Nariman

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Also known as Naratu

Badghis Province. About 10 kilometers west of Laman and 35 kilometers south of Qal'a-i Nau on the road from Herat. Three kilometers northeast of Dehistan.

Date: Achaemenid period, 6th-4th c. BC;
Pre-Mongol Islamic, 10th-13th c. AD;
Timurid, 15th-16th c.

An enormous fortress measuring 900 x 220 meters. It occupies the totality of a rocky plateau oriented East-West, separated from a mountainous monolith by a narrow mountain pass. The north and south faces are sharpened in large sections and so are impregnable. The access to these is by a sharply bended ramp situated at the southeast corner, immediately after the second mountain passage, driving towards a door that still exists. It is formed by a broken arch made of fragile layers of sandstone cupola bricks, surmounted by a second unburdened arch, broken and slightly abused, constructed of bricks and overwhelmed with masonry of stone blocks and lime mortar. The left interior foot of the door has several conserved squared-off and cut cinderblocks. The several pieces of the rampart that endure are established the same way on the rock and at the balance of the cliff, and found principally on the West and South faces. This rampart consisted of exterior facing and a continuing interior arcade, which probably carried the covered way. The construction of these arcades is the same type as the door, although less close-fitting. In the best conserved part of the rampart (South face) one finds a little square piece at a vaulting edge, 2.70m on the side, lighted by two narrow splayed and curved windows. The defensive system of the North face and the North-West corner is composed of towers, very eroded, and constructed in the same way as the rest of the rampart. The North-West corner, poorly defended naturally, is doubled by an exterior enclosure of which there survives one tower. At the interior of the fortress, at the culminating point, on finds the remains of two monuments close to one another. The first does not survive except for a piece of a square plan flanked by an iwan at the North and another at the South, and tapped by a door on each of the East and West faces. The construction is the same type of this rampart, which more than a few brick elements. Of the second monument, there remains only the central part, of an octagonal plan. Each face is laid out in niches, covered by a broken surbased arch, made of bricks. The whole thing is constructed of bricks on bedrock of masonry in crude cinderblock facing. At the North and the West, at the interior of the fortress, one finds two wells(?) Finally, a bit closer to the center, on the North side, a ziyarat.

Site description by M. LeBerre, in Warwick Ball, Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan, 1982, n. 764