S E R I E O R I E N TALE R O MA

n.s. 34

Le forme della città

Iran, Gandhāra e Asia Centrale

Scritti offerti a Pierfrancesco Callieri

in occasione del suo 65° compleanno

a cura di Luca Colliva, Anna Filigenzi, Luca Maria Olivieri

con l’assistenza editoriale di Marco Baldi

ROMA
2023
 ISMEO
ASSOCIAZIONE INTERNAZIONALE
DI STUDI SUL MEDITERRANEO E L’ORIENTE

SERIE ORIENTALE ROMA

FONDATA NEL 1950 DA GIUSEPPE TUCCI

DIRETTA DAL 1979 DA GHERARDO GNOLI

Scientific Board:
Timothy H. Barrett, East Asian History, School of Or. and African Studies, London
Alessandro Bausi, Äthiopistik, Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg
Peter Kornicki, East Asian Studies, Cambridge University
Daniel Potts, Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and History, Inst. for the Study
of the Ancient World, New York University

Editor: Adriano V. Rossi

NUOVA SERIE
Vol. 34

ROMA
ISMEO
2023
Pierfrancesco Callieri
Questo volume è stato pubblicato con un contributo del Progetto MUR “Storia,
lingue e culture dei paesi asiatici e africani: ricerca scientifica, promozione e
divulgazione”.

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 CONTENTS

Prefazione/Preface di Adriano V. Rossi .............................................. IX

Premessa/Foreword di Luca Colliva, Anna Filigenzi, Luca M. Olivieri XVII
Bibliografia/Bibliography di Pierfrancesco Callieri ........................... XXVII

IRAN

A. Askari Chaverdi, M. Hasan Talebian, An Analysis on the Function

of Kabah-Ye Zardosht in Naqsh-e Rostam in the Archaeological
Context of Shahr-E-Parseh ........................................................... 3
A. Askari Chaverdi, From Seminar to World Heritage List. Archaeo-
logical Landscape of Sasanian Fars: Firuzabad, Bishapur, and
Sarvestan ....................................................................................... 19
L. Colliva, Dal monumento alla città, una “via mediana” per l’ar-
cheologia ....................................................................................... 39
J. Cuny, Nouvelles « Épaves » de la vaisselle perse en pierre : deux
mortiers de Suse ............................................................................ 59
B. Genito, Remains of Domestic Buildings of Probable Achaemenid
Date in Eastern Iran ..................................................................... 73
S. Gondet, R. Boucharlat, The Firuzi Area within the Archaeological
Context of Persepolis: a Reappraisal, Based on Mapping and
Chronological Remarks ................................................................. 113
W.F.M. Henkelman, Pitch and “All Happiness.” Bitumen in the Perse-
polis Archives ................................................................................ 143
D. Huff, Remarks on the Development of Sasanian Fire Temples ....... 191
E. Matin, From Tol-e Takht to the Persian Gulf. Pierfrancesco Callieri
and the Landscapes of Ancient Fars ............................................. 195
D.T. Potts, Race and Racialism in Ancient Elam: some Observations
on the Archers Frieze at Susa ........................................................ 237
M. Rahbar, The Sasanian Tower of Silence at Bandian: a Refutation
of the Excarnation Theory ............................................................. 249
VI

E.W. Sauer, J. Nokandeh, H.O. Rekavandi, The Military Origins of

Cities on the Sasanian Empire’s Northern Frontiers .................... 263
J. Wiesehöfer, Iran: Remarks on the Importance of a Major Area be-
tween 550 BCE and 650 CE .......................................................... 279

