Plan, Form and Function of a “Fortified” Site in the Iranian Sistan of Post-Achaemenid and possibly Parthian Period

As it is well known, the tradition of studies on the post-Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian periods in general, and on the Iranian Plateau in particular, has always maintained that in that period the urbanization processes of the territory were given a great boost. This was true for both the large quantity of information given by the Alexandrian and post-Alexandrian sources on the subject, and the archaeological evidence which, albeit in a sometimes-contradictory way, would show the characteristics of a major and large urban occupation of the territory with respect to the previous times. Proper cities (very rare and most of them out of the Iranian plateau!), urban layouts, settlements, fortifications, castles, regional walls etc. have always been tenaciously sought and identified (sometimes difficultly) on the ground! However, remains of urban occupation in clear and reliable archaeological contexts have very rarely been completely recognized in the Iranian plateau. One of the cases that we want to bring to the attention here is the one of Qalʽa-ye Sam, already identified in the middle of the last century, and approached by the activities of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Sistan (Iran) between 1959 and 1961 under the direction of Umberto Scerrato. The Italian archaeologist led some surveys and excavation tests on the site, which some foreign scholars called “Qalʽa”, an Arabic-Persian term meaning “fortification”. In this case, Qalʽa-ye Sam (the fortress, or the castle of Sam, whose name derives from the homonymous prince, ancestor of Rostam of the Sistanic cycle of the Šāhnāme in the Ferdousi saga) is the toponymic solution, often used locally, as it happens many times in other cases in the popular ancient toponomastics of Iran1. In the general picture of the urbanization processes during the Parthian time in the Iranian Plateau and Central Asia, the author tries to outline a series of possible plans, forms and functional comparisons in the archaeological evidence, first with an overview of the most important settlements and cities of Hellenistic and Parthian times, known also thanks to the sources, and then by outlining other less known remains which have been documented only recently through the archeological data and topographical investigations.