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Product Description
SEE MORE ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN LURISTAN ARTIFACTS
In over 30 years of working with thousands of ancient objects, we have only had the rare pleasure of acquiring an ancient Bronze Age metal casting mold ONCE, from the Ancient Near East, and this is it! Hand carved of steatite stone (chosen for its thermal insulating properties), this incredibly rare bronze metal casting two-part mold is designed to cast TWO different styles of axes. This is accomplished by reversing sides, depending on which design is desired. What is even more intriguing is that one side shows burning from actual ancient use. When we acquired this specimen, it was completely covered in a layer of ancient mineral calcite. With extreme care in the use of pneumatic tools in our lab, we removed the calcite layer in several areas. This revealed the original surface that showed the burning from when axes had been cast in it. We left some of the remaining opposite side still covered in the calcite to offer a testament to its authenticity and ancient origin. It does not look like the other side was used as the pour hole for that side shows no charring like the other side we fully exposed.
Words just cannot emphasize how rare this specimen is. Furthermore, it is in PERFECT, UNBROKEN preservation! This would make the ultimate museum display to show with various cast axes set aside this amazing casting mold. Ancient metallurgy employed both, lost-wax casting, sand-casting and in this example, mold casting. This is a true once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire something that only presented itself to us once, despite over 30 years of intense collecting.
HISTORY
With origins dating back to prehistory, the empire of ancient Iran was one of the world's first superpower civilizations by the time it had taken form in the second millennium B.C.. The various cultures that can be included in the former ancient Iranian Empire stretched across an enormous geographical region extending beyond what is called the Iranian Plateau. To gain insight as to just how large this area was, the Iranian Plateau alone, includes Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan and comprises approximately nearly 4 million square kilometers (almost 1.5 million square miles). The area of ancient Iran included not only the massive Iranian plateau made up of the tribes of the Medes, Persians, Bactrians and Parthians, but also included groups as far west as the Scythians (an eastern Scythian tribe existed in parallel in Central Asia), Sarmartians, Cimmerians and Alans populating the steppes north of the Black Sea. To the eastern boundary of the empire, the Saka tribes dominated, spreading as far as Xinjiang, China. From a very early period, the ancient Iranian peoples have been historically documented to exist in two separate continuums - a western civilization (Persia) and an eastern civilization (Scythia).
The beginnings of ancient Iran trace back to an influx into the Iranian cultural region of bands of horse-mounted steppe nomads from Central Asia, speaking Indo-European languages. Some settled in eastern Iran but other groups migrated deeper to the west settling in the Zagros Mountains. These first people descended from the proto-Iranians, originating from the Central Asian Bronze age culture of what is called the Bactria-Margiana Complex (aka Oxus Civilization), dated 2200-1700 B.C..
This historical achievements and the breadth of diverse cultures included of this once great empire are too vast to adequately credit in this brief synopsis. The Islamic conquest of Persia in the middle of the 7th century A.D. and the collapse of the Sassanid Empire marked the end of once geographically expansive and culturally diverse ancient superpower.
The term LURISTAN references artifacts made by a society of semi-nomadic people that once lived in the mountainous region of Northwest Iran. Little is known of this ancient culture but the most impressive traces are that of the bronze artifacts they left behind that can be found in parts of present-day Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. These include highly decorative equipment for their horses, ceremonial containers and numerous weapons ranging from simple utilitarian pieces on up to elaborate masterpieces of warfare.
It is theorized that the Luristan bronzes were crafted by the earliest existence of the Median empire but this has never been proven as written records of the Medes have not survived. The Medes were Indo-Iranian people originally from central Asia who settled in Northwest Iran in the 9th century BC and later defeated the Assyrian empire in 614 BC. Their success is short-lived and their empire which once stretched from central Iran to the Persian Gulf and Anatolia was overrun in 550 BC by the Persians.
