In the Jiroft district, in southeastern Iran, a change in the course of the Halil Roud River recently revealed traces of a 5.000 year-old civilization on the Iranian Plateau totally unsuspected until that day. More that 80 sites have already been identified on a 40-kilometer strip south of Jiroft. Five huge cemeteries have been plundered but the housing structures pertaining to them remain untouched.
The quantity of relics found, the cultural wealth of the objects and the size of the area (400 km-long!) point to an entirely original civilization, yet unknown. Given the period involved, scientists are unanimous regarding the major importance of this discovery, which may well question the commonly held belief that civilization sprung up from one sole location in Mesopotamia. In 2003, Professor Yousef Madjidzadeh leading an international team, unearthed the first remains of the walls of a city covering a hundred hectares, as well as a vast construction that could be a ziggurat.
He is now convinced that he is unearthing the mythical kingdom of Aratta described in the most ancient Sumerian legends found in Uruk: a rich and powerful city-state that would have had a seminal role in the development of the Sumerian religion, so important that writing would have been invented to carry out exchanges between Uruk and Aratta.