ARMENIA, IRAQ E ASIA CENTRALE

M. Badalyan, Some Notes on the Statues of a Bull and a Cow with Its
Calf in the Haldi Temple of Musasir ............................................. 295
H.-P. Francort, Sur les traces de sphinx centrasiatiques en Bactriane,
dans l’Altaï, au Xinjiang, et du Martichoras en Bactriane et en
Inde (IVe Siècle BCE-I/IIe Siècle CE) ........................................... 301
A. Invernizzi, The Adiabenian Rider. A Note on the Parthian Rock Re-
lief at Khinis-Bavian ..................................................................... 313
A. Ivantchik, Iranians in the Bosporus: a New Inscription of the Ro-
man Period ...................................................................................... 345
B. Kaim, Stucco Decoration in the Fire Temple at Mele Hairam ....... 357
C. Lippolis, The Layout of Parthian Nisa: an Updated Overview ...... 371
C. Lo Muzio, The “Red Hall” Murals in the Varakhsha Palace
(Bukhara Oasis): Hints for a New Reading .................................. 383
P.B. Lurje, A Worship Scene on the Wall of Hisorak Palace ............... 399
B. Lyonnet, Questions on the Origin of the Iron Age Circular Fortresses
in Central Asia and of Monumental Architecture in Sogdiana ....... 417
V. Messina, Polis o Cosmopoli? Percezioni e realtà della città antico-
orientale di età ellenistica ............................................................. 435
C. Rapin, Sources antiques sur Maracanda-Zariaspa (La Sogdiane
entre Spitamène et Alexandre Le Grand) ...................................... 443
F. Sinisi, Cesura e innovazione nella glittica e nella numismatica del
Nord-Ovest indiano tra epoca saka-pahlava e kushana ............... 481
G. Vignato, Boundaries and Gates in Rock Monasteries Kucha as a
Case Study ..................................................................................... 493

PAKISTAN

M. Ashraf Khan, T. Saeed, The Contribution of the Italian Archaeolog-

ical Mission in Swat (Pakistan): a Tribute to Pierfrancesco Callieri 511
 VII

S. Baums, The Dharmarājika Bowl and Slab from Butkara I ............. 519
P. Brancaccio, Between Storytelling and Performance. The Narrative
of the Buddha’s Life in Urbanized Gandhara ............................... 533
O. Coloru, Demetrio Rex Indorum, Menandro I e Barikot. Un’ipotesi
di lavoro ........................................................................................ 547
A. Filigenzi, Il Tempio Vishnuita di Barikot: nuovi dati archeologici
e qualche riflessione sul paesaggio identitario ............................. 555
Ghani-ur-Rahman, A Fitting Tribute to Pierfrancesco Callieri ........... 569
E. Iori, The Achaemenid “Mirage” in Gandhāra: a Study of the 5th-
4th Century BCE Pottery from Barikot .......................................... 573
L.M. Olivieri, M. Minardi, Scavare a Barikot. Le fasi tardo-antiche 601
C.A. Petrie, Regional Variations in the Ceramic Assemblages of the
Borderlands of Pakistan during the Hindu-Shahi and Early Islamic
Periods. Some Observations about Barikot and Akra, and the
Broader Patterns They Reveal ....................................................... 637
M. Vidale, R. Micheli, Out of Context, but Part of a Broader Picture.
A Hand-Axe from Late Bronze Age Barikot .................................. 651

Contributori/Contributors .................................................................... 665

 RACE AND RACIALISM IN ANCIENT ELAM:
SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE ARCHERS FRIEZE AT SUSA
DANIEL THOMAS POTTS

Introduction
In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, the Danish Assyriologist
Thorkild Jacobsen published his famous essay on the assumed conflict between
Sumerians and Semites in ancient Mesopotamia (Jacobsen 1939). Without going
into too much detail on this important work, it is clear that Jacobsen was, in part,
writing in reaction to then prevalent racialist ideas in Nazi Germany, particularly
the intellectual capacities and hierarchical ranking of Aryan and non-Aryan
peoples, to use the vocabulary of the day. Among other things, Jacobsen’s study
was a refutation of attempts by German scholars, such as Gustaf Kossinna
(1913-1914a, b) and Heinrich Driesmans (Driesmans 1913-1914), to distort our
understanding of the remote past by viewing it through a racialist lens, and it
seems clear that such views were so thoroughly discredited after the war that
they ceased to even be a topic of discussion, except in the most opprobrious
terms. Yet notwithstanding the fact that race is a potent political and social con-
cept, rather than a valid biological category (Goodman 1997), racialism is a fact
of life, as the Black Lives Matter movement and the quest for racial justice made
abundantly clear in 2020. And in examining topics like slavery, race, racialism,
ethnicity and “how we got where we are today,” it seems obvious that the deep
historical roots of these issues deserve serious study, not just their modern man-
ifestations over the past few centuries. With that in mind, I hope Pierfrancesco
will accept this small offering on Achaemenid Susa and the largely forgotten ra-
cial and racialist discourse that it inspired in the late 19th and early 20th century,
coupled with a hopefully more enlightening perspective on human variation in-
spired by the archers frieze from the palace of Darius I at Susa.

