Across a highland where three provinces meet — carved into black, sun-varnished stone above the headwaters of a small river — are something like twenty-one thousand rock engravings: ibex and hunters, horsemen and dancers, symbols nobody has decoded, and one six-legged figure that is part man and part praying mantis. It is among the largest fields of rock art on Earth. And its age is officially given as somewhere between forty thousand and four thousand years ago — a range so vast it is not really a date at all, but the exact shape of what modern sanctions have made it impossible to know.
In the centre of Iran, where the provinces of Markazi, Isfahan and Lorestan come together around the headwaters of the Anarbar river, there is a region of bare highland called Teymareh (تیمره). The main body of its rock art lies within Khomein county, which is why this page calls it the rock art of Khomein — but the field spills across the provincial line toward Golpayegan, its historic gateway, and you will find the very same carvings written up as the Golpayegan petroglyphs or the Khomein petroglyphs more or less interchangeably. Whatever the label, it is one thing: a vast open-air gallery scattered across dozens of sites and tens of square kilometres of stone.
The numbers, held carefully, are staggering. Survey work puts the count at around 21,000 petroglyphs across some 31 recorded sites over more than fifty square kilometres — a scale that places Teymareh among the largest concentrations of rock art anywhere in the world, and includes what is described as the largest single rock-art panel in Iran: twelve metres of stone carrying more than a hundred figures. These are informed estimates from ongoing fieldwork rather than a closed ledger; much of the upland has never been systematically recorded, and new panels are still being found. But even the conservative version of the figure describes a landscape that prehistoric people returned to, and marked, for an immense span of time.
What they carved is a bestiary and a chronicle at once. The ibex — the wild goat with the great curved horns — is everywhere, by far the most common figure, its horns sometimes swept into near-abstract arcs. Around it: hunters with bows, riders, files of dancers holding hands, hounds, carts, and geometric signs and symbols whose meaning is entirely lost. The styles run from careful naturalism to pure abstraction, which is one of the clues that this is not the work of a single people or a single age but of many, layered on the same rocks across thousands of years. And among the tens of thousands of figures, a few are strange enough to have travelled the world — none more than a small carving, high in this quiet Iranian upland, of a creature that should not be there.
Because here is the thing that makes Teymareh unlike any other site in this collection: we are not allowed to know how old it is. Stone carvings hold no organic material to test directly, and the surrounding methods that might bracket their age depend on radioactive materials that sanctions on Iran prohibit. So the carvings have never been scientifically dated. The figure the experts give — an age of somewhere between 40,000 and 4,000 years — is not a measurement. It is a confession, in the polite language of scholarship, that a geopolitical wall of the twenty-first century runs directly between us and the deep past of this hill.
Rock art is read by its subjects and its styles, and Teymareh is unusually rich in both. The same rocks carry careful, lifelike animals and stark geometric signs, sometimes side by side — the surest sign that people came back to these surfaces over a very long time, each age adding to the last. A rough field guide to what you are looking at:
The wild goat with the great backswept horns is by far the commonest figure at Teymareh, as across most of Iran's rock art. Some are drawn with real anatomical care; others reduce the whole animal to a body and a pair of enormous curving horns — an emblem more than a portrait.
Archers drawing on their prey, figures on horseback, hounds running down game. The presence of riders is one of the clues to the field's enormous time-depth: horses put some of these scenes firmly in the historical era, millennia after the earliest carvings.
Lines of stick figures holding hands, arms linked — scenes read as dance or ritual. Among all the hunting and killing, these rows of joined human figures are the rock's quiet record of gathering, celebration, belief.
Grids, crosses, wheels, dots and shapes that correspond to no animal — a whole vocabulary of abstract symbols whose meaning is completely lost. Scholars have noted that these motifs echo forward into later Iranian pottery and bronze, as if the rock kept a design language alive.
