Yousef Majidzadeh

Yousef Majidzadeh was born in 1936 (the Iranian year 1315) in Tabriz, the capital of East Azerbaijan in northwestern Iran. He completed his primary and secondary education in his home city before moving to Tehran to study archaeology. Details of his parents and childhood have not been made public.

Majidzadeh studied archaeology at the University of Tehran and graduated with a bachelor's degree, ranked first in his class, in the Iranian year 1341 (1962 to 1963). In 1965 a scholarship for top graduates took him to the United States, where he earned a master's degree and then a doctorate at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, specialising in prehistory and the civilisation of Mesopotamia.

His 1976 dissertation, The Early Prehistoric Cultures of the Central Plateau of Iran: An Archaeological History of Its Development during the Fifth and Fourth Millennia B.C., drew on his own excavations at Tepe Qabrestan in the Qazvin Plain. He also took part in three seasons of excavations at Chogha Mish in Khuzestan.

In 1970, having completed his master's degree in Chicago, Majidzadeh joined Ezat Negahban's Qazvin Plain project of the University of Tehran as an assistant director and led the excavations at Tepe Qabrestan, a Chalcolithic settlement with early evidence of copper working. He returned to Iran in 1976 as an assistant professor in the Department of Archaeology and Art History at the University of Tehran and became an associate professor in 1977. After the 1979 revolution he served for three years as head of the department and as a member of the faculty's elections and promotions council. He retired in 1988 and moved to Paris.

From 1998 to 2003 he directed excavations at Tepe Ozbaki in Savojbolagh county, a 100 hectare site settled from the seventh millennium BC to the Islamic period, with important Uruk period remains. In 2003, after widespread plundering of Bronze Age cemeteries along the Halil Rud near Jiroft, the Cultural Heritage Organization put him in charge of scientific excavations at the mounds of Konar Sandal South and North. Over six seasons to about 2008 his team found a fortified citadel, a monumental mud brick platform he called a ziggurat, seal impressions and inscribed objects. He edited the proceedings of the first international conference on the Halil Rud civilisation, held in Jiroft in 2004, and in 2008 he and Holly Pittman published the first preliminary report on the excavations in the journal Iran.

After retiring from the University of Tehran in 1988, Majidzadeh lived in France, first in Paris and later on the Cote d'Azur, and he died in Antibes. He remained close to French colleagues such as Jean Perrot, the former director of the French excavations at Susa, with whom he co-authored several reports on Jiroft. He kept his family life private, and the names of his spouse or children, if any, have not been published.

Majidzadeh believed that the Iranian plateau was not a cultural backwater of Mesopotamia but a centre of early civilisation in its own right. From his 1976 article onward he argued that Aratta, the rich land described in Sumerian epics, lay in southeastern Iran, and after 2003 he identified it with the Halil Rud valley. He called Jiroft a missing link in the history of civilisation and in 2007 proposed that scholars use the term Proto-Iranian instead of Proto-Elamite for the early script found at Iranian sites.

He also believed that protecting heritage depended on local people. Rather than relying only on the police, he took his team to villages on their day off to explain that the objects were the inheritance of local families and could bring tourism, and he opposed paying villagers for objects because he feared it would encourage more digging.

Majidzadeh is remembered as the archaeologist who introduced the Bronze Age civilisation of the Halil Rud valley to the scholarly world. His excavations at Konar Sandal gave the first stratified evidence for a culture known until then mostly from plundered chlorite vessels, and later teams, including Italian and French researchers working at Mahtoutabad and Konar Sandal, built on his work. His Persian textbooks on Elam, Mesopotamia and the beginnings of urbanisation trained generations of Iranian students.

He also left a lasting mark on the fight against antiquities trafficking in Iran, both through public education around Jiroft and through his catalogue of confiscated objects, which helped identify a shipment of 118 looted pieces seized in London. According to journalist Zahra Keshvari, a square in Jiroft was named after him in the 2000s.

The second volume of his History and Civilisation of Mesopotamia (2000) was chosen as a Book of the Year in Iran. In 1999 he co-edited The Iranian World, a volume of essays presented to his mentor Ezat O. Negahban. In 2017 (1396) the Pasargad Heritage Foundation gave him its Nowruz Award as the best cultural heritage figure of the year.

Books: The Art of Ancient Iran by Edith Porada (Persian translation, 1977); The Beginning of Urbanisation in Iran; History and Civilisation of Elam (1991); History and Civilisation of Mesopotamia, three volumes (1997 to 2000); Jiroft: The Earliest Oriental Civilization (2003); Excavations at Tepe Ghabristan, Iran (IsMEO, Rome, 2008); Excavations at Ozbaki, two volumes (2010); Archaeology of the Halil Rud Basin, Southeast Iran: Jiroft, with Mohammad Reza Miri (2013).

Articles: The Land of Aratta, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 35 (1976); Lapis lazuli and the Great Khorasan Road, Paleorient 8 (1982); Les fouilles d'Ozbaki (Iran), campagnes 1998 to 2000, Paleorient (2001); La decouverte de Jiroft, Dossiers d'Archeologie 287 (2003); Excavations at Konar Sandal in the Region of Jiroft in the Halil Basin, with Holly Pittman, Iran 46 (2008).

He appeared in documentaries about Jiroft, including the Italian film Jiroft: Alle radici dell'umanita (2007) and the French documentary Iran: Aratta, a l'aube des civilisations.

Majidzadeh's interpretations of Jiroft were contested. Oscar White Muscarella of the Metropolitan Museum of Art argued that most so called Jiroft objects came from plundered graves without context, that some were modern forgeries, and that claims of a civilisation older than Sumer and of an identification with Aratta were not supported by evidence. In 2007 the journal Science reported doubts about the circumstances in which some Konar Sandal tablets had been found, and Encyclopaedia Iranica noted that two inscriptions were recovered from a farmer's yard rather than excavated. Other scholars proposed that the region corresponded to the kingdom of Marhashi known from Akkadian texts. Majidzadeh defended his conclusions and continued to publish excavation results, including the 2008 preliminary report in Iran. He also said in later years that officials no longer seemed willing to let him return to the site.

Majidzadeh died in October 2026 in Antibes, Alpes-Maritimes, France, aged 90, after a period of illness. Sources differ on the exact day: a French death notice published in Antibes on 19 October gives Sunday 18 October 2026, while Iranian reports citing archaeologist Sajjad Alibeigi, who was in contact with the family, give Monday 19 October 2026. His death was announced in Iran on Tuesday 20 October 2026 by the Research Institute of Archaeology and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts. Funeral and burial arrangements had not been made public at the time of writing.