Ezat Jon's Biography

Iranian Archaeologist
By: Dr. Kamyar Abdi (kamyar.abdi@dartmouth.edu )

Ezzat-Allâh Negahbân (usually spelled Ezat O. Negahbân) was born in the city of Ahvaz
on March 1, 1926 to ‘Abdol-Amir Negahbân and Roghieh Didebân. When he was two
years old, his father was elected to the Iranian parliament (Majlis), and the family moved to Tehran. Seven years later his father passed away while on a trip to Ahvaz. He attended Jamshid-e Jam Elementary School, Firouz-e Bahrâm High School, and the German Technical School. At sixteen, while still attending high school, he began working full-time as a traveling accountant for the national railway, on a contract basis because he was too young to be hired as an employee. This wide-ranging travel, together with a fascination for the newly constructed Irân Bâstân Museum which was located near the German Technical School, caused him to decide to pursue the study of archaeology when the German school was closed down at the beginning of World War II.



Negahbân enrolled in the Department of Archaeology at Tehran University,
where he received his BA. In 1949 he traveled to the United States, attending the
University of Michigan for English language study, and then in 1950 enrolled at the
Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. He received his MA from the University of Chicago in 1954 after completing a thesis under Donald McCown (Negahbân 1954).

Negahbân’s years at Chicago coincided with the tumultuous Mosaddeq era, and
he had to make a living for himself (as well as his sister who was caught up in a similar situation in Germany). He worked as a baby photographer, a school bus driver, a Fuller brush salesman, and a steel-worker at the mills in Gary, Indiana (Braidwood and Braidwood 1999, p. 1), among other jobs. While at the University of Chicago, he met his future wife Miriam Lois Miller, a student of library science, whom he married in 1955. Together they have six sons: Bijan (deceased at age 2), Ali, Bahman, Mehrdad, Babak, and Daryush.

In 1955 Negahbân returned to Iran with his wife where he was appointed
Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology at Tehran University after his
credentials from the University of Chicago were evaluated as the equivalent of a PhD
degree. Negahbân was promoted to a full professorship in 1962, served as the Chairman
of the Department from 1967 to 1978, and as the Dean of Faculty of Letters and
Humanities from 1975 to 1979. He also served as the Technical Director of the Iranian
Archaeological Service from 1960 to 1965, and as Technical Advisor of the Iranian
Ministry of Culture from 1965 to 1979 (after the Archaeological Service was transferred from the Ministry of Education to Ministry of Culture). He was also Director of the Irân Bâstân Museum from 1966 to 1968.

The foremost Iranian archaeologist of his generation, Negahbân’s career had a
number of major impacts on Iranian archaeology, earning him the informal appellation
“Father of Modern Iranian Archaeology”. His excavations at a number of key
archaeological sites augmented our knowledge of Iranian archaeology and history. His
restructuring of the curriculum at the Department of Archaeology of Tehran University, and in conjunction with that, founding of the Institute of Archaeology, raised the standards of indigenous Iranian archaeology to a more scientific and professional level, while his support of a wider and more systematic involvement in Iranian archaeology by expeditions from other countries elevated the field to unprecedented international levels.

Negahbân carried out his first series of excavations in 1961 at the site of
Mehrânâbâd about 25 km south of Tehran on the road to Sâveh in collaboration with T.
Cuyler Young Jr. The site apparently dates to the early village period of the Central
Plateau, but was heavily damaged during Sasanian times, making the discerning of earlier material very difficult, if not impossible (Malek Shahmirzâdi 1977, pp. 434-5).

The same year, alarmed by rampant illicit diggings and lootings of archaeological
sites in the Caspian Basin, Negahbân organized a series of surveys along the tributaries of the Sefidrud river in the Rudbâr area, which resulted in the discovery of the important site of Mârlik and Pileh Qaleh. Negahbân immediately organized a team composed of members of the Archaeological Service together with a few students from Tehran University to excavate these sites. A long and arduous season of excavations carried out under very difficult conditions (Negahbân 1997: 177-202; Ahkami 2003: 58), led to the discovery of fifty-two lavishly furnished burials dating to the late second-early first millennium BCE. Perhaps equally important was the nearby site of Pileh Qaleh, evidently with a sequence of occupation dating from the second millennium BCE to middle Islamic
times, including some constructions that may have been associated with the Mârlik
burials (Negahbân 1964a). Unfortunately, our knowledge of Pileh Qaleh is limited as a
change in the Ministry of Education (in which the Archaeological Service was based at
that time), led to a withdrawal of the team’s excavation permit and the shutdown of work at Pileh Qaleh. Negahbân produced a series of general and specialized reports on the finds of Marlik, documenting an early Iron Age society with evidence for social stratification, advanced weaponry, and a sophisticated art style (cf. Negahbân 1962, 1963, 1964b, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1972, 1977, 1981, 1983, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2001).