A 14-cm figure with six limbs, a triangular head and the grasping forearms of a praying mantis — one of the very few rock carvings of an invertebrate anywhere on Earth, published in a scientific journal in 2020. Its looped middle limbs echo the worldwide “squatter man” motif. More on it below.
The carvings were pecked and incised through the dark desert varnish that coats the stone, exposing the lighter rock beneath. Where that pale line has itself re-darkened with new varnish, the carving is very old; a fresher, brighter cut is younger. The colour is the clock — the only one this field is allowed.
Dating rock carvings is hard everywhere. Unlike a painted image, an engraving holds no pigment, no charcoal, no organic trace to put in a machine; the surface itself is just stone. Elsewhere, archaeologists get around this with a battery of indirect methods — testing the varnish, the sediments, associated material — many of which rely on measuring the decay of radioactive isotopes. It is delicate, expensive science.
In Iran, it is also, at present, illegal. Sanctions prohibit the import and use of the radioactive materials the dating work would require. So Teymareh — one of the largest rock-art fields on the planet — sits scientifically undated, and the age that circulates in every article, including this one, comes from a visual and comparative survey by the rock-art specialists Jan Brouwer and Gus van Veen: somewhere between 40,000 and 4,000 years old.
Sit with that range for a moment. Forty thousand years ago, Neanderthals still shared the earth with us. Four thousand years ago, the pyramids were already old and Iran was on the verge of writing. A bracket that wide is not an estimate; it is a placeholder for a question nobody is allowed to answer. Every other prehistoric site in this collection can at least gesture at when — the caves of Khorramabad are dated in tens of thousands of years, the burnt city at Shahr-e Sukhteh to the exact centuries of its life. Teymareh is the one place where the deep past is physically present on the rock and epistemically sealed off — a library you can stand inside and are forbidden to read the dates in.
In surveys of the Teymareh rocks carried out in 2017 and 2018, the rock-art researcher Mohammad Naserifard recorded a small carving — barely fourteen centimetres — that nobody could quite make sense of. It had six limbs, which suggested an insect; but insects almost never appear in rock art anywhere, so the figure sat unexplained until entomologists were brought in to look at it.
Their verdict, published in 2020 in the Journal of Orthoptera Research, was striking. The triangular head, the great eyes and the folded, grasping forearms were unmistakably those of a praying mantis — and a detail on the head narrowed it to a specific local genus, Empusa. It is one of the only known rock carvings of an invertebrate on Earth. Stranger still, its two middle limbs end not in feet but in circles, which links it to the globe-spanning “squatter man” motif — a figure flanked by loops that appears in rock art from continent to continent, variously read as a person holding objects or, more exotically, as a memory of some atmospheric event.
The mantis-man is a curiosity, not the key to the site — but it is a perfect emblem of what Teymareh is. Here is a field so vast that a figure unique on Earth can sit in it unremarked for millennia; so specific that a scientist can identify the exact genus of insect a prehistoric hand had in mind; and so cut off from dating that the same paper which pins down the species has to admit, in the next breath, that it cannot say whether the carving is four thousand years old or ten times that. Everything Teymareh offers and everything it withholds, in a single palm-sized figure on a rock.
Teymareh is not a monument you walk up to; it is a landscape you comb. The reward is not one great object but the slow accumulation of thousands of small ones across an open highland — which means the visit asks a little more of you than most, in walking, in effort, and above all in the eye. Its weight sits heavily on the Legacy side, and it carries something no other site here can claim: a mystery that is not romantic but literal, sealed by the politics of the present.
You will not find Teymareh by driving to it. You go out from Khomein with someone who knows the hills, and then you walk — up open, stony highland under a big sky, the kind of country that looks empty until you learn to see it. Your guide stops at a slab that looks like every other slab, and points, and the emptiness resolves: an ibex, horns curved right over its back, pecked into the dark skin of the rock. Then another. Then, once your eye has caught the trick of it, they are everywhere — on this rock and that one and the one behind you, a whole hillside you had been walking through without seeing, covered in animals.
