Ancient Iraq Read online

  Several other Neolithic sites have been discovered in northern Iraq, but among these two are of special interest. The first site is represented by the lower levels of the otherwise mainly historic Tell Shimshara, situated in the upper valley of the Lower Zab, not far from the town of Rania, and excavated by Danish archaeologists from 1957 to 1959.24 The only difference between Shimshara and Jarmo lies in its stone industry, and notably in the predominance of obsidian (85%) from Armenia or Anatolia, but it has also the merit of filling, at least partly, the chronological gap between Jarmo and Hassuna (c. 5800 B.C.), the first of a long series of proto-historic settlements. The second site is Maghzaliyeh, an important tell on the plain west of the Tigris, excavated by Soviet archaeologists between 1977 and 1980.25 The most important feature of this Neolithic village is a curving wall with semi-circular projections suggesting towers. If this is the case, then we are confronted with the most ancient fortified settlement ever discovered in Mesopotamia.

  Thus, around 7000 B.C. in northern Iraq and in other parts of the Near East man ceases to be a wandering hunter depending for his living upon his luck and skill and becomes a farmer attached to the small piece of land from which he obtains a regular food supply. Out of clay he builds himself a house. He uses new tools to perform new tasks. He secures in sheep and cattle a permanent and easily available source of milk, meat, wool and hide. At the same time his social tendencies develop, for the care and defence of the land call for close cooperation. Each family probably erects its own farm, cultivates its own field, grazes its own flock and makes its own tools; but several families are grouped together and form a hamlet, the embryo of a social organization. Later other revolutions will occur: metal will replace stone, villages will grow into cities, cities will be united into kingdoms and kingdoms into empires. Yet the essentials of life, the labour of man bent over mother earth and enslaved to the cycle of seasons, has not changed since those remote days.

  The absence of pottery in eleven out of sixteen occupation levels makes Jarmo one of the earliest agricultural communities in Western Asia, together with Ali Kosh and Tepe Guran in Iran, Hacilar in Anatolia and Jericho in Palestine, to mention only the main ‘aceramic’ sites. With the exception of Jericho which, with its well-built houses and strong city-wall of undressed stones, must have looked like a small medieval town, all these were modest villages covering only a few acres and apparently unfortified. The people who lived in those villages used stone bowls, baskets made waterproof with bitumen and probably skins and gourds as containers, but they already handled clay with some skill to build the walls of their houses, to line pits or basins dug into the ground and to model figurines of animals and women.26 From this to baked clay, and therefore pottery, there were but a few steps which seem to have been made much earlier than formerly believed, since coarse, lightly fired clay vessels have been found at Mureybet, in northern Syria, in a level dated c. 8000 B.C. by a radiocarbon sample, and at Ganj Dareh, an eighth millennium site in western Iran. Similar vessels also occur at Jarmo, c. 6300 B.C., but they already coexist with a decorated pottery characterized by lines of oblique tadpole-shaped blobs painted in red on a pinkish-buff surface, also found at the contemporary site of Tepe Guran.

  Ceramic by itself is perhaps not as momentous an invention as agriculture, but for the archaeologist it heralds a new era where bowls, cups, plates and vases will henceforth play for him the same role as fossils for the geologist. From about 6000 B.C. to the beginning of history more than three millennia will elapse, and these long years will of course be filled with cultural developments, commercial ventures, ethnic movements and no doubt wars and conquests, but because written documents are lacking, the actors will always remain nameless and silent. All we have to try and reconstruct the events of that distant past are material remains among which pottery is of special interest, as it is found in abundance on all sites and lends itself to comparative studies. Interpreted with caution – for changes in pottery styles may be due to many reasons and do not necessarily betray the replacement of one population by another27 – the distinctive wares found at different levels in archaeological excavations represent both the hall-marks of successive cultures in late prehistoric Mesopotamia and fairly reliable indicators of the relationship between these cultures and those of surrounding countries.

