Historical and geographical significance of Kerman
Several roads connect Kerman with Quhistan, the mountainous region in the southern part of Khorasan; mentioned especially often is the road through Rawar and the oasis of Nayband to Khur, and that through Khabis to Khusb. Quhistan did not have a great significance in the history of Iran. As early as the tenth century the villages were separated from each other by extensive areas where only nomads could live; there were no rivers there, but only wells and underground canals.
Palm trees grew in the southern part of Quhistan, but the rest of the province was counted among the “cold regions.”
Wilhelm Tomaschek, a Czech-Austrian geographer and orientalist, remarks that Quhistan gives an idea of what Iran may look like many thousands of years hence, as a result of dessication (extreme dryness) and weathering of the soils.
Qaen and Tun (Ferdows) were the chief towns, so that the whole region is called Tunocain or Tonocain by Marco Polo.
Only Qaen had commercial importance; Maqdisi, a historian, calls it “the warehouse of the goods of Khorasan and the treasure-trove of Kerman.
There were, moreover, many mountain castles in this region, so that Quhestan became in the eleventh century one of the centers of power for the Isma’ilis.
The deserts of Kerman, Makran, and Sind were considered less sterile than that of Khorasan, and they were inhabited by nomadic tribes. The areas near mountains were suited for agriculture and fruit growing, and here the inhabitants soon adopted a sedentary way of life. Herodotus, a Greek historian, counts the people of Kerman among the sedentary tribes of Persia.
The Arabs divided the cultivated areas according to the kind of crops grown there, into surud (cold areas) and jurum (warm areas), from the Persian words sard (cold) and garm (hot).
In Kerman, only the northern districts, occupying approximately one-fourth of the whole region, were reckoned as surud, the rest were jurum; and whereas the crops of the former cold region could absolutely not be grown in the southern regions, the reverse did occasionally occur.
The cultivated lands in Kerman lay in separate patches and thus differed from the more continuous areas under cultivation in Fars.
The towns of Kerman mentioned by the Arab geographers have partly conserved their former names, as, for example, Bam, Khabis, Zarand, and some smaller places like Mahan.
The last-named town is noted for the fact that the only monument from the Achaemenid period found in Kerman was located there: in the mausoleum of Ne’matullah Vali, a saint who lived in the fifteenth century and who founded the Ne’matallahi order of dervishes. The find was a small pyramid on a triangular base, with a trilingual inscription (Persian, Assyrian, and the language of Susiana): “I, Darius, great king, king of kings, king of the regions, king of this land, son of Gushtasp, the Achaemenid.”
The names of some other cities mentioned by the tenth-century geographers are now applied primarily to their corresponding districts, such as Narmashir, Bardasir, Jiruft, and so on. The Arabs mention Sirjan as the chief city of Kerman. Its location was probably not identical with that of Sa’idabad, the present capital of the district of Sirjan, but must have been to the northeast of it, in the present district of Rafsanjan, with its chief town, Bahramabad: this probability is based on the fact that the Arab geographers count only two days’ march from Sirjan to Zarand.
In Tomaschek’s opinion, Sirjan became the capital of the province only in Arab times; prior to that the capital would have been the city of Kerman, built by Ardashir, the founder of the Sassanid dynasty, who named it Weh-Ardashir, a name transformed by the Arabs into Bardasir. Sirjan, nevertheless, had already been the capital of the province of Kerman in pre-Islamic times.
The town created by Ardashir seems to have been just a military camp; only in the second half of the tenth century, under the Buyid dynasty, did it become the capital of the province.
The above is a lightly edited version of chapter entitled ‘Rey and Hamedan’, from a book entitled, ‘An Historical Geography of Iran’,
written by W. Barthold and published by Princeton University Press, Princeton.