Kneel at one. The carving is a line of paler stone cut through a darker crust, and where the cut has itself gone dark again you are looking at time made visible — the rock slowly re-healing over a wound some human hand opened an unknowable number of centuries ago. Nearby, a row of little figures holds hands in a dance. Further on, hunters, a rider, a grid of lines that means nothing anyone alive can recover. And somewhere on this upland, if you are lucky and your guide is generous, a small six-limbed creature with a mantis's head and two circles where its hands should be.
And here is what settles on you, up there in the wind with the marks all around: you cannot ask the one question a human being always asks in front of the ancient — how old? Not because the answer is lost, but because it is forbidden. The machines that could read these stones are barred from the country by the quarrels of the living. So you stand inside one of the greatest galleries of the human past with the labels physically ripped out, close enough to touch the ibex and no closer to its age than a bracket forty thousand years wide. It is the rarest feeling a ruin can give you: not the melancholy of what time has erased, but the vertigo of what politics will not let you learn.
Twenty-one thousand marks of the human past, on a hill where the age of every one is sealed behind the politics of the present.
Highland spring: mild days, green hills, meltwater in the gullies between the rocks. The best walking of the year, and the pleasantest conditions for the long, patient looking that Teymareh rewards. Book a guide ahead — spring is when the field is at its finest.
Autumn matches spring and may beat it for the carvings themselves: clear, calm air and a low sun that rakes hard across the stone, throwing every pecked line into relief. Cool underfoot, thin crowds — which here means almost certainly none.
High summer on open, shadeless highland is punishing, and the overhead midday sun flattens the carvings just when the heat is worst. If you must come, walk at dawn and late afternoon only, carry serious water, and treat the middle of the day as off-limits.
The uplands turn cold and can snow, and the tracks in get difficult — but a bright winter day, with low sun and a dusting of white in the hollows, shows the rocks at their most dramatic and empty. For the hardy and well-guided only.
The wonder of this place is above. What follows is the planning detail — gear, logistics, and the questions people ask — tucked away so you can open only what you need.
Teymareh is a region rather than a site with a gate, which shapes everything about visiting it. Prices move with the rial, so treat any figure as an order of magnitude.
In the highlands where Markazi, Isfahan and Lorestan meet, around the headwaters of the Anarbar river between Khomein, Golpayegan and Mahallat. The usual access is from Khomein: take the Khomein–Golpayegan road south, and the main rock-art areas lie roughly 20 km out. The carvings are scattered across dozens of sites over a wide upland, so a local guide is close to essential — the panels are unmarked and easy to walk straight past.
Both, and neither is wrong. The Teymareh region straddles a provincial border: the main carving sites fall within Khomein county in Markazi province, while Golpayegan — just across the line in Isfahan province — is the historic gateway and gives the field its most common alternative name. You will see “Teymareh”, “Golpayegan petroglyphs” and “Khomein petroglyphs” all used for the same rock art.
Nobody can say precisely, and the reason is unusually modern: sanctions on Iran block the radioactive materials that radiocarbon and related dating require, so the carvings have never been directly dated. The published expert estimate is a range of roughly 40,000 to 4,000 years — a span so wide it is really an honest admission of uncertainty rather than a date. What is clear is that carving continued here across an enormous stretch of time, into the historical era.
The most-cited figure is around 21,000, spread across some 31 recorded sites over more than 50 square kilometres — which would make Teymareh one of the largest rock-art fields in the world. Treat the number as an informed estimate from ongoing survey rather than a final count; new panels are still being recorded, and much of the highland has never been systematically documented.
A 14-centimetre carving of a six-limbed figure with the triangular head and grasping forearms of a praying mantis, published in 2020 in the Journal of Orthoptera Research — one of the very few known rock carvings of an invertebrate anywhere. Its middle limbs end in circles, echoing the worldwide “squatter man” motif. It is a genuine scientific curiosity, and a good emblem of how strange and specific this field's imagery can be.
