The necessity of Nationalization of the Archaeological Studies

Date: 3/30/2021 12:15:49 PM

Iranian and Pseudo-Iranian Studies

Dr. Awat Abbasi  

Iran was in the dark days of economic and cultural eclipse when the monopoly of archaeological excavations of the entire country was entrusted to France through an Archaeological concession Treaty by the two kings of the Qajar dynasty. Frenchmen dug our ancient sites, plundered our cultural heritage to build their museums and wrote our history according to their own strategies. Once again in 2004/1383, another similar document was submitted to the Iranian Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization by the National Center of Scientific Research of France (CNRS) to take over the archaeological excavations of vast regions of Iran.

Taking advantage of the weak administrational policies of ICHTO, Iranian archaeology suffered another humiliating experience. Through a foul play, Yussof Madjidzadeh, head of the archaeological team of the Konar Sandal Mounds of Jiroft was dismissed and the most important archaeological project conducted by Iranian archaeologists ceased. The hidden hands were to be sought in the removal of his viewpoints on the lofty status of the newly discovered civilization of Jiroft from the scholarly publications. It was no accident that shortly afterwards a François Desset by name appeared on the scene and suspiciously claimed to be both a professor of Bronze Age Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology at Tehran University since 2014 and a postdoctoral student of the same department as well. In late 2020 the announcement of his great unpublished achievement in deciphering an ancient Iranian script appeared as an unusual web propaganda degrading to be echoed even in a TV show in Spain. Another piece with Desset’s claim to be the first to call the Jiroft writing system as “geometric,” is of the same kind as eliminating Professor Madjidzadeh’s viewpoints from the scholarly publications, since Dr. Azhideh Moqaddam’s brilliant theory on the structure of the ancient Geometric writing systems had been published in Germany years before this false claim.

The changes hastily applied to the Linear Elamite entry on Wikipedia concerning Desset’s unseen decipherment were elucidating. The objects carrying the Linear Elamite inscriptions (W, X, Y, Z) referred to by Desset have been doubted as forgeries since years ago and the other more recent discoveries are of no archaeological provenance. The collaboration of Desset’s Italian friend, Massimo Vidale from the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) in taking the specimens to a laboratory in Italy and bringing back the verification of the authenticity of the objects was the least convincing episode. Iranian scholars are aware of the conspiracies and will not tolerate.