Hasanlu Tepe (Iran):
The Early Iron Age Citadel
Michael D. Danti

Hasanlu Tepe, located 37° 00' N and 45° 13' E, is the largest site in the Qadar River valley of northwestern Iran and dominates the small Sulduz plain. The tepe consists of a 25 m high central mound, 13 HA in area, surrounded by a low mound. The low mound rises 8 m above the surrounding plain and covers at least 23 HA, but modern villages and agricultural fields obscure its exact extent. From 1956 to 1977, the site was extensively excavated by the Hasanlu Project, a joint venture of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Iranian Antiquities Service. Robert H. Dyson served as the general director for this entire period.

During the early Iron Age or Periods V-IV, ca. 1300-800 BCE, the settlement consisted of a fortified citadel surrounded by a small, lower lying settlement and cemeteries. Due to a lack of indigenous writing, the ethnic affiliation(s) and language(s) of the inhabitants are still unknown, but the possibilities can be narrowed thanks to Assyrian and other contemporary historical documents. At the end of the Bronze Age, a number of new Indo-Iranian groups migrated to northern and northwestern Iran and mixed with native populations. This resulted in a checkerboard pattern of small kingdoms interspersed with the tribal territories of transhumant pastoralists, including the Mannaeans, Hurrians, Ellipi, Medes, and Persians. In the earlier first millennium BCE, these small states and tribal groups were wedged between the larger, more centralized empires of the Assyrians, Urartians, and Elamites. For the populations of northwestern Iran, life in the early Iron Age represented a struggle to maintain the maximum degree of independence, while balancing the changing interests and demands of neighboring world powers. Nowhere in northern Iran is this complex relationship more apparent than at Hasanlu. This situation would eventually culminate in the collision of the Urartian and Assyrian empires in the region south of Lake Urmia in the late 9th and 8th centuries. It was at this time that an unknown invading force, likely the Urartians, sacked and burned Hasanlu Tepe. The defeat was sudden and evidently unanticipated; the speed of the conflagration caught both the citadel’s occupants and the invaders by surprise — large numbers of the occupants and some invaders were trapped in the blaze, and the arsenals, temples, and palaces of the citadel were left with most of their original contents intact. When the Hasanlu Project began work at the site in 1956, they found a veritable Pompeii of the Iron Age Near East.

Thus far, two final reports have been completed on the earliest Neolithic habitation of the valley, Period X/the Hajji Firuz Period (Voigt 1983), and the latest occupation at Hasanlu, Period I/the Ilkhanid Period (Danti 2004). Three additional volumes have appeared in the “Special Studies Series” covering a decorated breastplate (Winter 1980), ivories (Muscarella 1980), and seals and sealings (Marcus 1996).

The recent resumption of archaeological work in western Iran demands the immediate publication of the Iron Age levels, since they form the cornerstone for our understanding of the culture history of this important region. Moreover, Iron Age Hasanlu provides an incredible dataset for scholars interested in the study of broader issues such as early empires, secondary state formation, core-periphery relations, and urbanization.