2025/12/5
Shokouh Khosravi

Shokouh Khosravi

Academic rank: Assistant Professor
ORCID: 0000-0003-1863-4717
Education: PhD.
H-Index:
Faculty: Faculty of Art and Architecture
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E-mail: Sh.khosravi [at] uok.ac.ir
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Research

Title
“Central Zagros and Proto-Historic Seal and Sealings from Mahidasht Plain; Evidence from an Administrative Center along the High Road”
Type
Speech
Keywords
Central Zagros, Early Bronze Age, adminestrative institutions, seal Impressions,Tapeh Tyalineh.
Year
2025
Researchers Shokouh Khosravi

Abstract

Seals and sealings are direct evidence of economic complexities and indispensable clues for the administrative and political institutions that produced them. Archaeologists not only examine these artifacts using iconographic analyses, comparative chronologies, and cultural interactions, but they also discuss them in terms of their variety, nature, and function. The Mahidasht region, as a vital cultural sphere on the Great Khorasan High Road, is one of the crucial geographical and cultural regions that have yielded some substantial evidence of these economic and political complexities. Environmental potentials and geographical significance of Mahidasht, which is the largest plain among the intermountain valleys and plains of the Central Zagros, which lies along several communication routes, developed as a strategic area in regional and interregional trade over the course of the third millennium BCE. In 2023 and 2024, excavations at Tapeh Tyalineh resulted in the discovery of over 6,000 seal impressions. The findings will be studied here in terms of style and iconography to date the corpus of administrative artifacts. Tyalineh corpus of clay sealings comprises amazing and varied evidence of late prehistoric administrative technology, providing us with clues of an unknown bureaucratic institution in western Iran. The corpus includes door sealings, jar sealings, oval slabs (test rolling), jar stoppers, a few of which bear seal impressions, clay lumps, clay disks, clay figurines, and several geometric clay tokens. The evidence of Tyalineh, combined with that from Godin Tapeh, can serve as proxies of a society and an economy involved in interregional commercial interactions. Further, the administrative technology attested not only at Tyalineh but also at Chogha Maran and Dehsavar, indicates that there were well-established administrative and economic institutions existing along the Khorasan High Road in the Central Zagros during the Early Bronze Age