Daily life in Elamite Anshan during c. 1500 BCE

A cautious reconstruction of life at a reduced highland settlement in Fars, where early Qaleh pottery, animal bones, and a few excavated work areas reveal more than the sparse written record.

Anshan was both an Elamite region and the name of its chief city, securely identified with Tall-e Malyan in the Beyza plain of Fars, about 50 kilometres north-northwest of modern Shiraz. The archaeological site covers nearly 200 hectares inside an old enclosure, but that figure belongs to its long history and does not describe the inhabited area around 1500 BCE. After the extensive Kaftari-period occupation, evidence dated approximately 1600–1300 BCE is scant and appears across only a small part of the former city.[1]

Here “around 1500 BCE” means the early part of that poorly resolved interval, often called the Qaleh or transitional Middle Elamite phase. It is not a securely documented year. Written political history also becomes unusually quiet: the known sequence of Elamite rulers breaks off after about 1520 BCE and resumes only in the later fourteenth century.[2] Anshan should therefore be imagined neither as the crowded city of its earlier height nor as the administrative centre revealed by much later remains. It was a smaller community living among the earthworks and abandoned or lightly occupied spaces of an older centre.

Evidence and its limits

Pottery provides the best chronological marker. Qaleh painted ware occurs above Kaftari levels at Malyan from about 1650 BCE, although the earliest pieces are difficult to distinguish from late Kaftari pottery. Characteristic examples are well-fired buff vessels with dark geometric bands concentrated near rims and shoulders rather than spread across the whole surface. Because the phase lasted for centuries and its excavated assemblages remain unevenly published, a Qaleh sherd or building cannot automatically be dated to 1500 BCE.[3]

Some of Malyan's most vivid evidence belongs later. The large mudbrick building in Operation EDD, its nearly 300 Elamite tablets and its close ceramic links with Susa and Chogha Zanbil date broadly to about 1300–1100 BCE; radiocarbon evidence places the building's destruction towards the end of that span. Those remains show what Anshan became in the later Middle Elamite period, not how every household lived two or three centuries earlier.[6][7] This distinction matters whenever the later tablets, glazed architectural fittings or monumental courtyard plan are discussed.

The account below consequently combines three different levels of evidence: Qaleh-period finds from Malyan; longer-term evidence from the Kur River basin; and cautious inference about the work necessary to sustain a settled population. The first can identify pottery production and the animals eaten in particular excavated areas. The other two can suggest farming, storage, herding and repair, but cannot recover a “typical day”, a standard meal, or fixed divisions of labour by gender and status.

Housing and Living Spaces

Mudbrick was the principal architectural material across Malyan's excavated sequence, and local earth and clay made it the likely basis of early Qaleh buildings too. Yet no ordinary house plan can securely stand for Anshan around 1500 BCE. Qaleh deposits occur in several excavation areas with very different functions: BB33 was dominated by pottery kilns, while the structure in Operation XX was comparatively elaborate and may have been residential. These are not a representative sample of poor, middling and wealthy homes.[5]

People living at a much smaller settlement would still have needed roofed shelter, places to cook, containers for water and food, and space for craft or animal-related work. Packed earth floors, mud plaster and mudbrick walls required periodic renewal. Such maintenance is a reasonable reconstruction from the site's building tradition, but specific claims about courtyards, upper storeys, street drainage, wells or room use cannot be made for this phase from the published evidence.

Settlement contraction had practical consequences. Residents may have had more open ground close to occupied buildings than people in the earlier city, while distances to fields, grazing, water and fuel still structured movement beyond the house. Old walls and mounds would have remained part of the lived landscape, but archaeology does not reveal whether abandoned structures were quarried, avoided, reused for storage or incorporated into new compounds in any consistent way.

Food and Daily Meals

The basin supported mixed cultivation and animal husbandry over the long term, so cereals and livestock are safer starting points than a detailed menu.[1][5] Grain had to be harvested, protected as seed and food, ground and cooked; animals supplied meat and other products while competing for fodder and water. However, the evidence does not justify the earlier-style lists of onions, garlic, named fruits, beer, dairy preparations or particular dishes at Anshan in 1500 BCE. Even carbonised cereal grains recovered from the EDD building come from the later Middle Elamite occupation.[6]

Animal bones offer firmer but still broad evidence. Assemblages classed as Qaleh come from industrial BB33, the elaborate building in XX and several levels of EDD, together spanning much more than the target date. Sheep and goats remained important, while cattle contributed an unusually high share by bone weight in some Qaleh deposits. The differences between excavation areas led Melinda Zeder to reconstruct varied channels of meat provision rather than one uniform household economy.[5] These discarded bones show animals selected and consumed in particular contexts; they do not prove how often most residents ate meat, who raised the animals, or what accompanied it.

Cooking and storage nevertheless joined household routine to seasonal risk. Cereals are useful precisely because they can be dried and held between harvests, while ceramic jars and bowls could store, prepare and serve food. A smaller settlement may have relied more directly on nearby producers than the earlier city did, but this remains a model rather than a documented ration system. Harvest failure, damage to stored grain or loss of livestock would have affected households differently according to their reserves and social connections.

Work and Labor

Pottery making is the clearest locally documented craft. Excavation at BB33 found five large kilns and kiln debris, and another Qaleh production level lay beneath the later EDD building. This concentration indicates a work area rather than occasional firing in every home. Producing vessels involved obtaining and preparing clay, forming and drying pots, gathering substantial fuel, controlling the firing and moving finished wares to users.[5]

Recent compositional analysis adds detail without identifying individual potters. Qaleh wares and fine Middle Elamite wares used different recipes based on fine-grained, probably alluvial marly clays; chaff was the only deliberately added temper identified in those groups, and Qaleh samples used less of it. The kilns establish production at Malyan, while chemical differences among regional ceramic traditions show that the basin was not culturally or economically uniform.[4] A painted jar therefore records skilled choices about clay, temper, surface treatment and firing as well as its later household use.

