TEHRAN–The National Museum of Iran will be hosting an international conference to discuss the kingdom of Mannaea, CHTN reported on Wednesday.

Entitled “The Kingdom of Mannaea and Its Neighbors, in the Context of the Iron Age Archaeology of Western Iran”, the meeting will be held on Saturday.

Janoscha Kreppner, a professor of Middle Eastern archaeology at the University of Munster, Germany, along with Iranian scholars Mehrdad Malekzadeh, Yusef Hassanzadeh, and Kamyar Abdi, are scheduled to give speeches during the event.

Mannaea civilization flourished in northwestern Iran in the 1st millennium BC. Mannaea, also spelled Mannae or Manna, was an ancient country surrounded by three major powers of the time, namely Assyria, Urartu, and Media.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Mannaeans are first recorded in the annals of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (reigned 858–824 BC) and are last mentioned in Urartu by Rusa II (reigned 685–645 BC) and in Assyria by Esarhaddon (reigned 680–669 BC). With the intrusion of the Scythians and the rise of the Medes in the 7th century, the Manneans lost their identity and were subsumed under the term Medes.

The first well-documented evidence of human habitation in the Iranian plateau was found from several excavated cave and rock-shelter sites, located mainly in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran and dated to Middle Paleolithic or Mousterian times (c. 100,000 BC).

From the Caspian in the northwest to Baluchistan in the southeast, the Iranian plateau extends for close to 2,000 km. The land encompasses the greater part of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan west of the Indus River, containing some 3,700,000 square kilometers. Despite being called a “plateau”, it is far from flat but contains several mountain ranges, the highest peak being Damavand in the Alborz mountain range at 5610 m, and the Dasht-e Loot east of Kerman in Central Iran, falling below 300 meters.

ABU/AM