Ancient Iraq Read online

  No less interesting than the tholoi are some of the small objects found at Arpachiyah and elsewhere. We allude, in particular, to amulets in the form of a house with gabled roof, a bull's head or a double-axe, and to terracotta figurines of doves and women. The latter are not new in Mesopotamia, but they now differ from previous models. The woman is usually squatting or sitting on a round stool, her arms supporting her heavy breasts. The head is reduced to a shapeless lump, but the body is realistic and covered with painted strips and dots which may stand for tattoo marks, jewels or clothes. It is probable that these figurines were talismans against sterility or the hazards of childbirth rather than ‘Mother Goddesses’, as too often assumed.

  Last but not least comes a very remarkable painted pottery, the most beautiful ever used in Mesopotamia.23 The Halaf ware is made by hand in a fine, ferruginous clay slightly glazed in the process of firing. The walls of the vessels are often very thin, the shapes varied and daring: round pots with large, flaring necks, squat jars with rolled-out rims, footed chalices, large and deep ‘cream bowls’ with an angular profile. The decoration perhaps

  Examples of decorated pottery in proto-historic Mesopotamia: i. Neolithic (Jarmo); 2 – 3, Hassuna culture (3 is an incised jar); 4 – 6, Samarra culture; 7, Eridu (Ubaid 1) culture; 8, Hajji Muhammad (Ubaid 2) culture; 9–10, Halaf culture; 11–13, Ubaid 3 and 4 cultures; 14–15, Nineveh V culture; 16 Jemdat Nasr culture. All drawings are not on the same scale.

  lacks the bold movement of the Samarra ware, but it is perfectly adapted to the shapes, minutely executed and pleasant to the eye in the manner of Persian rugs. On a cream or peach ‘slip’ is laid, originally in black and red, later in black, red and white, a closely woven pattern covering most of the vessel. Triangles, squares, checks, crosses, scallops and small circles are among the favourite designs, though flowers, sitting birds, crouching gazelles and even a leaping cheetah are also encountered. Most characteristic of all and perhaps loaded with religious symbolism are the double-axe, the ‘Maltese square’ (a square with a triangle on each corner) and the bucranum, or stylized bull's head.

  It has recently been proven by neutron activation analysis24 that this attractive pottery was manufactured in large quantities in certain specialized centres, such as Arpachiyah, Tell Brak, Chagar Bazar and Tell Halaf, and exported to specific settlements from which it gradually reached more distant places. The people who transported this ware (perhaps on the back of cattle or on ox-drawn sledges) presumably returned loaded with such ‘luxury’ goods as marine shells, gem stones and particularly obsidian, which is predominant in most Halafian sites. It has also been suggested that the Halafian formed a ‘ranked society’ (i.e. with social, but not economic, classes) and that the pottery-producing centres were the residences of local chieftains. The inhabitants of these relatively small villages were farmers and pastoralists. They grew emmer, wheat, einkorn, barley, lentils, flax and other vegetables and bred sheep, goats, pigs, cattle and domestic dogs.

  Judging from the distribution of true Halaf pottery, at the peak of its expansion the core of the Halaf culture occupied a wide, crescent-shaped area entirely located in the dry-farming zone. It extended from the region of Aleppo to the Diyala valley, covering the whole of Jazirah and of future Assyria, and it was surrounded by a halo of peripheral areas where this pottery was copied or merely imported; these included the heart of eastern Anatolia, Cilicia and northern Syria up to the Mediterranean coast, the Harim basin and parts of western Iran and Transcaucasia.

  While the Samarra culture may be regarded as a derivative of the Hassuna culture, the Halaf culture has no ancestor in prehistoric Mesopotamia. It is strikingly intrusive and clearly has some connections with Anatolia (virtually all the symbolic designs painted on the Halaf ware and many of the artefacts already described are reminiscent of those found in Anatolian Neolithic sites), but it is not possible to be more precise at present.25 Whatever the origin of the ‘Halafians’, there is no evidence of brutal invasion; in fact all we know of them points to a slow infiltration of peaceful people who came to settle in regions that might have then been sparsely populated.