  CHAPTER 4

  FROM VILLAGE TO CITY

  The story of the passage from Neolithic to History, from the humble villages of the Zagros foothills to the relatively large and highly civilized Sumerian cities of the lower Tigris–Euphrates valley cannot be told in full detail because our information, though rapidly progressing, remains imprecise and patchy. Yet each new prehistoric tell excavated, each buried city dug down to the virgin soil, confirms what forty years of archaeological research in Iraq already suggested: the Sumerian civilization was never imported ready-made into Mesopotamia from some unknown country at some ill-defined date. Like all civilizations – including ours – it was a mixed product shaped by the mould into which its components were poured over many years. Each of these components can now be traced back to one stage or another of Iraqi prehistory, and while some were undoubtedly brought in by foreign invasion or influence, others had roots so deep in the past that we may call them indigenous. In addition, excavations conducted at an ever increasing pace in Iran, Syria, Palestine and Turkey at the same time as in Iraq have thrown considerable light on the interplay of Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures in the Near East and have supplied enough comparative material and radiocarbon dates to draw up a rough, tentative chronological scale along the six divisions of Mesopotamian proto-history:

  The Hassuna period

  c. 5800 – 5500 B.C.

  The Samarra period

  c. 5600 – 5000 B.C.

  The Halaf period

  c. 5500 – 4500 B.C.

  The Ubaid period (Ubaid 1 and 2 included)

  c. 5000 – 3750 B.C.

  The Uruk period

  c. 3750 – 3150 B.C.

  The Jemdat Nasr period

  c. 3150 – 2900 B.C.

  Each of these periods is characterized by a distinct cultural assemblage and has been named after the site, not necessarily the largest nor even the most representative, where this assemblage was first identified.

  As will be seen, the areas covered by these cultures vary from one period to the other; moreover, cultures long thought to be successive are in fact contemporaneous or at least overlapping, and within each period there is room for a variety of regional and interesting subcultures. The above divisions therefore, are somewhat artificial, but they provide a convenient framework into which can be fitted the changes that occurred during those three millennia when Mesopotamia was pregnant, so to speak, with Sumer.1

  The Hassuna Period

  The site type for this period is Tell Hassuna, a low mound thirty-five kilometres south of Mosul, excavated in 1943 – 4 by the Iraqi Directorate of Antiquities under the direction of Seton Lloyd and Fuad Safar.2 There, resting on the virgin soil, were coarse pottery and stone implements suggestive of a Neolithic farming community living in huts or tents, for no trace of building was found. Overlying this primitive settlement, however, were six layers of houses, progressively larger and better built. In size, plan and building material these houses were very similar to those of present-day northern Iraqi villages. Six or seven rooms were arranged in two blocks around a courtyard, one block serving as living quarters, the other as kitchen and stores. The walls were made of pressed mud, the floors paved with a mixture of clay and straw. Grain was kept in huge bins of unbaked clay sunk into the ground up to their mouths, and bread was baked in domed ovens resembling the modern tanur. Mortars, flint sickle-blades, stone hoes, clay spindle-whorls and crude clay figurines of naked and apparently seated women were present. Large jars found inside the houses contained the bones of deceased children accompanied by tiny cups and pots for after-life refreshment while, strangely enough, much liberty seems to have been taken with the disp
osal of adult skeletons piled up in the corner of a room, thrown into clay bins ‘without ceremony’ or buried in cist graves without the usual funerary gifts. The few skulls that have been studied belong, like those from Byblos and Jericho, to a ‘large-toothed variety of the long-headed Mediterranean race’, which suggests a unity of population throughout the Fertile Crescent in late Neolithic times.3

  The pottery discovered at Hassuna has been divided into two categories called ‘archaic’ and ‘standard’. The archaic ware ranges from level Ia, at the bottom of the tell, to level III and is represented by: (1) tall, round or pear-shaped jars of undecorated coarse clay; (2) bowls of finer fabric varying in colour from buff to black according to the method of firing and ‘burnished’ with a stone or bone, and (3) bowls and globular jars with a short, straight neck, sparingly decorated with simple designs (lines, triangles, cross-hatchings) in fragile red paint and also burnished. The Hassuna standard ware, predominant in levels IV to VI, is made up of the same painted bowls and jars and the designs are very similar, but the paint is matt brown and thicker, the decoration more extensive and executed with greater skill. A number of vessels are almost entirely covered by shallow incisions, and some are both painted and incised.

