circa 2700 B.C.,reputedly legendary for magnificent crafts that found their way to Mesopotamia.But thus far there's no proof,and other scholars are skeptical.What would be have to find to put the matter unequivocally to rest?He chuckled wistfully.The equivalent of an engraved arch that says,Welcome to Aratta.Prospects for more digs at the thousands of unexplored sites seem daunting.In Iran the price of meat is high,there aren't enough jobs,the bureaucracy is inscrutable,bloated,and inefficient,and state corruption-as described to me by three different people-is an open secret,worse than ever,and institutionalized.The country has many needs,Youssef said,and certainly archaeology is not the main subject.But since Jiroft,all the provinces are interested in excavating and every little town wants to be known around the world like Jiroft.They're proud,and there are rivalries.Youssef was slouched happily in a fauxl-eather chair in the offices of his publisher,munching tiny green grapes while musing about why Iranians are the way they are.As much as anything else,he thought,it was the geography,for when the Iranians were being overrun time after time,where could they go-the desert?There was no place to run and hide.They stayed,they got along,they pretended and made taarof.The tree here are very deep roots.The legacy from anitquity that has always seemed to loom large in the national psyche is this.The concepts of freedom and human rights may not have originated with the classical Greeks but in Iran,as early as the sixth century B.C. under the Achaemenid emperor Cyrus the Great,who established the first Persian Empire,which would become the largest,most powerful kingdom on Earth.Among other things,Cyrus reputedly a brave and humle good guy,freed the enslaved Jews of Babylon in 539 B,C,sending them back to Jersalem to rebuild their temple with money he gave them,and established what has been called the world's first religiously and culturally tolerant empire.Ultimately it comprised more than 23 different peoples who coexisted peacefully under a central government,originally based in Pasargadae-a kingdom that at its height,under Cyrus's successor,Darius,extended from the Meditterrannean to the Indus RIver.So Persia was arguably the world's first superpower.We have a nostaligia to be a superpower again,said Saeed Laylaz,an economic and political analyst in Tehran,and the country's nuclear ambitions are directly related to this desire,The headlines are familiar.A consensus report of key U.S. spy agencies-the National Intelligence Estimate-concluded last December that a military-run program to develop nuclear pwoer weapons in Iran was halted in 2003.Iran continues to enrich uranium,insisting that it wants only to produce fuel for its nuclear power plants,but highly enriched uranium is also a key ingredient for a nuclear bomb.As a deterrent,the UN has imposed increasing economic sanctions.But Iran's president Mahmoud Ahamadinejad,a conservative hardliner,is giving no ground while at the same time making frequent threatening remarks about nearby Israel,denying the Holocaust,and,according to the U.S. government,sending weapons and munitions to extremist militias in Iraq that are being used against Iraqis and U.S. forces there.




At one time the area of the country was triple what it is now,and it was a stable superpower for more than a thousand years,said Saeed,a slender refined man in glasses and starched shirtsleeves rolled to three quarter length,sitting in his elegant apartment next to a lamp resemnling a cockatoo,with real feathers.The empire once encompassed today's Iraq,Pakistan,Afghanistan,Turkmenistan,Uzbekistan,Tajikistan,Turken ,Jordan,Cyprus,Syria.Lebanon,Israel,Egypt,and the Caucasus region.The borders have moved in over the centuries,but this superpower nostalgia,so in contradiction to reality,he said,is all because of the history.At the foundation of which,again,is Cyrus,and in particular something called the Cyrus Cylinder-perhaps Iran's most exalted artifact-housed at the British Museum in London,with a replica residing at UN headquarters in New York City.The cylinder resembles a corncob made of clay,inscribed on it,in cuneiform,is a decree that has been described as the first charter of human rights-predateing the Magna Carta by nearly two millennia.It can be read as a call for religious and ethnic freedom,it banned slavery and oppression of any kind,the taking of property by force or without compensation,and it gave member states the right to subject themselves to Cyrus's crown,or not.I never resolve on war to reign.To know Iran and what Iran really is,just read that transcripition from Cyrus,said Shirin Ebadi,the Iranian lawyer who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Price.We were in her central Tehran apartment building,in a basement office lined with mahogany-and-glass bookcases.Inside one was a tiny gold copy of the cylinder,encased in a Plexiglas box that she held out to me as if presenting a newborn child.Such greatness as the cylinder has been shown many times in Iran,but the world doesn't know it,she said.When I go abroad,people get surprised when they realize that 65 percent of the college students here are girls.Or when they see Iranian paintings and Iranian atchitecture,they are shcoked.They are judging a civilization just by what they have heard in the last 30 years.The Islamic revolution,the rollbacks of personal freedoms,particularly for women,the nuclear program and antagonism with the west.They know nothing of the thousands of years that came before,she said-what the Iranians went throught to remain distinct from their invaders,and how they did it.For instance,she said,after the Arabs came,and Iran converted to Islam,eventually we turned to the Shiite sect,which was different from the Arabs,who are Sunni.They were still Muslims,but not Arabs.We were Iranian.In fact,the first thing people said when I asked what they wanted the world to know about them was,We are not Arabs! followed closely by we are not terriorists!!.A certain Persian chauvinism creeps into the dialogue.Even though economically they're not performing as well as Arab states like Dubai and Qatar,they still feel exceptional.The Arabs who conquered Iran are commonly regarded as having been little more than Bedouin living in tents,with no culture of their own aside from what Iran gave them,and from the vehemence with which they are still railed against,you would think it happened not 14 centuries ago but last week.I met a woman at a weddingwho gave off the air of an aging movie star,her dapper husband beside her wearing his white dinner jacket and smoking out of a cigarette holder,and it wasn't five minutes before she lit into the Arabs.

Everything went down after they came,and we have never been the same!she said,wringing someone's neck in the air.And a friend I made here,an English teacher named Ali,spoke of how the loss of the empire still weighed on the national consciousness.Brfore they came we were a great and civilized power.he said,as we drvoe to his home on the outskirts of Shiraz,dodging motocycles and tailgaters.Echoing commonly started though disputed lore,he added,they burned our books and raped out women,and we couldn'd speak Rarsi in public for 300 years,or they took out out tongues.