Shortly after I returned home from tracing Shah Abbas’ thousand kilometre walk from Isfahan to Mashhad, I found this extraordinary (1907) photo of the citadel in Lasjird (40km west of Semnan), converted as it had been into an elevated, fortified village.
was the only place specifically mentioned as having a in an unpublished Ottoman logistics plan for an (abandoned) invasion of Iran at around the time of Shah Abbas I; and Ferrier, in 1845, described seeing the “remains of a fortification . . the walls of which are about twenty-four feet in height: it would hold a garrison of 2000 men”.
But the nineteenth century Turkoman raids meant the area was increasingly unsafe and by 1862 Eastwick reported that the Lasjird fort remains were again in active use – only this time as a fortified village, with “rooms which run round the interior of the fort in a sort of galleries” and a huge stone, on a pivot, acting as a door. The mound had apparently grown to 80 feet high, with a balcony about 45 feet from the ground, from which “all filth is thrown hence, so that in the course of years a rampart has been formed, which the hardiest soldier would hesitate to cross”.
In 1884, Mitford reported finding two storeys of rooms built onto the upper part of the fortifications, with doors opening outwards onto precarious scaffoldings. He described the whole thing as “a more fit habitation for monkeys or pigeons, than for men”, and on his “remarking on the danger to the rising generation, [he] was told that many children were killed by falling from these rough platforms”.
By the time Jackson passed by in 1907, when he took the photo above, the ‘village’ was deserted, and the surrounding refuse had been converted into lush gardens – and when I was there, there was no sign at all of the old mud fort.
The modern picture here at left shows – for comparison – the inside of the crumbling (‘village of salt’: 40km to the west of Lasjird). There are no scaffolding balconies but, if you look carefully, there are widely spaced vertical and horizontal lines on the inside of the external wall, which (from the places where a few have fallen out) you can see are large, and so very early (maybe even Sasanian?) bricks.
The fort at is called ‘Qasr Mala’, very close to the name Kasr al Milh (‘fort of salt’) given to the village a thousand plus years ago by Arab geographers including Ibn Rustah and Muqaddasi. Perhaps the pile of mud remains shown here is a thousand years – or more – old?
Do you mean to say that there isn’t even a mound left to indicate the fort of Lasjird? No early tepe?
As to bricks, it is worthwhile measuring their sizes since they alter slightly down the centuries.
I couldnt find one at all!
And then I rechecked on Google Earth (which shows elevations to the nearest metre), and this doesnt show anything either
But I hadnt seen the 1907 photo before I was there, so maybe didnt ask exactly the right question locally – if anyone is in Lasjird anytime soon, please do let me know! It’s certainly on my list for a future trip.
Thanks for the comment!
I wish I could go with you and see all these interesting historical remains. I was born in Iran yet haven’t had the chance to see anything like these.
By the way, I guess those bricks are called “ Khest “ in Persian . This is an old style of making brick-shape slabs and normally they are some combinations of Limestone powder (calcium carbonate: CaCO3) and Mud.
Sia