■ Provenance
Objects from the hoard provide a link between the cultures of the Iranian plateau and the nomadic or Scythian art forms known as the ”animal style”. ”The Scythian motives adopted by Urartu account for the decoration of the great Treasure of Saqqez brought to light on the south shore of Lake Urmia,” was Leonard Woolley’s assessment (Woolley 1961 p 176).
■ Style
The hoard contains objects in four styles: Assyrian, Scythian, proto-Achaemenid, and the provincial native pieces. Dated ca. 700 BC, this collection of objects illustrates the situation of the Iranian plateau as a crossroads of cultural highways—not least of them the Silk Road—which fused disparate cultures to inform early Iranian art. The objects have also been related to finds at Teppe Hasanlu and Marlyk.
■ Current location
Examples of the Ziwiye Treasure are scattered among public and private collections. A ’Ziwiye’ provenance may have been applied to comparable objects that have passed through the trade since the 1960s. Items attributed to the hoard are currently in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London.
■ Controversy
The archaeologist Oscar White Muscarella has questioned the whole account of the finding of the hoard (as he has done with the older Oxus Treasure), pointing out that none of the items were excavated under archaeological conditions, but passed through the hands of dealers. He concludes that ”there are no objective sources of information that any of the attributed objects actually were found at Ziwiye, although it is probable that some were”, and that the objects have no historical and archaeological value as a group”, although many are genuine and ”exquisite works of art”. In a later work Muscarella denounced several ”Ziwiye” objects as modern forgeries.

NE 62.0Km	Takht-e Soleymān
SE 93.0Km	Bijar (city)
SW 95.1Km	Zrebar Lake
NW 102.9Km	Chahar Cheragh Square
SE 108.1Km	Dar ul-Ihsan Mosque
SW 108.9Km	Shalmash Falls
SW 125.1Km	Bil spring
SW 129.5Km	Cultural Landscape of Uramanat

vTourMap 🝙 Ziwiye hoard 🝙 قلعه زیویه

vTourMap 🝙 　 Ziwiye hoard　 🝙 　 قلعه زیویه