Footloose in north-west Iran: Hamadan

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We met at midnight in a car park in central Tehran and the night was full of the sounds of laugher and friends greeting. I felt alone and excited, as I knew no one except AS, and him only slightly, having met him the day before. He is a friend of F, my contact at the National Museum of Iran.

He had invited me on a six day historical trip around north-west Iran. Travelling companions: 30 Iranian students. Interesting as I speak about 20 words of Farsi, but I felt up for the challenge! Travelling by private coach meant that I would be able to see much more than I ever would without my own transport. Very few Westerners spend time in this area, which is full of Kurds and Azeris, so this was also a draw…. I didn’t see any other Westerners for my whole time in the north west.

I was also looking forward to getting to know more Iranians and hanging out with a group of young people. They had just finished their exams, so this trip, educational as it was, was seen as a holiday by most. Many of them came with their boyfriends and girlfriends. This was a time of “ordu” or travelling, where they could be with their partner away from the strictures of everyday life, where many still lived in their parental homes.

We were going to be travelling by night west to Hamadan. When we stopped for tea and a toilet break it dawned on me how disempowered I was going to feel, not understanding people when they spoke and no way to affect where we went / what we did. Usual for a tour, but not what I was used to.

Travelling can be many things, at that point it felt like a beginning of a tired rolling up of trousers, entering stinking squat toilets with a queue of women from the bus. Many had tubes of liquid soap in their pockets, which they kindly leant me. As the week went on they became more and more friendly. I became close to many of them…

I felt knackered and scummy from sleeping on the coach, and tried to wake up gazing out of the window at Hamadan, wanting to feel the difference from other Iranian cities. I was to do a lot of gazing out of windows over the next few days, unlike many of the Iranians who had seen the country and often kept curtains closed against the sun. This was not only to see as much as possible of the country we were travelling through, but also to give me something to do while they were laughing and chatting in Farsi!

After a picnic breakfast in a park, where plastic sheeting was carefully laid out and we all gathered round to eat flatbread and cheese, we started our itinerary, a whirlwind tour of tombs …. Many Iranians were camping here, waking up to their own days, boiling tea and picking their way to the toilet block to wash. I saw so many Iranians camping in parks all over Iran. So unlike the LP advice, I am sure any happy campers would fit right in here!

Our first stop was the Baba Taher tomb, I had not heard of him but found out that he was a revered Sufi and poet who lived around the 10th century in Hamadan.

The interior of his tomb had tiled starshape reaching up into the roof.

I had heard of the next person, whose tomb we visited, Avicenna or Ibn Sina as he is known in Iran. One of the most famous philosophers in the Middle Ages, East or West. Born in Buchara, now in Uzbekistan, he is best known in Europe as a doctor. His treatise “al-Qanun” or Canon was used by European as well as Asian medical students and doctors for centuries. He is regarded as one of the fathers of early modern medicine.

The tomb is a modernist version of the Gonbad-e Kavus in NE Iran near Gorgon. This original tomb was built while Ibn Sina was still living, and was thus part of his cultural heritage.

I felt strangely moved when confronting his original tomb, not under the open tower, in the place of honour, but pushed to the side in an empty room, which eager visitors passed without caring to reach the tower; the main event as they thought. I thought of all that learning that had emanated from within the dusty bones encased in stone beside me, so many thoughts, treatises written and then written about. And how in Iran people still had a personal connection to him, the ‘museum’ included boxes dedicated to him by primary schools and mosques.

The Alaviyan Dome was our next stop, domed no longer, it is an 12th century Seljuk brick tomb tower, with twirling arabesques of stucco work added in the Ilkahnid period, that showed that the Persians were masters of this technique.

The city of Hamadan is the oldest in Iran, on the trade routes between Mesopotamia and the rest of Iran, and was once known to the Greeks as Ecbatana. We went to visit the archaeological site where ruins of the ancient city were found. These are usually thought to date from the Median / Achaemanid periods (Medians 750-550 BC and Achaemenids 550 - 330BC). However there has been some recent debate according to some of my Iranian friends as to whether these ruins are in fact later Parthian remains (empire dates: 274BC - AD224).

However the archaeologists might argue, for the layman there is little to see, apart from uninterpreted walls and rooms, which you can see from a large cutting, protected from the sun.

Some of the finds are exhibited in the accompanying museum, which gives you a better idea of what life was like in the city of Ecbatana.

And all of this was before lunch, on the first day (and I didn’t even mention the Armenian Church near the museum). I could tell it was going to be a fascinating but exhausting trip!

