Earth has no sides

We pulled in to the dirt road. I looked back and all I could see was a large cloud of dust, being raised behind the Land Rover that we were driving. As if we were not creating the dust, but appearing out of it. We were in Khuzestan in Southwestern Iran.

While heading towards "the hills" we were all quiet, all three of us. I pulled my archeological book, breaking the silence, and started reading a section about how such hills were formed. How all that was left of one civilization after another, built on top of each other, were these archeological hills or as we called them in Persian "Tappehaayeh Baastaani". Amir said: “They look like any other hills, are you sure?” I glanced at the hill that we were approaching, looked at him and continued reading...

He stopped the car as we came to the foothill and I immediately jumped out of the back door. The late afternoon sun had a nice warm feeling on my skin and the early spring air was very crisp. It was only few days after Norooz, the Iranian New year. An old village could be seen far at a distance. The homes seemed as if they were made of the same soils that were surrounding them, except one or two brick walls which were breaking the harmony of the earthy look of the village.

I was walking few steps ahead of others around the bottom of the hill. Neither of us were sure what to expect. I stopped at a washed up corner of the hill where water streams, caused by the rain, had cut a narrow slice of the hill from top to the bottom. This side of the hill was shady, cool and somewhat mysterious. I turned to Amir and answered: "Yes, I’m sure!"

I already could see pieces of broken clay that were washed down the foothill. I anxiously headed up along the sheared portion of hill. I saw a sharp clay sticking out and cautiously started digging the soil around it with my bare hands. It looked like a piece of a dish, more like a plate with a rough shape and surface. The pieces buried at the bottom of the hill were not sophisticated...signs of more ancient civilizations. One generation was built over another, as if the older ones were still carrying the weight of their children who had built their homes over them.

Further up, as I continued carving with my fingers, I came across something white and soft. I slowly took a piece out and said to Neda: "Look! Bones". But a second later it turned to a white powdered dust and disappeared right out of my hand. As if it could not withstand the fresh air of many thousand years later or may be it wanted to live again by turning in to the air that I was breathing. It was only then that I felt like I had stepped in to 1000's of years of history. I could now feel the people who lived there, I could smell the air, I could hear the children play…

We walked up higher and dug up more broken pieces. The newer ones were more delicate. Naturally the next generations were more sophisticated and then…I saw something new: a grey layer. A sign of fire, war, and a generation lost to it, I touched the ashes and felt the pain and heard the cries...

...and continued walking up the history to the newer layers of my past, until I felt the warmth of the sun on my skin again. I was already on the hilltop of the present and the village showed up again at a distance.

I was there with them. I was them. I lived more than 5000 years that day. I was 19.