  While the archaic pottery has several traits in common with that found in the deepest layers of Turkish (Sakçe Gözü, Mersin), Syrian (Kerkemish, ‘Amuq plain) and Palestinian (Megiddo, Jericho) sites, the standard pottery seems to have developed locally4 and is distributed over a relatively small area of northern Iraq. Sherds of Hassuna ware can be picked up on the surface of many unexcavated mounds east and west of the Tigris down to Jabal Hamrin, and complete specimens have been found in the lowest levels of Nineveh, opposite Mosul, at Matarrah,5 south of Kirkuk and at Shimshara6 in the Lower Zab valley. They were also present throughout the thirteen levels of mound 1 at Yarim Tepe,7 near Tell ‘Afar, associated with the remains of square or round houses, with tools and weapons of flint and obsidian, with pieces of copper ore and a few copper and lead ornaments, with small seated clay figurines and with minute stone or clay discs with a loop at the back, engraved with straight lines or criss-cross patterns. These objects, probably worn on a string around the neck, may have been impressed as a mark of ownership on lumps of clay fastened to baskets or to jar stoppers, in which case they would represent the earliest examples of the stamp-seal, and the stamp-seal is the forerunner of the cylinder-seal, a significant element of the Mesopotamian civilization. Some authors, however, regard them, at least in this period, as mere amulets or ornaments.

  Forty-eight kilometres due south of Yarim Tepe, at the limit of the rain-fed plain and the desert of Jazirah, lies Umm Dabaghiya, excavated by Diana Kirkbride between 1971 and 1973.8 Umm Dabaghiya was a small settlement, a simple trading post where nomads from the desert brought the onagers and gazelles they had hunted to be skinned, the raw hides being later sent elsewhere to be tanned. Related by its coarse and painted pottery to the archaic levels of Hassuna but most probably older, the site has many distinctive and strangely sophisticated features. For instance, the floors of the houses are often made of large clay slabs which announce the moulded bricks of later periods; floors and walls are carefully plastered with gypsum and frequently painted red, and in one building were found fragments of frescoes representing an onager hunt, a spider with its eggs and perhaps flying vultures. Several houses contained alabaster bowls beautifully carved and polished. Predominant among the clay vessels are bowls and jars with ‘applied decoration’, i.e. small figurines of animals and human beings stuck on the vessels before firing. Other sites representative of this Hassunan subculture are Tell Sotto and Kül Tepe,9 near Yarim Tepe, and mound 2 at Tulul ath-Thalathat,10 in the same Tell ‘Afar area. Not unexpectedly for places lying on the trade routes to the west and north-west, some

  Caption

  Buildings, potteries, figurines, seals and tools characteristic of the Hassuna, Halaf and Ubaid periods.

  elements of the ‘Umm Dab culture’, such as plastered floors and arrow-heads, point to Syria (Buqras on the Euphrates and even Ras Shamra and Byblos), whilst the red and frescoed walls are reminiscent of contemporary Çatal Hüyük in remote Anatolia.

  The Samarra Period

  In the upper levels of Hassuna, Matarrah, Shimshara and Yarim Tepe the Hassuna ware is mixed with, and gradually replaced by, a much more attractive pottery known as Samarra ware because it was first discovered, in 1912 – 14, in a prehistoric cemetery underneath the houses of the medieval city of that name, famous for its spiralled minaret.11 On the pale, slightly rough surface of large plates, around the rim of carinate bowls, on the neck and shoulder of round-bellied pots, painted in red, dark-brown or purple, are geometric designs arranged in neat, horizontal bands or representations of human beings, birds, fish, antelopes, scorpions and other animals. The motifs are conventionalized, but their distribution is perfectly well balanced and they are treated in such a way as to give an extraordinary impression of movement. The people who modelled and painted such vessels were undoubtedly great artists, and it was long thought that they had come from Iran, but we now know that the Samarra ware was indigenous to Mesopotamia and belonged to a hitherto unsuspected culture which flourished in the middle Tigris valley during the second half of the sixth millennium B.C.

