In Persia, as in Egypt, the distribution of water was precisely regulated; hourglasses were used to measure the length of time the farmers utilized the water and a system of sluices made it possible to gauge the volume of the water. Leo Africanus speaks of the measuring clocks that operated by water: “When they are empty the watering period is over.” Mention is also made of skilled personnel and even teams of divers.
A History of Technology and Invention, Islam and Byzantium
Gaston Wiet, 1962
THE ZAFAR INSTITUTE WIRED MORE money. Working feverishly with the help of a local crew, the excavation began. For months I’d walked this territory, shovel clanging, while only a few inches under my footsteps rested the capitals, two bulls set back to back, of slender Persian columns, thinner and more fluted than Greek, of the great city of Suolucidir. I was sure this was it. The supports of this vast honey-combed metropolis were buried all over the landscape, their bell-shaped bases hidden intact deep within the earth. The palace at its center with its colonnaded porticos was set on a high terrace approached by a double flight of stairs. The rest of the city spiraled out from this locus. During the excavation we learned my hypothesis was right: the Suolucidiris defended their city by constructing a series of labyrinths, switchbacks, and elbow turns more circuitous than even those imagined to exist in the Burnt City to the north. I tried to get my crew to map out as much of it as possible and as quickly as possible. I attempted to find the thread of the path that led me to the underground zoo and the body of Ramin Kosari, but in the time left to me, the route was never successfully retraced, and no twentieth-century remains were discovered.
The English traveler Laurence Oliphant measured what he claimed were the ruins of an ancient synagogue at Deir Aziz in Go-lan in 1885. Oliphant was said to have been an unstable mystic, and his claim was all but forgotten. Nearly one hundred years later a contemporary archaeologist found the site again, and his measurements were identical within a few inches. Mad Oliphant was right all along. Some people anticipate what they’ll find, and so are blind to certain kinds of discoveries that contradict their expectations, but I believed the Nieumachers, and I was only following the measurements they’d laid out when no one had believed them either.
The city proved to be enormous. Around every turn lay some other spectacle; the friezes and statuary I saw before me the day I fell through the earth were only the beginning. Unfortunately, it was also the end.
Only the pen of a Macauley or the brush of a Vereschagin could adequately portray the rapidly shifting scenes attending the downfall of this ancient nation — scenes in which two powerful and presumably enlightened Christian countries played fast and loose with truth, honor, decency and law, one at least, hesitating not even the most barbarous cruelties to accomplish its political designs and to put Persia beyond hope of self-regeneration.
W. Morgan Shuster, The Strangling of Persia
Washington, D.C., April 30, 1912
ON NOVEMBER 4, 1979, HOSTAGES were taken in the American embassy in Tehran. They demanded that the Shah, who was in Egypt receiving treatment for cancer, be returned to Iran to stand trial. American flags and effigies of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (though the exact physical template used by his Savile Row tailors remained untouched) were set on fire, and since the United States had supported the Shah, this shouldn’t have really come as a surprise to anyone. Why were my co-nationalists so shocked and so angry? Even children wrote anti-American messages on the embassy walls and elsewhere. By July 1980 diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States had deteriorated. The Ayatollah Khomeini, who returned from exile in Paris to take over once the Shah was deposed, turned out to be, in his own way, just as brutal as his predecessor. Even in my remote corner of the country, individuals weren’t invisible to the long arm of whoever was in power in the capital, and further excavation was becoming increasingly difficult, as people lived in fear of the army, the Revolutionary Guard, Khomeini’s Basiji, and others I couldn’t identify. Just as the door to Suolucidir creaked open after being locked and bolted for thousands of years, it was swinging shut again.
In Zahedan, where every market stall had had to post a picture of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, suddenly all those portraits, big and small, were reduced to ashes and smoke. Late at night, during an insomniac’s ramble, I saw a lone orange fire, a solitary kebab man at the end of my street, enveloped by the smell of grilled lamb and advieh, a spice mixture of cumin, cardamom, ginger, and rose petals. A Kurd, perhaps, he wore a black-and-white-checkered jamdani around his head. Leaning against a high wall of sun-dried brick, a second man laid out branches of dates, oranges, and bundles of henna leaves, and beside him another merchant polished his array of samovars, fluted and pinch-waisted; elongated passersby were reflected many times over in the silver and brass surfaces. Another man set up a line of narghile, coppery, engraved, silver and glass-bowled. The kebabwala threw a scrap to a dog.
I was working deep in the Suolucidir site when I heard someone yelling for me to hurry back to the entrance. We had to leave quickly. Soldiers were coming. The yelling got louder, more frantic. No militia of any kind had visited the city before, or at least not for thousands of years, and it was safe to assume these men weren’t here for a friendly field trip. The shouting grew louder, I heard the sound of jeeps pulling up to the edge of the site, and running through the labyrinth as best I remembered it, I emerged to see soldiers herding some of the excavators into trucks while others were being questioned. I was the only American, but I no longer had my passport.
A soldier pointed his Kalashnikov at me and yelled I should stand in line with others on the edge of the pit. One by one each man was asked his name and to surrender his identity papers. I had thirty seconds to decide whether to say Ariel Bokser. Ariel Bokser, I’m American. I lost my passport, and no I haven’t yet reported it missing.
It just came out instinctively with no premeditation. Ariel Bokser was back in the United States explaining that his accent had been acquired during years spent in Jerusalem living in an apartment above a falafel stand named Shushan. Ramin Kosari’s papers had been lost or stolen. I groped my pockets like a cartoon character who’s just been pickpocketed. The last thing I heard was an explosion near my head, and I felt a searing pain as I fell backward.
I passed out for the second time in Suolucidir. It was as if something in the underground city could snatch your consciousness if you weren’t vigilant. When I came to, it was night. I’d been thrown over the side of the pit, landing on a mess of straw and sand. Around me were the bodies of six of my fellow diggers. They had been shot and then toppled over the edge.
A jumble of limbs lay under me. If I knelt to get up, my hands and knees pressed into someone’s spine and shoulder blades. Finally standing, I backed away, retreating into the site. The passages were dark, but I made my way to the arsenal, where I picked six weapons and wrapped them carefully. They were among the most valuable objects we’d found. In the early morning hours I made my way back to Zahedan and left the tridents, hammers, and notched shields at the doorsteps of the six men who had been shot.
Arriving in Tehran from Zahedan without a passport, and with the American embassy under siege, I was trapped. My hotel was full of journalists hoping to outlast the hostage crisis, enjoying martinis poolside, comparing the backgrounds of their drivers and their skills at navigating parts of Tehran where you could get into trouble. They listened to tapes of Duke Ellington, Mahler, Sting, and Abba. They had photographs of Khomeini’s family, of tortured corpses dumped in a street behind a half-burned-down movie theater,