Negritos in Elam
In 2012 the journal Human Biology convened a workshop at the Musée de
l’Homme in Paris entitled “Revisiting the ‘Negrito’ Hypothesis, an Inter-dis-
238 Daniel Thomas Potts

ciplinary Synthesis of the Prehistory of Southeast Asia” (Endicott 2013: 7).

The term negrito, the Spanish diminutive for black, has been applied by an-
thropologists to “a shared phenotype among various contemporary groups of
hunter-gatherers in Southeast Asia—dark skin, short stature, tight curly hair.”
According to the so-called “negrito hypothesis,” these groups were descended
“from a region-wide, pre-Neolithic substrate” population; according to an al-
ternative view, the negrito phenotype is the result of convergent evolution, i.e.
similar-looking groups identified as negritos evolved in the Philippines, Ma-
laysia, the Andaman Islands and Peninsular and Island Southeast Asia that do
not represent the descendants of a region-wide, pre-Neolithic population sub-
stratum (ibid.: 7-9). The conclusion of the workshop: it is impossible at this
point to confirm or deny the negrito hypothesis, although phenotypic variation
strongly suggests parallel evolution (Benjamin 2013).
Despite the fact that the Susiana plain is far from the Andaman Islands and
Southeast Asia, the hypothesized presence of a negrito population there, related
to negrito groups in India and Oceania, was suggested by Marcel Dieulafoy’s
discovery of the so-called archers frieze in the palace of Darius I at Susa, which
shows a file of males, equipped with bows and spears or lances, whose hands
and faces are black (Fig. 1; for the original display of the frieze in the grande
salle de Suse at the Louvre and the sensation that it caused see Cotty 2018:
64-65, 70). Initially this discovery prompted Dieulafoy (1885: 242) to suggest
that “les dynasties élamites auraient été noires et apparentées aux Éthiopiens
qui vivaient au sud de l’Égypte” (cf. Hüsing 1908: 22-23 and the discussion in
Potts 2017: 27-28), and he later insisted that “les archers négritos” (Dieulafoy
1893: 291) “fut toujours, selon moi, un caractère anthropologique” (ibid.: 287).
This view, however, was not strictly Dieulafoy’s own but was informed
by the investigations of Frédéric Houssay (1860-1920), whom Dieulafoy had
brought to Iran as a naturalist attached to his expedition. As Houssay noted
in 1887, after the completion of Dieulafoy’s first season of excavations at
Susa in May, 1885, the extreme heat made it necessary for the members of
the expedition to leave Susiana until work could resume in the following
winter. Although Houssay was a zoologist by training, Dieulafoy charged
Charles Babin, an “ingénieur des ponts et chaussées,” and Houssay to under-
take a post-season excursion across the mountains from Shushtar to Shiraz
in order to photograph the reliefs and inscriptions of Malamir, Persepolis,
Naqsh-e Rustam and Pasargadae.
As Louis Bournure wrote in his obituary of Houssay, “En ce sens ce voyage
en Perse fut certainement pour lui aussi décisif que, pour DARWIN, le tour du
monde à bord du Beagle” (Bounoure 1925: 434). This journey brought Houssay
face-to-face with “des populations qui appartiennent à des races très différentes:
Arabes, Susiens, Loris, Bakhtyaris, Farsis” (Houssay 1887a: 367-368). Al-
though work on the zoology, ethnography (Houssay 1887a; Chantre 1895), ge-
ology and geography of the region (Houssay 1894) was eventually published,
 Race and racialism in ancient Elam 239

Fig. 1 - Black-skinned archers from the palace of Darius at Susa. Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

that part of his work which is relevant here was his study of the modern inhab-
itants of Susiana. Prior to this time, as Houssay noted (1887b: 126),
240 Daniel Thomas Potts

Les anthropologistes ne savent à peu près rien des habitants modernes de la

Susiane; et sur leurs ancêtres, on ne peut émettre que des hypothèses tirées
de l’examen des bas-reliefs. On s’accorde à voir en eux un élément nègre
fort peu aisé à déterminer. Les archéologues leur chercheraient volontiers
des parents en Afrique […] Les anthropologistes les rapprocheraient de préf-
érence des Négritos de l’Inde et de l’Océanie.

