The Bampur Sequence in the 3rd Millennium B.C.

Abstract

Bampur is today a dusty, straggling village in Persian Baluchistan (FIG. I). Bounded by a variety of desert landscape, blackened gravel on one side, rolling dunes on the other, the Bampur river is its lifeline, providing perennial water and a narrow strip of fertile soil along its course. Hydrants, as yet uncoupled to pipes, stand in the main road as tangible evidence that the village is included in the regional development plans. Bampur has in fact passed through many vicissitudes and it has grown considerably since 1 9 3 2 when Sir Aurel Stein described it as a cluster of some 50 mat huts [I]. In Islamic and later times it was a political centre of some importance and its ascendance almost certainly had an earlier origin.