Shahr-e Sukhteh
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How it came to be
Shahr-e Sukhteh, the Burnt City, is a mudbrick urban site on the Helmand River in south-eastern Iran. In the Bronze Age it stood where trade routes crossed the Iranian plateau, and it was one of the places where the first complex societies of eastern Iran emerged.
The city had separate monumental, residential, workshop and burial areas. It had ties with the Indus plain, the Persian Gulf coast and Central Asia, and was a centre for metalwork, stone vessels, gems and pottery. Its graveyard in the south-west covers 25 hectares.
Aurel Stein investigated it in the early 1900s, an Italian team excavated it from 1967 to 1978, and an Iranian team has worked there since 1997. The city was abandoned as watercourses and climate changed. It was inscribed in 2014.
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