page_title: Teppe Hasanlu
section_title: Archaeology
hierarchical_section_title: Teppe Hasanlu / Archaeology
caption_attribution_description: English: Hasanlu Golden Cup, Hasanlu Golden Bowl
context_page_description: Teppe Hasanlu or Tappeh Hassanlu is an archeological site of an ancient city located in northwest Iran, a short distance south of Lake Urmia. The nature of its destruction at the end of the 9th century BC essentially froze one layer of the city in time, providing researchers with extremely well preserved buildings, artifacts, and skeletal remains from the victims and enemy combatants of the attack.
  Hasanlu Tepe is the largest site in the Gadar River valley and dominates the small plain known as Solduz. The site consists of a 25-m-high central "citadel" mound, with massive fortifications and paved streets, surrounded by a low outer town, 8 m above the surrounding plain. The entire site, once much larger but reduced in size by local agricultural and building activities, now measures about 600 m across, with the citadel having a diameter of about 200 m.
  The site was inhabited fairly continuously from the 6th millennium BC to the 3rd century AD. It is famous for the Golden bowl of Hasanlu. Since June 2018, the Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization has pushed for the entire archeological site to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
context_section_description: After some licensed commercial digging by dealers, the site was first dug by Aurel Stein in 1936. The site of Hasanlu was then excavated in 10 seasons between 1956 and 1974 by a team from the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania and the Metropolitan Museum. The project was directed by Robert H. Dyson, Jr. and is considered today to have been an important training ground for a generation of highly successful Near Eastern archaeologists.
  Originally, excavations in the Ushnu-Solduz Valley were intended to explore a series of stratified occupation levels in the area with the objective of reconstructing a regional cultural history from Neolithic times until Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia beginning in 334 BC, such that any conclusions would rely solely on material evidence from the region itself, independent of linguistic or literary evidence from adjoining regions. The unexpected discovery of the famous "Gold Bowl" at Hasanlu in 1958 led to the project shifting its focus to the Iron Age levels at this site, although several other sites in the region were also excavated in order to stay in line with the project's broader objective.  These other excavations were conducted at Dinkha Tepe, Dalma Tepe, Hajji Firuz Tepe, Agrab Tepe, Pisdeli, and Seh Girdan.
  The Hasanlu Publications Project was initiated in 2007 to produce the official monograph-length final reports on the excavation. Currently two Excavation Reports and several Special Studies volumes have been completed.
caption: The Golden bowl of Hasanlu
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