Farming and herding must also have supported the remaining population, although the published evidence does not assign particular fields, flocks or tasks to named residents. Work would have varied with season: sowing and harvest concentrated labour at different times from lambing, grazing or kiln firing. The contraction of settlement need not mean that all craft specialisation or exchange ceased; the kiln district and varied animal provisioning suggest that at least some labour and distribution extended beyond a single self-sufficient household.[5]

Social Structure

Anshan around 1500 BCE was almost certainly unequal, but the evidence does not support a detailed ladder of kings, priests, scribes, merchants, farmers, servants and enslaved people at this particular place and date. An elaborate structure in Operation XX and an industrial kiln area at BB33 point to differentiated spaces and access to resources. They do not reveal the legal status, kinship or ethnicity of the people who used them.[5]

Households remain the most plausible setting for food preparation, care and much routine production, but their composition is unknown. There are no contemporary household archives that identify parents, dependants, apprentices or property holders, and objects alone rarely disclose who used them. It would therefore be misleading to assign grinding and weaving categorically to women, or ploughing, transport and formal dealings to men. Age, skill, wealth, season and household need may all have shaped labour, but they cannot be reconstructed person by person.

The title “king of Anshan and Susa” demonstrates the long political importance of the highland-lowland pairing, not the location of a royal court at Malyan in 1500 BCE. Likewise, the later EDD archive shows an institution recording metals, manufactured objects and deliveries in Elamite, but it dates after about 1300 BCE and largely documents organisational transactions rather than family life.[8] No shrine or ritual assemblage securely dated to the target phase allows a local religious calendar to be reconstructed. The inscribed bricks commemorating a temple at Anshan belong to Hutelutush-Inshushinak around the early twelfth century BCE.[1]

Tools and Technology

Ceramics dominate what can be said with confidence. Qaleh potters produced cups, bowls, goblets and jars, including carefully painted vessels, in permanent kilns. A geochemical and petrographic study of 119 mid- to late-second-millennium samples from six basin sites found controlled, high-temperature firing and distinct raw-material selections among Qaleh, Middle Elamite, Shogha and Taimuran wares.[4] These vessels were technologies for cooking, serving, transport and storage, but shape alone does not always establish a single use.

Grinding stones, chipped stone, bone implements and metal objects occur in Malyan's longer sequence, while wood, basketry, leather, rope and cloth survive poorly. It is safer to say that people needed cutting, grinding, digging and carrying equipment than to supply a precise toolkit for 1500 BCE. The gold, silver, copper and tin recorded in the later EDD tablets cannot be used as evidence that ordinary early Qaleh households owned bronze axes, knives or sickles.[8]

Clothing and Materials

No surviving wardrobe or contemporary image defines ordinary dress at Anshan around 1500 BCE. Sheep and goat bones demonstrate the use and consumption of caprines, but bones alone do not measure wool production or identify spinners and weavers. Wool, plant fibres, leather and hair were all technically available in the wider region; the balance among them at early Qaleh Malyan is not known.

Cloth was labour-intensive and therefore likely maintained, repaired and reused, but named garments, colours and dress codes would be speculation. Nor can differences in jewellery or textile quality be mapped confidently onto age, gender or occupation without well-dated burials, images, inventories or textile remains. For this phase, pottery reveals material choices and workshop skill far more clearly than clothing does.

Daily life at Anshan around 1500 BCE unfolded during contraction rather than at the city's better-known peaks. The remaining population still had to secure food, shelter, fuel and vessels, and the Qaleh kilns show organised craft work amid the reduced occupation. Beyond those points, restraint is part of an accurate reconstruction: later archives and monumental architecture illuminate Anshan's recovery after 1300 BCE, but they cannot fill every silence in the lives of the earlier community.

References

Abdi, Kamyar. (2005; updated 2012). “Maliān.” Encyclopaedia Iranica. Site history and bibliography.
Hansman, John. (1985). “Anshan.” Encyclopaedia Iranica. Historical and geographical overview.
Carter, Elizabeth. (1991; updated 2013). “Ceramics viii. The Early Bronze Age in Southwestern and Southern Persia.” Encyclopaedia Iranica, V/3, 294–297. Ceramic sequence and Qaleh chronology.
Pincé, Possum, Dennis Braekmans, Sylvia Lycke, and Peter Vandenabeele. (2019). “Ceramic Production in the Kur River Basin (Fars, Iran) during the Middle to Late Second Millennium BCE: A Geochemical and Technological Characterization.” Archaeometry, 61(3), 556–573. https://doi.org/10.1111/arcm.12451.
Zeder, Melinda A. (1988). “Understanding Urban Process through the Study of Specialized Subsistence Economy in the Near East.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 7(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/0278-4165(88)90006-2.
Carter, Elizabeth, with contributions by Ken Deaver, Naomi F. Miller, and Chandra L. Reedy. (1996). Excavations at Anshan (Tal-e Malyan): The Middle Elamite Period. Malyan Excavation Reports II; University Museum Monograph 82. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum. Catalogue record and full text.
Carter, Elizabeth, and Matthew W. Stolper. (1976). “Middle Elamite Malyan.” Expedition, 18(2), 33–42. Penn Museum article.
Stolper, Matthew W. (1984). Texts from Tall-i Malyan I: Elamite Administrative Texts (1972–1974). Occasional Publications of the Babylonian Fund 6. Philadelphia: University Museum. Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative publication record.