National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

camp during my visit to Chāh Ḥasan and could no longer be recalled. It was
also uncertain whether a well with sufficient water for our large party could be
found within convenient reach of the site. That this must have received water
in early times from the Halīl Rūd is certain. In fact, on continuing our march for
2 miles we arrived at a well-marked dry bed, some 60 yards wide, which at
certain seasons was said to be reached by floods from a river branch known as
Jū-i-Shāhābād. After another 4 miles' march across a scrubby steppe we passed
through a stretch of cultivated ground which appeared to have been recently
reclaimed. Finally, we struck the narrow belt of cultivation on the river's left
bank near the huts of Rēgābād. As the river was said to be rising in flood, a
safe ford had to be sought a couple of miles lower down. Its inundation bed
there proved fully half a mile wide and the main channel holding water at the
time about 35 yards across, with a depth of 3 feet. Judging from this and the
canals subsequently encountered on both sides of the river, I was led to conclude
that the average volume of water carried down by the Halīl Rūd from the high
ranges and plateaux south of Kermān is considerably greater than the drainage
gathered in the Bampūr river.

The tump reported at Tumbut, when visited next morning, proved to be a
small mound situated amidst fields about a mile to the west of the hamlet and
only 20 yards in diameter. It is thickly coated with salt efflorescence. Probably
owing to this and to the alluvium which irrigation has deposited around it, no
pottery was to be found on the surface. The heat, which had made itself felt
increasingly during the last few days on this low ground—Tumbut lies at an
elevation of only about 1,500 feet above sea-level—made it advisable to husband
our time. I therefore decided to move first to the large mound known as Tump-
i-surkh, situated some 5 miles to the north-west of Tumbut. A visit to Qalāt-
i-ganj, a ruined site reported some 18 miles to the south-west at the foot of a
low range of hills just visible from Tumbut, was to depend on the specimens of
pottery to be brought from there by a local retainer of Sirdār Ḥusain Khān. Of
any mounds lower down the Halīl Rūd I could learn nothing locally.

Surface finds at Tump-i-surkh pointed to a site of chalcolithic occupation
inviting trial excavation. But the difficulty about getting our baggage camels
across deep-cut irrigation channels en route caused delay. So I used the interval
for the examination of a mound reported near the village of Mīrī to the north,
beyond the left bank of the river. It was reached after another 8 miles' ride
partly across cultivated ground, and partly across the wide inundation bed of the
river, here thickly covered with tamarisk scrub and swampy in places. The
mound, measuring some 120 yards in diameter and rising to 15 feet in the
middle, bears on the surface plenty of coarse plain pottery of the same varied