Confronted by the “guerriers de Darius avec la face et les mains noires,

une chevelure et une barbe spéciales” (ibid.: 128), Houssay (ibid.: 143) con-
cluded that
L’anthropologie nous enseigne donc que la Susiane, à une époque qu’il ap-
partient aux historiens et aux archéologues de préciser, a été occupée par
une population noire, parente de ces noirs de l’Inde, que les peuples blancs
ont contraints à se réfugier dans les districts montagneux et peu accessibles.
Ces nègres étaient des Négritos.

Houssay’s research was quickly embraced by the French Classical archae-

ologist and founder of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, Edmond Pottier, who
wrote
Il y a pourtant un détail qui peut surprendre: c’est que les archers sont des
hommes de couleur noire, avec les traits purs et réguliers de la race aryenne,
comme ceux des Hindous. On s’imagine difficilement que la race perse ait
eu la peau aussi foncé. On pourrait penser que les céramistes ont employé
là une couleur conventionnelle, destinée à reproduire le ton basané que prend
le tent des hommes dans un climat très chaud.

Pottier (1886: 363-364) also pointed to the presence of lighter-skinned in-

dividuals among the archer reliefs, noting,
Mais, parmis les fragments rapportés par la mission, on constate la présence
de certains guerriers semblables à ceux-ci, dont la peau est tout à fait
blanche. M. Houssay, docteur ès sciences naturelles, qui accompagnait
M. Dieulafoy dans sa mission et qui s’était donné comme but spécial d’étu-
dier les caractères ethnographiques de la région, à remarqué que parmi les
habitants des villes voisines, coimme Chouster et Dizfoul, on retrouve exac-
tement le même type noir; enfin, dans le cimetière parthe que la mission a
trouvé établi sur l’emplacement du palais même on a recueilli beaucoup de
crânes et d’ossements qui révèlent l’existence, à cette époque, d’une race
noire. Il est donc très possible que parmi les Perses du temps des Achémé-
nides la race noire aux traits aryens se soit trouvée mêlée aux blancs.

Indeed, a water-color rendering (Fig. 2) of one panel of the archers frieze

in Dieulafoy’s later publication (Dieulafoy 1893: pl. VII) entitled “Immortels
—Contingent Perse” (AOD 487 in the Louvre) contrasts greatly with that of
the “Immortels—Contingent Susien” (ibid.: pl. VI), suggesting a clear differ-
 Race and racialism in ancient Elam 241

Fig. 2 - ‘White-skinned’ archers from the palace of Darius at Susa. After Dieulafoy 1893:
pl. VII.

ence between the fair-skinned Aryans and the dark-skinned Elamites in Darius’s
army. Adolphe Billerbeck (1893: 101-102) suggested an even finer distinction
in the make-up of Darius’ guards, noting “Das susische Heer bestand…aus drei
verschiedenen Völkern: Negritos, Mongolen und Ariern, d.h. den Bewohnern
der susischen Ebene, den Bewohnern der ansanitischen Berge und den Verbün-
deten von Parsua”. A rather different view was put forward by Ernest Babelon,
however. While acknowledging the dark skin “of this famous group of janis-
saries,” he suggested that “the Achaemenid monarchs recruited” them “in great
part from among the blacks of India,” noting that “a great number of the figures
on the frieze acquired by M. Dieulafoy actually have a skin coloured of a deep
brown” (Babelon 1889: 170-171).
Despite these slightly divergent views, most scholars affirmed Houssay’s
conclusions in the following decades, both the perceived negrito character of
Darius’ Susa archers, and their affinity to the living population of Khuzestan,
extending the phenotype represented by Darius the Great’s palace guards to
the entirety of the original Elamite population (e.g. Duhousset 1887: 406; Per-
rot, Chipiez 1892: 10; Cougny 1892: 297; Billerbeck 1893: 30; Goldsmid 1893:
441; Howorth 1898: 213-214; Bloch 1902: 675; Hamy 1907: 18; Reinach 1911:
67; Sykes 1915: 54-55; Hüsing 1916: 233; Kennedy 1919: 501, no. 1). Yet it is
fair to say that what Houssay may have thought was a scientifically grounded,
empirically supported identification of Negrito Elamites, based on the color-
ation of the Susa archers and observations of living peoples in Southern Iran,
quickly led to a racialist discourse devoid of any scientific credibility. Georg
Hüsing described “Diese Negritos von Dieulafoy und Billerbeck” as “die
242 Daniel Thomas Potts

