It is located 230 kilometres (140 mi) south of the city of Kerman, and 1,375 kilometres (854 mi) south of Tehran along Road 91. In the past it was also called Sabzevaran, and on account of its being very fertile land it is famous as Hend-e-Koochak (the little India).
Jiroft is located in a vast plain, Halil River, on the southern outskirts of the Jebal Barez mountain chain, surrounded by two rivers. The mean elevation of the city is about 650-metres above sea level. The weather of the city is very warm in summer and temperatures are moderate in winter. It is one of the hottest places in Iran.
There is a large dam (Jiroft Dam) upstream the city (40 km North-East of Jiroft) on the Halil River (Halilrood). It is under operation since 1992. Having a reservoir of more than 410 million cubic meters of water, irrigates 14200 hectars of the downstream and generates electricity.
The name “Jiroft” has recently become known in archaeological circles, after Iran’s Cultural Organization announced the discovery of remains from an ancient city buried near the current city of Jiroft, leading to theories proposing the remains belong to a forgotten culture known as the Jiroft civilization.
The city is served by Jiroft Airport, located several kilometres to the northwest.
Jiroft history and culture
“Jiroft culture” has been postulated as an early Bronze Age (late 3rd millennium BC) archaeological culture, located in what is now Iran‘s Sistan and Kermān Provinces. The hypothesis is based on a collection of artifacts that were confiscated in Iran and accepted by many to have derived from the Jiroft area in south central Iran, reported by online Iranian news services, beginning in 2001.
The proposed type site is Konar Sandal, near Jiroft in the Halil River area. Other significant sites associated with the culture include; Shahr-e Sukhteh (Burnt City), Tepe Bampur, Espiedej, Shahdad, Tal-i-Iblis and Tepe Yahya.
The proposition of grouping these sites as an “independent Bronze Age civilization with its own architecture and language”, intermediate between Elam to the west and the Indus Valley Civilization to the east, is due to Yousef Majidzadeh, head of the archaeological excavation team in Jiroft. He speculates they may be the remains of the lost Aratta Kingdom, but his conclusions have met with skepticism from some reviewers. Other conjectures (e.g. Daniel T. Potts, Piotr Steinkeller) have connected the Konar Sandal with the obscure city-state of Marhashi, that apparently lay to the east of Elam proper.
Discovery and excavation
Many artifacts associated with Jiroft were recovered from looters described as “destitute villagers” who had scavenged the area south of Jiroft before 2001, when a team led by Yousef Majidzadeh began excavations. The team uncovered more than two square kilometers of remains from a city dating back to at least the late 3rd millennium BC. The data Madjidzadeh’s team has gathered demonstrates that Jiroft’s heyday was from 2500 B.C. to 2200 B.C .
The looted artifacts and some vessels recovered by the excavators were of the so-called “intercultural style” type of pottery known from Mesopotamia and the Iranian Plateau, and since the 1960s from nearby Tepe Yahya in Baft. The “Jiroft civilization” hypothesis proposes that this “intercultural style” is in fact the distinctive style of a previously unknown, long-lived civilization[No pictures in galley]