Early spring and early autumn, when the highland weather is mild and the light is long. This is high, open country with little shade: summer middays are harsh and winter can be cold and snowbound. Spring adds green hills and running streams; autumn adds clear air and a low sun that rakes across the carvings and makes them easiest to read.
Barely, and that is part of its story. Teymareh was effectively unknown until the researcher Morteza Farhadi introduced it in the early 1990s, and despite its scale it still lacks meaningful on-site protection; mining in the region is the most-cited threat. Visit gently: look, photograph in raking light, and touch nothing — these surfaces have survived millennia precisely because so few hands have reached them.
Teymareh belongs to this collection's oldest thread — the places where you stand in front of the deep human past itself, not a temple or a tomb but the raw record of minds tens of thousands of years gone. Its closest kin is the valley of Khorramabad in neighbouring Lorestan, whose caves hold a dated sequence of human life running back beyond sixty thousand years — the when that Teymareh is forbidden. Read the two together and you have both halves of Iranian prehistory: one that science has been allowed to read, and one it has not. Further out, the Bronze-Age metropolis of Shahr-e Sukhteh shows what came next — the moment these scattered hunters' descendants built a city; and the layered mound of Tepe Sialk near Kashan compresses the same long climb, from the first villages to the edge of empire, into a single hill.
In Lorestan, next door: five caves and a rock shelter with a dated record of human life beyond 60,000 years — Neanderthals, the first modern minds, Iran's oldest jewellery. The dates Teymareh cannot give. Read the article →
The rock art's gateway town holds fine Seljuk architecture of its own — the domed Jameh Mosque and the slender 18-metre brick minaret (Mil-e Golpayegan), once a lantern for Silk Road caravans — an easy cultural counterpoint to a day on the hills.
The third town of the Teymareh triangle, on the same river headwaters, known for hot springs and stone — a reminder that this whole highland has drawn people to its water and rock since before history began.
Near Kashan, a couple of hours east: a worn mound stacked with 8,000 years of settlement, from the first farmers to the eve of empire — the long story that begins with hillsides like Teymareh's. Read the article →
Go up in the low sun of an autumn afternoon, when the light lies flat along the stone and the ibex step out of the rock one after another. Kneel at a carving and put the question you cannot answer out of your mind — how old — and ask the one you can: who. A person crouched on this exact hill, with a sharp stone in their hand, and chose to make a mark that has outlasted their name, their language, their people, and every empire that came after. The date is sealed away. The gesture is right there under your fingers, as fresh as the afternoon it was cut.
Untamed Iran prefers official, scholarly and first-hand sources, and is careful to separate what is established from what is estimated. Teymareh is a site where almost every hard number is, by necessity, an estimate — the dating question makes certainty impossible — so this page states the figures that recur across the reliable sources and flags them as the estimates they are. The following are the sources this page rests on:
Facts last reviewed July 2026. Established: a very large field of petroglyphs across the Teymareh highland where Markazi, Isfahan and Lorestan meet, around the Anarbar headwaters between Khomein, Golpayegan and Mahallat; the ibex as the dominant motif alongside human, equestrian, dance and abstract figures; the 2020 peer-reviewed publication of the “mantis-man” carving; the impossibility of radiocarbon dating under current sanctions; the field's near-total lack of on-site protection and the threat from mining; and its emergence into wider knowledge through Morteza Farhadi's work in the early 1990s. Estimated, not established: the count of ~21,000 petroglyphs, the ~31 sites and 50+ km² extent, and above all the age — the “40,000 to 4,000 years” bracket is a comparative estimate by Jan Brouwer and Gus van Veen, not a measured date, and this page treats it as such throughout. Treated with care: the phrase “largest rock-art collection in the world”, which is widely reported but not independently verifiable — this page says “among the largest”; and the plasma-discharge reading of the “squatter man” circles, which is a fringe hypothesis noted for completeness, not a scholarly consensus. Coordinates are approximate and point to the general highland, not a specific panel; the individual sites are unmarked and are best reached with a local guide.