Landscape, Sources and Architecture at the Archaeological Remains of Achaemenid Sistan (East Iran): Dahan- i Ghulaman

The author deals with the important archaeological remains in Sistan of Dahan.e Ghulaman. The region located along the border between Iran and Afghanistan (between 30°18’ and 31°21’ northern latitude and 61° and 61°50’ eastern longitude), constitutes today, together with the southern region of Baluchistan, one of the largest provinces (ostān) of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The province, is bordered by the province of Khorasan and Afghanistan to the north, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east, the Sea of Oman to the south, the Kerman province to west and the Hormozgān province to south-west. From a morphological point of view, Sistān represents the westernmost portion of system of lagoons constituting the Hāmun Lake, whose eastern part is administratively within the boundaries of the Afghan province of Nimrūz. The scholars by now agree that the first historical reference both to the territory around the Hāmun Lake and to the Helmand River is that of the inscription of Darius I (522-486 a.C.) at Bisotun, in which the name of the country and its inhabitants are attested in the old-Persian form z-r-k (to be read Zrānka), apparently its original name. This form finds a direct reflex in the Elamite (“sir-ra-an-qa”; Cameron 1960), Babylonian (“za-ra-an-ga”) and Aramaic (“srng/srnķ”) version of the same inscription. Some toponyms and ethnonyms attested in some Greek sources (Zarángai, Zarangaîoi, Zarangianế in Arrian and Hysidorus of Charax; Sarángai in Herodotus) and in Latin (Zarangae in Pliny) derive indirectly from this origin. Instead of this native form, characterized by the non-Persian sound “z-”, in the greater part of the Greek sources (mainly those dependent on the biographers of Alexander; Schmitt 1996, 535) and in Latin variations one finds the hyper-corrected Persianized form *Dranka/Dranga which are characterized by the Persian sound “d-”: Drángai, Drangế, Drangēnế, Drangi(a)nế (Ctesias, Polybius, Strabo; Diodorus; Ptolemy; Arrian; Stephan of Bysanz), Drangae, Drangiana, Drangiani (Curtius Rufus, Pliny, Ammianus Marcellino, Justin). In the complex frame of the formative processes, political nature and the real extension of the Achaemenid Empire, the discovery of Dāhān-e Ghūlāmān in the Iranian Sīstān basin (eastern Iran), by the Italian Archaeological Mission of IsMEO, and the related excavations that followed in the 60s of the last century, formed and still today occupy are a very important and decisive stage. In this particular geo-environmental context, the macroscopic architectural remains of Dāhān-e Ghūlāmān that stand out in a very characteristic and particularly suggestive way, belong to a real city. Thus was proposed, at the time of discovery, to be the old Zarin of the classical sources, the capital of the Achaemenid satrapy of Drangiana (Zrānka of the imperial inscriptions), and dated between the end of the sixth and the fourth century BC. They are the only “urban” remains until now known from that time in the plateau. Even the new tests conducted in the recent years by the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organisation in the city and in particular in the building no 15 seem to confirm the overwhelming importance of the site