Bashkardi is a group of varieties spoken in the region Bashakerd in southern Iran, inland from the Strait of Hormus. The region is difficult to access, and it was even more so when the British Iranologist Ilya Gershevitch visited in 1956. He was able to do some recordings, but did not publish any of his texts. One of the issues he might have struggled with is alignment. All that survives of the two-way case distinction seen in related languages is a set of (historically oblique case) pronominal clitics, which (among other things) function as agent (transitive subject) in the (formerly ergative) past system. These clitics are also used in addition to a NP, but, owing to the multiple functions of the clitics, it is not clear to me from the material whether agent clitics are obligatory. If so, Bashkardi would pattern like Sorani Kurdish, which has generalised the agent clitics while the inherited verbal endings have acquired pronominal function and can cross-reference various arguments. Bashkardi varieties are still spoken in the region, but (except for the ex-ergative alignment) their morphosyntax patterns entirely on the Persian model today. This concerns the use of TAM prefixes as well as prepositions for direct and indirect objects. None of these markings are systematic or even frequent in the 1956 material, where NPs are largely unmarked, and the semantics of verbs forms need to be deduced from the context as well. Clearly, with fragmentary data at hand, passages that are somewhat complex syntactically or content-wise often remain unclear. At the same time, the 1956 Bashkardi data show a stage of the language now lost, and provide a parallel to post-classical Middle Persian, where likewise TAM and argument marking was largely absent before markers became grammaticalised in the verbal and nominal system leading up to New Persian.