The Italian Cultural Institute of Montreal, in collaboration with Pointe-à-Callière Museum have the pleasure of inviting you to the conference of Pierfrancesco Callieri, Professor of Iran’s pre-Islamic Archeology at the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Alma Mater Studiorum Bologna
June 26, 2017, 6:30pm Free Admission
Pointe-à-Callière Museum
The Joint Iran-Italy Archaeological Mission in the Fars region (southern Iran), under the leadership of Alireza Askari Chaverdi (Shiraz University) and Pierfrancesco Callieri (University of Bologna), has been conducting a research program on urban contexts since 2008 and rural of great architectural complex of the Persian Achaemenid dynasty (sixth to fourth century BC.) known by its Greek name of Persepolis. The Iranian-Italian project, named “From the Palace to the City“, is characterized by its multidisciplinary approach and its stratigraphic excavations followed the results of the geophysical surveys conducted by a French-Iranian mission.
In 2011, the Mission’s activities were developed in Bagh-e Firuzi, about 3.5 km west of the Persepolis Terrace, and allowed the discovery of a singular building in the small hillock called Tol-e Ajori, “the mound of bricks“, because of the large number of fragments of baked bricks found on its surface. The excavations made it possible to acquire a gradual understanding of the nature and function of this building, which it is now possible to interpret as a monumental gate, according to a Mesopotamian and Elamite tradition, mud bricks and cooked bricks, with an exterior face decorated with glazed bricks.
The decoration is developed on plain bricks (monochromatic or bearing geometric and floral patterns), and on relief bricks that were originally intended to form panels representing fantastic animals such as the bull or the dragon- Mesopotamian mushkhushshu snake; the latter having never before been observed in the known art of the Achaemenides. The plan of the building was identified as a copy in major dimensions of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. The decorative and figurative motifs repeat faithfully those of Babylon, now visible at the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin. The fragments of cuneiform inscriptions in Babylonian and Elamite have features older than the known Achaemenid inscriptions, and with the topographical, architectural, technical and iconographic elements suggest a date prior to the construction of the Imperial Terrace of Persepolis by Darius I. Tol-e Ajori is therefore an exceptional testimony of a monumental proto-Achaemenid project in the place where the Darius I building, from 518 BC Persepolis.
Pierfrancesco Callieri is professor of archeology of ancient Iran at the University of Bologna, Ravenna branch. He is primarily interested in the archeology of Iran and pre-Islamic Central Asia, the period Achaemenid to the Sasanian period, especially the dialogue between Hellenism and cultures of Iranian and Indian worlds. He has focused his research on two geographic areas: on one side the northwest of the subcontinent between India and Pakistan, and the other Fars (southern Iran).
Since 2005, he is the Italian director of the Joint Archaeological Mission Iranian-Italian which worked in Fars on the sites of Tang-e Bolaghi, of Pasargadae (Tol-e Takht) and Persepolis (Persepolis west and Tol-e Ajori ), where excavations continue. Since 2015 he is chairman of the Societas Europaea Iranologica. In 2017 he received in Iran the 8th Farabi International Award for Iranian Studies.
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