There was a welcome break for a lunch of chelo kebab, rice yoghurt and salad, ate in a subterranean restaurant, where the power went just after we ordered our food. Serious organisation was going on by the changeable but charismatic group leader just to get the right food to the right person.

After lunch we visited the highlights of the first day the triple inscriptions at Ganjnameh and the famous ones at the World Heritage Site of Bisotun/ Behistun.

The inscriptions at Ganjnameh are in cuneiform script in the languages of Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian, inscribed by the Achaemanid rulers, Darius I (521-485 BC) and his son Xerxes I (486-466 BC).

The inscriptions praise the Achaemenid Zoroastrian god, Ahuramazda and relate the kings’ lineages.

Again and again we were to see that the inscriptions and reliefs carved in the pre-Islamic era were in places of outstanding natural beauty and that this connected to the messages that they wanted to portray, gave them an added power and awe.

The rocky site is about 5k away from Hamadan, in the Alvand mountains. There is a waterfall which draws crowds of Iranian tourists in summer. Both men and women (surprisingly to me) rolled up their trousers and paddled in the water.

After a not so flying visit to Anahita’s temple in Chandovan, which after every where else we had been that day was underwhelming. There was nothing to see. A few lonely pillars and no explanation as to why this site was dedicated to the ancient Persian goddess of water. There was no water here, high on a hill top. A few scattered, simple modern houses looked out on the hills which you could imagine had not changed much since they were the view of the ancient temple.

As the day wore on the atmosphere on the coach heated up. Our team leader with his cheeky grin led the boys dancing in the aisle between the seats, while the women clapped, laughed and looked on. The driver had a mix of Iranian, Kurdish and Azeri music which he played loud. The curtains were quickly drawn so that the interior of the coach was a private sea of green. I was reminded that it is illegal for men and women to dance together unless they are maremme, or related to eachother closely, and thus unable to marry - (father-daughter, brother-sister).

The last stop of the day was at Bisotun, where there are remains from the prehistoric, Median, Achaeminid, Sassanian and Ilkhanid periods. As you enter the site, you are met by the Seleucid bust of Hercules craning out of the cliff face. The site could be seen from the ancient road which linked the capitals of Babylon and Ecbatana.

This is where Sir Henry Rawlinson famously deciphered the cuneiform which he had copied while dangling from ropes on the cliff face. The inscriptions, like those at Ganjnameh are in the languages of Elamite, Old Persian and the Akkadian of the Neo-Babylonians. All use the cuneiform script. He inscribed the transcription in two parts, one in 1835, the other in 1843. This makes the inscription the ‘Rosetta stone’ of Mesopotamian and Persian cuneiform. However while the Rosetta stone has pride of place in the British Museum, this inscription 300 feet up a cliff face in north west Iran, perhaps not surprisingly, has not achieved the same fame.

The Achaemenid monumental relief and inscriptions from Darius I celebrated the Achaemenid accession to the throne of Persia after he had defeated Gaumata the Median magus and pretender to the throne (according to the Achaemenids: history is always written by the victors!). The life size figure of Darius is portrayed carrying a bow as a sign of kingship and with his foot on the chest of his enemy in the classic victor’s pose which had been used throughout Mesopotamia and Persia since Naram-Sin’s Victory Stele, from the mid 3rd Millennium BC onwards. This stele was found in Susa, having been stolen by the Elamites after their own victory over the Akkadians.

Crowned with a diadem, the king is shown with larger and with a more luxurious beard than his followers. Which interestingly seems to have been carved separately and bolted on at a later date, suggesting that the first beard was not right? This is similar to much monumental art from all over the Near East, where the ruler has the biggest beard, showing perhaps that he is more manly and virile than his followers.

Above the mortal plane Ahuramazda looks on endorsing the events below.

This famous relief though is inaccessible to the average punter; the stepped platform which could give access is locked. So you are left craning up at it, as indeed must have been the intention. The inaccessibility meant that it was more difficult to destroy or hack the faces by subsequent enemies of the Achaemenids.

Driving into the city of Kermanshah, where we were to spend the next two nights. What the hotel was called I couldn’t tell you as the name was in Farsi only and I forgot to ask/ or work it out, which for me is still pretty slow. We had a delightful supper of hamburgers sitting on the street corner, feeling like lost yoofs, as perhaps we were. I threw away the meat. I wouldn’t eat it in Britain and was not going to start now in Iran… bread, tomatoes, gherkins and mayo for me then!

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