An Introduction, Description and Classification of Parthian Pottery from Tepe Balan, Sardasht, First Season

Tepe Balan is one of the five ancient tepe that has been excavated as part of Sardasht dam’s salvage project. More than 900 diagnostic pottery pieces have been found during the first season from all the trenches, all the pieces used for this study. Since the site has just one period of settlement and so the pottery data is important. The primary aim of this article is to introduce and classification of parthian pottery from Tepe Balan . Thus, pottery data have been typified according to technical features, decoration and form. In terms of methodology of the study, initially the diagnostic pottery of the first season of the excavation have been documented, then these data have been compared with other data from central and northwestern Zagros and Mesopotamia, and finally some similarities have been detected. The forms for a better understanding have been classified into logical group with considering factors like mouth width and height and form of rim. The Latin characters have been used to distinguish them. The study indicates that forms A and B outnumbered by more than 60%, Technical characteristics reveals that they had storage functions. The forms F and B are comparable to local forms, The forms A and E comparable with ware of the Centraonl Zagros region.