schwarze Urbevölkerung des Landes, die noch heute, vermischt mit afrika-
nischen Negersklaven und einem Einschlage von Araber, das Gärm-sïr, das
‘heiße Land’ der Ebene und des Küstenstriches bewohnen.” But he went on to
compare what he and others identified as pre-Achaemenid examples of Elamite
negritos in the Assyrian reliefs with their Assyrian adversaries, noting, “Sie
sind so ziemlich um Haupteshöhe niedriger als die Assürer, tragen eine beson-
dere Kopfbedeckung, feste Bekleidung der Unterschenkel und stark ‘jüdische’
Gesichtszüge” (Hüsing 1916: 233). A similar view, albeit without the allusion
to strong “Jewish facial features,” appeared in the Cambridge Ancient History
where Reginald Campbell Thompson described Elam as having, “A mixed pop-
ulation, consisting from early times of a white-skinned race who may have
been akin to the Scyths, and a negrito people, with a subsequent addition of
Semites” (Campbell Thompson 1923: 468). And just as Dieulafoy distinguished
fair-skinned Persians from dark-skinned Negrito Elamites, Sigismond Zabo-
rowski, for example, wrote effusively about the notion that Darius was a pure
European. “Il n’a rien d’asiatique,” he wrote. “A première vue on peut dire de
lui: c’est un européen…. Nous sommes bien unis à lui par la langue, par une
parenté intellectuelle et de sang […]. Nous pouvons donc nous dire aryens
comme lui et avec le même accent” (Zaborowski 1908: 12).
That such views today appear almost laughably misguided, on so many
levels—philosophical, methodological, genetic—is clear, but the shunning of
them, and the prevailing silence surrounding them in the decades since 1945
falls into the category of what the late German prehistorian Günter Smolla
(1919-2006) termed, in reference to Gustaf Kossinna (1858-1931), the “Kos-
sinna syndrome” (Smolla 1979-1980). Although Kossinna died two years be-
fore the Nazis came to power in Germany, his work (e.g. Kossinna 1913-1914a,
b) was enthusiastically embraced by them, and just as enthusiastically reviled
in the West (cf. the discussion in Leach 2016: 81-85). The revulsion to many
of its tenets, however, had the effect, not of critiquing it, but of ignoring it, of
consigning it to the scrap heap of historical scholarship. In this time of height-
ened awareness of issues of race and racialism, it is worth re-examining the
archers frieze from Susa and Houssay’s characterization of some of the indi-
viduals shown on it as Negrito Elamites.

Human Variation in Skin Coloration

Some readers, of course, may question the intentionality and/or significance

of skin coloration on the Susa frieze. As long ago as 1889, for example, Georges
Bertin contested this very point. “When M. Dieulafoy sent to Europe the photo-
graphs of the representation of Persian soldiers found by him at Susa,” he wrote
[…] the hasty examination of the photograph gave the impression that these
soldiers were black skinned, though it was only the dark shadow on the pho-
 Race and racialism in ancient Elam 243

Fig. 3 - A ‘white-skinned’ archer in true color. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike

2.0 Generic License.

tograph, and it was concluded that we had in this a representation of the fa-
mous Asiatic Ethiopians of Herodotus. But the chromo-lithograph accom-
panying the report of M. Dieulafoy upset the existence of the black
Ethiopians of Asia; the representation is in colour and leaves no doubt as to
the skin colour of these soldiers being not darker than that of the modern
Persians (Bertin 1889: 110).

