Qumis

Listen first. Out here, the wind moves across open ground with almost nothing to stop it. Under your shoes the earth is pale and dry, and it crunches a little with each step. Look down and you may see broken pottery, small curved pieces of red and buff clay scattered among the gravel. These low, rounded mounds do not look like a city. But for a time, more than two thousand years ago, this was one of the important places of the ancient world.

You are standing at the site known as Qumis, also called Shahr-e Qumis, which means the city of Qumis. It lies on the plain between the towns of Semnan and Damghan, in northern Iran. To the north rise the Alborz mountains, a long wall of rock that separates this plateau from the Caspian coast. To the south the land opens toward the Dasht-e Kavir, Iran's great salt desert. Qumis sits on the narrow band of living land between the two.

That narrow band is the key to everything here. Travellers moving east and west across Iran had little choice. The mountains blocked them on one side, the desert on the other. So the main road between western Iran and the lands of Khorasan and Central Asia ran right through this strip. Later, this same route became part of the Silk Road network. Any power that held this corridor could watch and tax the traffic that passed along it.

Many historians and archaeologists identify Qumis with a city that Greek and Roman writers called Hecatompylos. The name is Greek, and it means hundred gates. Nobody believes the city literally had one hundred gates. One common explanation is that the name described a place where many roads met. Another is simply that it was a large city that impressed foreign visitors. Either way, the name tells you how travellers saw it... as a meeting point.

Here is the first surprise. Ancient sources tell us that Alexander the Great came this way in 330 BCE. He was chasing Darius the Third, the last king of the Achaemenid Persian Empire — the dynasty that built Persepolis. Darius was killed by his own nobles during that pursuit, somewhere in this region. Afterwards, Alexander's army rested at Hecatompylos. So the soldiers of Macedon may have camped on the same plain you are crossing now.

The city's most important period came later, under the Parthians. The Parthians, also called the Arsacids, were a dynasty from northeastern Iran who built an empire that rivalled Rome for centuries. Hecatompylos served as one of their early royal centres. Later, the Parthian court moved further west, and cities in Mesopotamia became more important. But in the early years of that empire, this plain was close to the heart of power.

So why does so little stand above ground? The answer is in the building material. People here built mainly with mudbrick, made from local earth mixed with straw and dried in the sun. Mudbrick is cool in summer and warm in winter. It is also cheap and easy to repair. But once a building is abandoned, rain and wind slowly wear it down. Walls soften into slopes. Rooms fill with their own fallen brick. In time, a palace becomes a hill.

That is what you are looking at. Each of these mounds may hold the remains of a large structure under its smooth surface. The site spreads over a wide area, and from ground level it is hard to see the pattern. Walk slowly and look at the edges of the mounds. In places where erosion or digging has cut into them, you can sometimes see layers of brick and packed earth, one level resting on another.

Modern archaeology here is fairly recent. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, a British team led by the archaeologists John Hansman and David Stronach carried out excavations at the site. They studied several of the large mounds and found substantial mudbrick buildings from the Parthian period. Their work helped make the case that this was indeed Hecatompylos. Even so, some scholars still treat the identification with caution, which is normal for ancient places known mostly from foreign texts.

Now the second surprise. The name Qumis outlived the ancient city. In the early Islamic centuries, Qumis was the name of a whole province along this corridor, with Damghan as one of its main towns. And this ground is not quiet underneath. The area sits in an active earthquake zone. A powerful earthquake struck the Damghan region in the ninth century, and medieval writers describe it as one of the deadliest disasters of its age. The landscape here has always carried that risk.

Take a moment to picture the plain as it once was. Imagine caravans of camels and pack animals moving along the road, dust rising behind them. Imagine traders speaking Parthian, Greek, Aramaic, and the languages of Central Asia. Imagine the noise of a market, the smell of bread ovens and animals, the bright colours of cloth for sale. The pottery fragments at your feet are the small, real traces of that daily life. Please leave them where they lie.

For a visitor, this is a quiet and open place. There is little shade, so the sun can feel strong, even when the air is cool. The light changes a great deal through the day. In the early morning and late afternoon, low sunlight throws long shadows across the mounds, and their shapes become much easier to read. At midday, the land flattens into pale brown and the outlines almost disappear.

Before you leave, turn slowly in a full circle. To the north, the mountains. To the south, the edge of the desert. To the east and west, the line of the old road, which modern highways and railways still follow today. The reason this city existed is still visible all around you. The people are gone, and the walls have melted back into the earth. But the corridor remains. As you walk back, listen again to the wind, and notice how easily it crosses this ground... just as travellers once did.