  The Ubaid Period

  Between 4500 and 4300 B.C. several Halafian settlements in northern Mesopotamia were abandoned, while in many others the tholoi and the painted pottery typical of the Halaf culture were gradually replaced by square houses and by another type of pottery which bears the name of Ubaid because it was first found in the 1920s during excavations of a small mound called al-‘Ubaid, in the vicinity of the celebrated Sumerian city of Ur.26 This name is significant as it implies that for the first time in proto-history one single culture extended from the Jazirah (and even beyond) to the Tigris–Euphrates delta. The lack of rupture between the Halaf and Ubaid cultures excludes a conquest of northern and central Iraq by ‘Ubaidians’ coming from the south, and the most plausible hypotheses are a peaceful infiltration or the adoption by the ‘Halafians' of the culture of another population after a long period of contact.

  That southern Iraq had been inhabited long before the middle of the fifth millennium was demonstrated in 1946 – 9 by the excavations conducted at Eridu (Abu Shahrain, nineteen kilometres to the south-west of Ur).27 The ruins of Eridu are now marked by low mounds and sand dunes surrounding a much dilapidated ‘ziqqurat’, or stage-tower, erected by Amar-Sin, king of the Third Dynasty of Ur (2046– 2038 B.C.), but under one corner of the ziqqurat Seton Lloyd and Fuad Safar unearthed an impressive series of seventeen temples28 built one above the other in proto-historic times. The lowest and earliest of these temples (levels XVII – XV) were small, one-roomed buildings which contained altars, offering tables and a fine quality pottery (Eridu ware) decorated with elaborate, often elegant geometric designs in dark-brown colour and presenting affinities with the Choga Mami transitional ware. The poorly preserved remains of temples XIV – XII yielded a slightly different ceramic characterized by its crowded designs and ‘reserve slip' decoration, which was identical with the pottery found in 1937 – 9 by German archaeologists at Qal‘at Hajji Muhammad, near Uruk.29 This Hajji Muhammad ware, as it is called, is also present on other sites of southern Iraq, notably Ras el ‘Amiya, eight kilometres north of Kish,30 where, it must be noted, fragments of walls, clay vessels and other objects lay buried (as indeed at Qal‘at Hajji Muhammad itself) under a few metres of alluvium and were discovered by chance. Finally, temples XI to VI, generally well preserved, contained numerous specimens of standard Ubaid ware, whilst temples VI – I could be dated to the early stages of the Uruk period. Since the Eridu, and Hajji Muhammad wares are closely related to the early and late Ubaid ware, these four types of pottery are now commonly called Ubaid 1, 2, 3 and 4 respectively.

  More recently, a startling discovery was made at a site called Tell el-’Oueili by the French archaeologists who were digging at the nearby city of Larsa. Oueili is a relatively small mound partly above and partly below the present level of the surrounding plain, and it has the advantage of being entirely Ubaidian. Two deep soundings conducted in 1981 and 1983 respectively enabled the explorers to divide it into twenty levels of occupation.31 The uppermost levels (1 to 8) contained Ubaid 4, 3 and 2 pottery, and samples of Ubaid 1 (Eridu) ware were recovered from levels 8 to 11. But this was not the end, as would have been expected, for below these were no less than eight additional levels (12 to 19) which yielded a pottery (tentatively classified as Pre-Ubaid or Ubaid Zero) that was hitherto unknown but had affinities with the Samarra ware, while the cigar-shaped mud-bricks of a wall in level 12 were reminiscent of the bricks found at Tell es-Sawwan. Furthermore, below level 20 (in the water table and therefore unexplorable) other layers of occupation could vaguely be seen, and no one knows how far back into the sixth millennium the roots of this modest South Mesopotamian village go.