In 1965, an accidental discovery at the Haft Tappeh sugar cane plantation in the
far south in Khuzestan gave Neghbân the opportunity to embark on a series of
excavations in his home province. Always on the lookout for ways to advance Iranian
archaeology, he found this an excellent opportunity to launch the first Iranian project in the archaeologically-rich province of Khuzestan, hitherto the effective domain of foreign archaeologists, especially the French. Over fourteen seasons lasting until the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Neghbân and his team excavated a fairly sizeable area at Haft Tappeh revealing major constructions, courtyards, and tombs dating to mid-second millennium BCE (Negahbân 1967, 1968, 1969, 1975, 1984, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1997, 2002). Inscriptions discovered during the course of excavations and translated over the years (cf. Reiner 1973; Herrero 1976; Herrero and Glassner 1990, 1991) indicate that Haft Tappeh was ancient Kabnak, the royal residence of a hitherto little-known Elamite ruler named Tepti-Ahar. The Haft Tappeh excavations was one of very few projects focused on Elam carried out outside of Susa, thus adding a valuable dimension to our rudimentary knowledge of this part of Iranian history.

Perhaps most important in terms of its contribution to Iranian archaeology is an
extensive and long-term regional project in the Qazvin Plain, on which Negahbân
embarked in 1970. The Qazvin Plain project pursued a two-pronged objective: requiring
students of archaeology at Tehran University to participate in archaeological fieldwork, gaining invaluable hands-on experience, and defining a regional chronological sequence for the relatively unknown Central Plateau. As the survey of the Plain was underway, three sites were selected for excavation: Sagzâbâd (covering the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age sequence), Qabrestân (covering the Chalcolithic sequence), and Zâgheh (covering the Neolithic sequence). Two new faculty members at Department of Archaeology, Tehran University who had just finished their MA degree at Chicago, served as Assistant Directors: Yousef Majidzâdeh, who incorporated the results of his excavations at Qabrestân into his Chicago PhD dissertation on the Chalcolithic period of the Central Plateau (Majidzâdeh 1976) and Sâdeq Malek Shahmirzâdi whose excavations at Zâgheh formed the basis of his PhD dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania (Malek Shahmirzâdi 1977). A joint team worked at Sagzâbâd (cf. Negahbân 1973, 1974) while Negahbân continued to direct the entire project, participating in the excavations and making such interesting finds as the “Painted Building” at Zâgheh (Neghaban 1979).

In addition to the major projects mentioned above (Mârlik, Haft Tappeh, and
Qazvin Plain) Negahbân carried out a number of smaller projects, including a 1965
survey in Khorâsân along the Soviet border and another survey in 1975-76 in the
Kalârdasht Plain in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains in the central Caspian Basin (Negahbân 2000).

Another area of Negahbân’s contribution to Iranian archaeology was his
important role in introducing changes into the curriculum of the Department of
Archaeology of Tehran University, the only institution for training archaeologists in Iran at that time. The Department of Archaeology was one of the first academic departments to be established at the Faculty of Literature after the foundation of Tehran University in 1934. In 1940 the Department granted a Bachelor of Arts degree to its first graduate, the famous poet Fereidoun Tavalloli (Asgari Châverdi 2000). Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Department had a more art historical outlook due to the primary training of the majority of its senior faculty members, including Issâ Behnâm, Mohsen Moqaddam, and Ali-Naqi Vaziri. Once hired by the Department in 1956, Negahbân gradually introduced a more archaeological approach in his courses, but a major revision and updating of the curriculum along more scientific archaeological lines had to wait until Negahbân was appointed Chairman of the Department in 1967. Perhaps the most important update to the curriculum was the addition of twenty units of fieldwork during the 1970-71 academic year, mandatory for both male and female students (Malek Shahmirzâdi 1990, p. 428). For this purpose, Negahbân had already negotiated with the Archaeological Service of
Iran for a long-term permit to conduct fieldwork on the Qazvin Plain and had secured and restored a Safavid caravanserai at Mohammadabad Kharreh between Qazvin and Bo’in
Zahra to serve as the base-camp of the Department’s field school (Malek Shahmirzâdi
1999; Negahbân 2003). This major achievement provided students with a unique
opportunity to gain a firsthand experience in archaeological fieldwork.

With his foresight, Negahbân also activated a Master’s program at the Department
and secured scholarships for a number of students to pursue their higher education
towards a PhD degree abroad. It is therefore not surprising that the 1970s produced some of the most prominent figures in Iranian archaeology. A number of Negahbân’s former students joined the Department as new faculty members, while others chose to work at the Archaeological Service. To these men and women, and ultimately to Negahbân, we should be grateful for keeping Iranian archaeology alive as Iran chose to close its doors to the world archaeology from 1979 until recent years.

Negahbân’s classes on Iranian archaeology at Tehran University, open to students
and other interested people alike, also attracted a number of foreigners who went on to become Iranian specialists, most notably William Sumner and Elizabeth Carter.

