7Berkeh – Sadegh Rahmani: The road sign “Ba’r-e Gaal” in Beydaleh Neighborhood leads us to an area that seems to have been an inhabited region a few centuries ago. What we see now, however, are the farmlands that have been cultivated for many years. The same condition can be seen in the Fire Temple of Kariyan which is now but a heap of soil and the farmers have plowed right under the hill. At the Fire Temple of Kariyan which is located near the city of Jooyum, you can still see some buildings made of stone and sarooj (ancient local mortar that was used in buildings). They have been seriously damaged due to the passing of time, wind, rain and sunshine.
In the Ba’r-e Gaal of Gerash, some traces of houses can also be seen that have been destroyed over time. The area may have been annihilated intentionally after the abandonment of its first inhabitants which are thought to have been Zoroastrians. The firm stones of the walls and the houses that had been stabilized by Sarooj can still be seen widely. The foundations have so far endured with the aid of stone and sarooj after centuries and are still flaunting over the soft and prepared soil of the area.
On the 25th of January 2025, on a cool evening, we took a leisurely tour of the area accompanied by the a cultural activist, Aziz Nobahar. Pieces of pottery are scattered everywhere in this area. These various pieces of pottery, some pea-colored and some smoked-colored and black, had once been jars and vats that were cooked in a pottery oven by a skilled potter and were delivered to the inhabitants of Ba’r-e Gaal and were used for the storage of wheat, grains, dates and sap.
We ran into a piece of stone that was spout-shaped. “There is undoubtedly a meaningful relation between this place and the dam of Tang-e Aab,” Aziz Nobahar said, “this piece of spout-shaped stone had been the path of water from Tang-e Aab and I remember that this stony water-path had continued from the dam of there to the midway of reaching Ba’r-e Gaal in the past thirty or forty years. This spout-shaped stone shows that they were transferring water from the dam of to these agricultural lands.”
The hill of Ba’r-e Gaal, like the hill of Tashi in Kariyan near Jooyum, had been a building made of stone and soil and now has turned into a heap of soil. When you watch from above, the whiteness of sarooj is evident over the whole of agricultural lands. In addition to the whiteness of sarooj, many firm, similar and uniformed stones can be seen beside these lands which implies the downfall of walls and buildings. If we want to discover the history of this area, we will have to guess the history of the dam of Tang-e Aab. Due to the architectural samples of these dams in the region, it can be seen that the dam goes back to the Sasanian Empire.
Historians have said that four hundred years after the dawn of Islam, Muslims entered the Southern regions of Iran. It means that Islam entered our geography in the fourth century A.H. Some of the inhabitants embraced Islam and some left their ancestral land and traveled to states or cities such as Kerman where their co-religionists inhabited, and others migrated to India and were later known as the Persians of India.
It seems that the early inhabitants of Ba’r-e Gaal left the area in the Fourth century A.H. due to religious wars. Perhaps one of the reasons for the abundance of Muslim scholars in the Jooyum region had been the existence of the Fire Tempel in Kariyan. In such a way that, after the invasion of Muslims to these areas, scholars of various Islamic sciences involved in scientific and theological Jihad so that the new believers get acquainted with the new religion. The tombs and tombstones that exist in the areas of Beyram, Khonj, Jooyum and Benarooyeh indicate the presence of Muslim scholars who have immigrated to this land due to the necessity of explaining the new religion.
Nonetheless, Ba’r-e Gaal in the South of the Beydaleh neighborhood can be studied as a case study. If the university students are interested in researching this topic, it is recommended that they regard a wider geographical area and consider the arrival of Muslims in the fourth century A.H. to the South-Central regions of Iran, the connection between the Sassanid dam of Tang-e Aab and Ba’r-e Gaal, the existence of the Fire Temple of Kariyan, the Four-Arched of Mahlacheh near Khonj and the presence of Islamic scholars in Jooyum and Kariyan as the links of one chain.
P.S. Ba’r-e Gaal is an ancient hill in the Southwestern suburbs of Gerash in Fars Province, Iran, that was registered as a national heritage on May 12, 2016. It is the fourteenth historical monument in Gerash, with the number 31492.