  This culture was revealed in the 1960s by the Iraqi excavations at Tell es-Sawwan, a low but large mound on the left bank of the Tigris, only eleven kilometres to the south of Samarra.12 The inhabitants of Tell es-Sawwan were peasants like their Hassunan ancestors and used similar stone and flint tools, but in an area where rain is scarce they were the first to practise a primitive form of irrigation agriculture, using the Tigris floods to water their fields and grow wheat, barley and linseed.13 The yield must have been substantial if the large and empty buildings found at various levels were really ‘granaries’ as has been suggested. The central part of the village was protected from invaders by a 3-metre-deep ditch doubled by a thick, buttressed mud wall. The houses were large, very regular in plan, with multiple rooms and courtyards, and it must be noted that they were no longer built of pressed mud, but of large, cigar-shaped mud bricks plastered over with clay or gypsum. A thin coat of plaster covered the floors and walls. Apart from numerous pots and plates of coarse or fine Samarra ware, these houses contained exquisite, translucent marble vessels. The bodies of adults, in a contracted position and wrapped in matting coated with bitumen, and of children, placed in large jars or deep bowls, were buried under the floors, and it is from these graves that have come the most exciting finds in the form of alabaster or terracotta statuettes of women (or occasionally men) squatting or standing. Some of the clay statuettes have ‘coffee-bean’ eyes and pointed heads that are very similar to those of the Ubaid period figurines, whilst other clay or stone statuettes have large, wide-open eyes inlaid with shell and bitumen and surmounted by black eyebrows, that are ‘astonishingly reminiscent of much later Sumerian technique’.14 Could the Samarran folk be the ancestors of the ‘Ubaidians’ and even perhaps of the Sumerians?

  So far, no other settlement comparable to Tell es-Sawwan has been excavated,15 but apart from copies or imports in Baghuz, on the middle Euphrates, and Chagar Bazar, in central Jazirah, the Samarra pottery has been found in a limited but fairly wide area along the Tigris valley, from Nineveh to Choga Mami near Mandali, on the Iraqi–Iranian border.16 In the latter site, where canal-irrigation was practised, not only do we find statuettes resembling the ‘coffee-bean’-eyed statuettes of Sawwan, but the Samarra ware seems to have developed locally into new ceramic types (called ‘Choga Mami Transitional’) similar to the Eridu and Hajji Muhammad wares of southern Iraq, themselves considered as early forms of the Ubaid pottery.17 This unexpected discovery might provide the beginning of an answer to our question.

  The Halaf Period

  The third period of proto-historic Mesopotamia takes its name from Tell Halaf, a large mound overlooking the Khabur river near the village of Ras el-‘Ain, on
the Turkish–Syrian border. There, just before the First World War, a German archaeologist, Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, came upon a thick layer of beautifully painted pottery immediately beneath the palace of an Aramaean ruler of the tenth century B.C. The discovery was not published until 1931.17 At that time little was known of Near Eastern prehistory and the date of von Oppenheim's ‘Buntkeramik’ was the subject of much controversy. But in the following years British excavations a Nineveh,18 Tell Arpachiyah near Mosul19 and Tell Chagar Bazar,20 as well as American excavations at Tepe Gawra, put the Halaf period into its proper chronological place and supplied a complete assortment of its cultural assemblage. The Russian excavations of mound 2 at Yarim Tepe and, more recently, the stratigraphic exploration of Arpachiyah by the Iraqi Ismail Hijara,21 as well as soundings and partial excavations of several sites in the Hamrin basin and the upper Tigris valley, have considerably added to our knowledge.22

  Compared with the previous cultures, the Halaf culture offers a number of new and highly distinctive features. The settlements are still of village type and size, but cobbled streets, at least at Arpachiyah, indicate some municipal caretaking. Pressed mud or mud bricks remain the standard building materials, but rectangular houses tend to be smaller than before while round houses called tholoi (plural of tholos) by analogy with the Mycenaean tombs of much later date become predominant. The tholoi of Yarim Tepe are usually small; some are divided into two rooms, others are surrounded by rectangular rooms or concentric walls of pressed mud. Those of Arpachiyah, however, are much larger structures, up to 10 metres in diameter; they rest on stone foundations and to some of them is appended a long antechamber which further increases the resemblance with the Mycenaean tombs. Since they had been built and rebuilt with great care and since they were found empty, it was long thought that they were shrines or temples, but the finds at Yarim Tepe clearly show that most tholoi were simple, beehive-shaped houses such as can still be seen around Aleppo, in northern Syria. In fact, the only building of that period that might be considered a sanctuary is a small, square structure with mud pedestals and an ox skull on the threshold of a doorway, excavated by Mallowan at Tell Aswad, on the Balikh river. At Arpachiyah the dead were buried in pits beneath the floors or around tholoi, but there are examples of collective burials of dismembered bodies there as at Tepe Gawra and of cremation, perhaps for ritual purposes, at Yarim Tepe.