In 1959, Negahbân founded the Institute of Archaeology of Tehran University and
served as its Director until 1979. The founding of the Institute marks another turning point in Iranian archaeology. Technically, the permit holder for archaeological fieldwork at Qazvin Plain and Haft Tappeh was Tehran University, especially its Institute of Archaeology, but the funding came from the Archaeological Service. The difficult task of bringing together a permit and funding to carry out fieldwork was accomplished thanks to Negahbân’s position in both institutions. Fieldwork in the Qazvin Plain was required for all the BA level students, while more advanced MA student went on to participate in the Haft Tappeh excavation. The Institute of Archaeology provided the instructors and students with office space, library, and laboratory facilities to conduct analyses on
archaeological material and produce publications on their fieldwork. Out of these
endeavors appeared the first journal of the Department and Institute, which published two issues under the title Mârlik (in 1973 and 1977) and another issue as Kand-o-Kâv (1979), before its publication came to end with the ‘Cultural Revolution’ (1980-82).

While building the infrastructure of an indigenous archaeology apparatus,
Negahbân never neglected the proposition that Iranian archaeology could benefit from a wider, more systematic international involvement. Word War II had brought
archaeological field activities in Iran by foreign expeditions to a halt. After the War, archaeological field projects resumed over the course of ten years, but except for the University of Pennsylvania’s work in the Solduz Valley (initiated by Robert H. Dyson in 1957), most other efforts were brief and haphazard. In a meeting at the International Congress for Prehistoric Archaeology in Hamburg in 1958, Negahbân invited Robert J. Braidwood of the Oriental Institute to continue with his research into early stages of food production and sedentism in the Zagros Mountains in Iran. Braidwood, whose work in Iraqi Kurdistan had come to a halt as a result of the July 1958 coup, gladly accepted Negahbân’s invitation (Braidwood and Braidwood 1999) and carried out a series of groundbreaking archaeological surveys and excavations in western Iran in 1959-60 (cf. Braidwood, Howe, and Negahbân 1960). Thus was formed ‘The Iranian Prehistory Project’ that was continued by Briadwood’s students, especially with surveys in Susiana by Robert McCormick Adams (1962), and surveys and excavations in Deh Luran and Khorramabad plains by Frank Hole and Kent Flannery (1963, 1967). These projects paved the way for the introduction of Processual Archaeology to Iran (Hole 1995) and were soon followed by many expeditions from Western countries that catapulted Iran to the forefront of archaeological theory and methodology in Near Eastern archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s.

Last, but not least, one should not neglect Negahbân’s role in combating illicit
excavations and sale of archaeological material in the antiquities market in Iran and
abroad (of which he carried a bitter reminder from his own work at Mârlik). As the
Director of the Vth International Congress of Iranian Art and Archaeology held in Tehran in 1968, Negahbân introduced a resolution that appealed to all countries, as well as to the UNESCO, to combat export, import, and sale of antiquities. The resolution, one of the first of its kind in the Near East, was passed almost unanimously, but earned Negahbân both condemnation as a “bitter fanatic” (by Arthur Upham Pope) and praise as a “decent man” (see Muscarella 1999 for discussions surrounding this resolution). Negahbân went on to attend two UNESCO meetings pursuing the subject, which ultimately resulted in a 1972 UNESCO resolution condemning the traffic in national cultural properties.

Negahbân was by no means an ‘ivory tower’ academic. He had an acute interest
in educating all Iranians about their country’s past. His excavations were open and active on Fridays, and visitors from all walks of life were always welcome to come and see the work in progress and to ask questions.

Skirmishes at Tehran University leading up to the 1978-79 Revolution and the
ensuing ‘Cultural Revolution’ (1980-82) left a personal mark on Negahbân when he was
stabbed repeatedly by a group of six masked thugs as he left his car to enter his office at the university early one morning in the spring of 1978. As Negahbân was recovering from his injuries, he chose retirement rather than continuing to work in such a hostile environment. Thanks to Robert H. Dyson, in 1980 he was appointed a Visiting Curator at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, where he settled with his family and, free from administrative and teaching responsibilities, embarked on producing the results of his earlier fieldwork, including the comprehensive reports of his excavations at Haft Tappeh (Negahbân 1991) and Mârlik (Negahbân 1996). Meanwhile, as early revolutionary zeal in Iran gradually gave way to more pragmatic policies, Negahbân resumed his cooperation with the archaeology apparatus, serving as an advisor to the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization which published the Persian edition of his reports (Negahbân 1368, 1372, 1376) as well as a number of other books (Negahbân 1375) including his fascinating memoirs (Negahbân 1378). In 1999 he was honored with their highest Cultural Heritage decoration for his lifetime contributions to Iranian archaeology. In the same year, Negahbân’s students and colleagues from Iran and abroad put together a festschrift honoring him and his unique position in Iranian archaeology (Alizadeh, Majidzadeh, and Malek Shahmirzadi 1999).

Unfortunately, Negahbân was hit by a car near his home in Philadelphia in August
of 2001, and spent the next eight months in hospital recovering from his massive injuries. As this paper is being written, he is still undergoing the long process of recuperation from this terrible accident. Although he is no longer able to produce papers or books, he and his wife Miriam remain gracious hosts, always happy to entertain guests in their house in Philadelphia, especially his old colleagues and students, as well as the new generation of archaeologists (some students of his former students, including this author) who now continue with his illustrious legacy in Iranian archaeology.


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