Tape Sialk
Iran (Islamic Republic of)Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization
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Description
Tape Sialk consists of two mounds known as Northern and Southern Sialk, located about 600 meters apart.
The artifacts of the northern mounds are more ancient than those of the southern. Relics of two cultural periods, from the beginning of settlement in villages in the Near East to the end of this period, and those of three cultural periods, beginning from the onset of settlement in cities, exist here. At the end of the second period, for unknown reasons, the inhabitants of Sialk moved to the southern mound and settled there.
They used a type of script known as proto-Elamite, whose signs combined pictograms and numerals (3200 BC). In view of their use of gray ceramic ware, the last inhabitants of Sialk buried their dead in two graveyards named A and B. Sialk was eventually abandoned at the end of the Iron Age, before the advent of the Medes.