Bertin’s view, however, was not widely shared. Moreover, an examination

of color photographs of the Susa frieze leaves no doubt that the faces of some
of the individuals shown are absolutely black, while others are brown (Fig. 3;
not white as Dieulafoy and Pottier asserted). Technically speaking, the multi-
colored glazed brick façades of Darius’ palace are a tour de force. Assuming,
then, that the pigmentation of the skin shown on these reliefs, like everything
else (garments, footwear, jewelry, weaponry, etc), was not a result of inept or
haphazard glazing, but was rather intended to intentionally and meaningfully
distinguish members of different human groups, what more can we say about it?
As the American anthropologist Alan H. Goodman wrote several years ago,
“Humans come in a bedazzling array of skin colors” (Goodman 2016: 1; cf.
Jablonski 2013: 76). This skin tone variation results from variation in cutaneous
melanin pigmentation which in turn reflects the strong correlation that has been
documented between skin pigmentation and latitude, i.e. skin color is darkest
244 Daniel Thomas Potts

in populations living closest to the Equator, and becomes gradually lighter the
further one moves way from it. As the research of Jablonski and Chaplin has
made clear, “variations in melanin pigmentation in human skin are adaptive
and… represent adaptations for the regulation of the effects of UV radiation”
(Jablonski, Chaplin 2000: 58). And as Goodman noted, “Dark skin works well
to maintain foliate levels and enable people to get sufficient vitamin D in areas
with lots of ultraviolet radiation, and lighter skin works well in areas with less
ultraviolet radiation because it allows more ultraviolet in to produce vitamin
D while not so much as to degrade foliate levels” (Goodman 2016: 2).
When, therefore, Hüsing wrote that, “Elam ist in den heißen Küsten-
strichen, also im Süden und in der Ebene, noch heute von einer dunkelhäu-
tigen Bevölkerung bewohnt” (Hüsing 1908: 22-23), he was making an
observation that can be demonstrated empirically. It does not necessarily fol-
low, however, that Hüsing was correct when he continued, “und war es ebenso
im Altertum, zur Zeit der ‘Aithiopen’ des Königs Memnon von Susa wie zur
Perserzeit, der die schwarze Palastgarde (neben der weißen) auf dem bunten
Friese von Susa entstammt” (Hüsing 1908: 22-23). The same applies to Sir
Percy Sykes who noted,
Some years ago, during the course of my travels, I was puzzled by the ex-
tremely dark populations of Bashakird and Sarhad, very remote and moun-
tainous regions bordering on Persian Baluchistan. The solution may be that
the whole country was originally peopled by Negritos, who probably
stretched along the northern shores of the Persian Gulf to India, and that
their descendants have survived in those distant parts, which are scarcely
known even by Persians, and where, in some districts, I was the first Euro-
pean traveller […] Elam, in addition to the rich alluvial plain, also included
the hill districts to the north and east, and here apparently there is no question
of a Negrito race. Consequently, there were in effect at least two races in-
habiting Elam—the Negritos of the plains who were very dark, and the white
hill-men, who were probably of Turanian extraction (Sykes 1915: 54-55).

Richard Frye drew a similar conclusion, noting that “the presence of Ne-
grito elements in southern Iran and Baluchistan, as well as Dravidian types in
Central Asia in ancient times leads to the supposition that the pre-Aryan inhab-
itants of the Iranian plateau did in fact leave clues to their identity, but work in
this domain has only begun” (Frye 1984: 41).
As Goodman noted, “skin color variation provides no support for the idea
of biological races. What skin color exemplifies is a far more complex and dy-
namic story about how we adapted” (Goodman 2016: 2). Moreover, skin pig-
mentation is labile and “some human lineages through time may have gone
through alternating periods of depigmentation and pigmentation (or vice versa)”
as they moved from areas with greater or lesser doses of UV radiation (Jablon-
ski, Chaplin 2000: 80). But another factor that should caution against retroject-
ing modern variation in human skin coloration onto the remote past is the
 Race and racialism in ancient Elam 245

