Rim sherd

These sherds were once part of the rim of a pottery vessel with a loop handle. They are made of gray clay which has been burnished. They were excavated at Tepe Nush-i Jan, an Iron Age hilltop site about 60 km sound of Hamadan in western Iran. Nush-i Jan was occupied in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C., and its occupants are generally thought to be the Medes, an Iranian people known from Assyrian, Achaemenid and Biblical sources. Though the textual sources portray them as a powerful empire, archaeological evidence for the Medes has yet to sustain this impression. Rather, they seem to have lived in scattered fortified sites in western and central Iran, without any clear capital. Nush-i Jan, one of the best known of these sites, features two temples, a columned hall, and a fort, where these sherds were found. Given their fragmentary state, it is difficult to say anything about how the vessel they came from was used.

Gray pottery of this sort is first attested in northeastern Iran in the Bronze Age, and in the Iron Age it is found at sites throughout western Iran, including in Media. Archaeologists speculated that this shift reflects the migration of Iranian-speaking peoples, including Medes and Persians, from the Indo-Iranian homeland in Central Asia to the Iranian plateau. But this theory has since been discarded because the appearance and color of pottery has as much to do with the clay that is locally available as with the techniques used to make and decorate it. Indeed, gray clay can be found throughout Iran, and is therefore not a useful indicator of migration.