Bronze Age · c. 3200–2800 BC · Tapeh Tyalineh, Kouzaran, Kermanshah province, Iran
More than 7,000 clay seal impressions found in rescue dig in western Iran
Rubbish pits at Tapeh Tyalineh in Kermanshah province held sealings, figurines and tokens from 3200–2800 BC, with designs paralleled at sites from Susa to eastern Turkey.
Peer-reviewed paper
Tapeh Tyalineh, Kouzaran, Iran Archaeologists have recovered more than 7,000 clay seal impressions from a farmed mound in western Iran. They date to around 3200–2800 BC, the Proto-Elamite period or Early Bronze Age.
The site is Tapeh Tyalineh, on the Kouzaran plain in Kermanshah province. It has also produced over 200 figurines, dozens of clay tokens and two cylinder seals. Shokouh Khosravi of the University of Kurdistan led the excavations and has published the finds in the journal Antiquity.
La Brújula Verde reported on the paper. It describes the material as the largest body of administrative artefacts from late prehistory found anywhere in the ancient world.
The study places the site in a region where such evidence had been rare. Earlier finds of complex record-keeping before the Bronze Age came mostly from Susiana in south-western Iran and from the Fars highlands. The Central Zagros mountains had produced little.
Farm earth-moving exposed the finds
Tapeh Tyalineh is a mound of 2.7 hectares. It lies about 25 km west of Chogha Maran, a Bronze Age site in the western Zagros.
Unauthorised earth-moving for agriculture had been bringing seal impressions to the surface since 1998. In 2021, soil removal exposed 67 bullae. That discovery led to rescue excavations in 2023 and 2024.
A sealing, or bulla, is a lump of clay pressed over a closure and stamped with a seal. Anyone opening the container or door would break it. At Tapeh Tyalineh many pieces still carry the marks of cord, textile and leather on their backs.
Sealings like these were pressed over the knots of sacks, over jar lids and over the locking mechanisms of storeroom doors. Some were stamped on receipts.
Thrown into old grain pits
In Trench A the team found no buildings. Instead it found a series of pits, first dug to store grain and later used as rubbish dumps. The researchers think the sealings were thrown away once the goods they secured had been checked in accounting.
The rubbish was burned, and the ash helped preserve the clay. Many pieces are unfired or only partly fired. The study takes this as a sign that the burning was accidental, not a deliberate attempt to keep the records.
The first season produced 4,019 seal impressions from these pits. It also yielded 127 figurines, dozens of tokens and one cylinder seal. The second season added more than 3,000 impressions, a second cylinder seal, more than 100 figurines and further tokens.
Bullae from doors and jars also turned up in mudbrick buildings. There they had been used on storage rooms.
Seal designs match sites from Susa to eastern Turkey
The study identifies 210 distinct seal motifs. They have parallels at Proto-Elamite sites in southern Iran, such as Susa and Malyan. There are also parallels at Tapeh Yahya, Sialk, Sofalin and Arisman on the Iranian Central Plateau, and at Chogha Maran and Giyan in the western Zagros.
Some motifs show connections with Mesopotamia of the Jemdet Nasr period (3100–2900 BC). Some impressions are in a style characteristic of Arslantepe, a major centre in what is now eastern Turkey.
The pottery from the site points the same way. It includes Proto-Elamite, Jemdet Nasr and Yanik fragments.
The site has a large number of stamp seal impressions. This type is less common at other sites of the same date.
The study looks at the stamp seals, the range of designs and the site's position in a fertile plain. Together, it argues, they point to a settlement with a central part in organised exchange. It was possibly a place where goods moving through the region were redistributed or controlled.
The researchers base a further suggestion on the jar sealings. The goods may have included dairy products such as oil, or drinks such as beer and wine. These would have been carried in sealed containers.
Chemical and petrological analyses of the clay have not yet been carried out. The team expects them to help show where the sealed goods came from. It also expects them to clarify how the administrative system worked.
Sources
- The largest administrative archive of Late Prehistory, with more than 7,000 seal impressions and hundreds of artifacts, found in Iran (La Brújula Verde)
Paper: Khosravi S. The late prehistoric administrative artefacts from Tapeh Tyalineh, Kermanshah, western Iran. Antiquity. Published online 2026:1-10. doi:10.15184/aqy.2025.10259
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