incontrovertible evidence of the presence of black Africans, brought as slaves,

in Baluchistan, along the Persian Gulf coast of Iran, and in Khuzestan, particu-
larly from the early 19th century onwards. The First and Second Russo-Persian
Wars of the early 19th century resulted in Qajar Iran’s loss of the regions of
Georgia and Armenia, and consequently in a cessation of the supply of Geor-
gian slaves, a deficiency compensated for by an increase in the importation of
African slaves (Mirzai 2002: 233). Thus, the negrito or black presence in South-
ern Iran, which some observers like Houssay, Hüsing and Sykes took as relicts
of a pre-Iranian substrate population, almost certainly included more modern
additions from sub-Saharan Africa, as well as reflecting inter-marriage between
Africans and Iranians of diverse ethnic groups. Without genetic analysis, the
“Aryo-Négroïdes, représentés par les Susiens modernes,” observed by Houssay
(1887c: 103; cf. Duhousset 1887: 406; Billerbeck 1893: 30, 101-102), cannot
be taken, at face value, as survivals of a pre-Iranian population. Yet the dark-
skinned Susian archers are completely plausible, given what we know of var-
iability in skin coloration, particularly in the Southern latitudes of Western Asia.

Conclusion

Gustaf Kossinna may have been one of the most famous scholars whose
work was embraced by the Nazis in the field of Rassenkunde but he was far
from the only one. Even before the First World War Heinrich Driesmans
dragged the Achaemenid Persians into the fray when he attributed
die Hochbaukunst des westasiatisch-europäischen Kulturkreises, welche
sich auf eine ganz bestimmte Rasse gründet und sich gegen die übrige Ras-
senwelt der Erde scharf abgrenzt, auf der sich diese Baukultur nirgends
wieder findet, vom sagenhaften babylonischen Turm bis zu den ägyptischen
Pyramiden und Tempeln, den griechischen Tempeln, römischen Palästen,
germanischen Burgen und Domen, und endlich bis zu den indischen Tem-
pelbauten,

alleging that it was spread over an

ungeheure Kulturkreis, mit dem Südrande etwa der Quellen des Nil, und
nordöstlich verlaufend Arabien, Persien, Indien umfassend, nordwestwärts
dann mit der Wolga und dem Ural abschneidend” which was “ursprünglich
von einer Rasse überzogen… welche sich außerhalb dieses Kulturkreises
nirgends auf dem asiatisch-europäisch-afrikanischem Kontinent wiederfin-
det, muß auf eine im letzten Grunde einheitliche Rassenveranlagung, auf
einen gemeinsamen Rassencharakter zurückgehen, gleichviel, ob man die
ursprüngliche Stammrasse dieses Kulturkreises nun als die arische, kauka-
sische, oder nur die ‘weiße Rasse”, oder sonstwie bezeichnen, bzw. erkennen
will (Driesmans 1913-1914: 17-18).
246 Daniel Thomas Potts

Faced with views like these, it is little wonder that scholars of the Achaeme-
nid empire, while fully cognizant of the ideological misuse of the Achaemenid
past in Nazi Germany (Wiesehöfer 1988; 1990; Rossi 2018: 851-852), have
largely remained silent in recent years on race and racialism in the study of an-
cient Iran. Yet human variation is a fact, not a fiction, and variation in skin col-
oration has been intensively studied by human biologists. Thus, where evidence
of skin color variation appears in ancient epigraphic, literary and archaeological
sources, it is a failure on our part if we fall into the “Kossinna syndrome” and
simply remain silent on the subject, for fear of giving credence to unscientific,
racialist ideas of what human variation actually means, or because the topic
has been so tainted by association with Nazism or other varieties of oppressive,
illegitimate political regimes. The evidence provided by the archers frieze from
Susa is unique because of the fact that it was made of glazed, multi-colored
bricks. The high level of proficiency displayed suggests that the colors achieved
were anything but accidental. We should, therefore, take the depiction of black-
skinned and brown-skinned individuals in the archers frieze as a genuine re-
flection of human variation in the past, and engage with the subject, for this is
a “living color” window on antiquity that is so often denied to us by the nature
of our archaeological evidence.
 Race and racialism in ancient Elam 247

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