The cylindrical seals bear cuneiform and middle Babylonian scripts and were found with the skeletal remains of a female, which experts say might have been an important figure during the Elamite era.

“Deep trenches and the newly found earthenware show that the city thrived for 150 to 200 years,” Mainz University Professor and head of Haft Tappeh excavations Behzad Mofidi said.

“Previous studies had shown that the area only witnessed one structural epoch, but our findings show that people lived in the area for several generations around 500 BCE,” he added.

Archeologists had previously found a collection of office buildings and clay tablets in the area.

According to Mofidi, the rooms were used by scribes who kept records of objects, animals and weapons.

A number of the clay tablets have also been decoded and will soon be published in Persian and German.