  Clearly, then, large parts of southern Mesopotamia had been occupied long before the Ubaid period proper perhaps by people related to those Samarra folk who, it will be remembered, invented irrigation agricult
ure on the middle Tigris and in the Mandali area. Moreover, while a progressive architectural development can be followed throughout the superimposed temples of Eridu, there is no break in ceramic styles or techniques. The Ubaid ware – so the experts tell us – derives from the Hajji Muhammad ware, which derives from the Eridu ware, which in turn appears to derive from, or at least to share common ancestors with, the Samarra ware. Another, inescapable, conclusion to be drawn from the Eridu temples is that the same religious traditions were handed down from century to century on the same spot from about the middle of the sixth millennium B.C. until historical times, and from the relatively recent finding of two Ubaid shrines near to Anu's ‘White Temple’ at Uruk (see Chapter 5). Thus the more we dig, the more we find that the Sumerian civilization was very deeply rooted in the past.

  Even easier to identify than the Halaf ware is the Ubaid ware, the hall-mark of that period, which is less sophisticated and much less attractive. The clay, frequently overfired, varies in colour from buff to green. The paint is matt, dark brown or bluish-black and the decoration restricted as a rule to only parts of the vessels. Although occasional plants, animals and broad sweeping curves are not without charm, the monotony of the common motifs (triangles, striped or cross-hatched bands, broken or wavy lines) betrays a lack of imagination. Yet the fabric is often fine, some specimens seem to have been made on a slow wheel or ‘tournette’, and spouts and loop-handles appear for the first time. Among the most characteristic forms are a bell-shaped bowl, a jar with basket-handle, a cream bowl with pouring lip and a lenticular vessel with a flat base and a long, tubular spout, called ‘tortoiseshell’. With a few exceptions (Kish, for example), this pottery was found on all sites of southern Iraq and on many sites of northern Mesopotamia, but there are marked differences between the north and the south in the other elements of the Ubaid cultural assemblage.

  The words ‘clay and water’ would aptly qualify the Ubaid culture in southern Iraq. As stone is rare in that part of the country, its use was limited to heavy tools and a few ornaments. All other objects, including bent ‘nails’ (in fact, probably mullers), sickles, spindle-whorls, loom-weights, net-sinkers, sling pellets and even models of axes, adzes and knives, were made of terracotta. The erroneously called ‘Mother Goddess’ type of clay figurines – a slim, standing woman with a lizard-like head crowned by a coil of hair made of bitumen and whose ‘coffee-bean’ eyes recall those of Tell es-Sawwan and Choga Mami – was very popular, and there were figurines of men as well. A number of houses were frail structures of reed matting supported by wooden poles and sometimes plastered with clay, such as can be seen around Basrah today, but pressed mud or mud bricks were widely used for more comfortable buildings. The Ubaid period temples of Eridu were made of large mud bricks set in clay mortar and consisted of a long, oblong nave, or cella surrounded by small rooms projecting forward at the corners. At one end of the cella, against the wall, was a low podium which had once supported the statue of the god, while at the other end stood –a brick altar. The walls were adorned externally with shallow buttresses and niches that caught the light and broke the monotony of the plastered brickwork. Let us also note that these temples were raised on mud-brick platforms which tended to be increasingly larger and higher, foreshadowing the ziqqurats of later times.

  Virtually unknown for many years, the secular architecture of the Ubaid period is now well illustrated in Lower Mesopotamia and in the Hamrin basin. In the upper, late Ubaid levels of Tell el'Oueili, for example, the French archaeologists have unearthed the remnants of several large and carefully constructed mud-brick houses separated from each other by open spaces. One of these houses was remarkable in that within and around it were dozens of small, square and shallow cavities between thin walls of tauf, which is rather puzzling but can probably be interpreted as infrastructures of granaries. The village was in a very flat region criss-crossed by streams and partly marshy. Its inhabitants grew barley, date-palms and other edible plants; they bred almost exclusively zebus and pigs which fed on aquatic plants, and they cut reeds for wickerwork with their baked clay sickles. The presence of obsidian and bitumen testifies to a certain amount of long-distance trade.32

  Half-way between the extreme south and the extreme north of Iraq lies the Hamrin basin where about twelve Ubaid settlements have been explored. Among them, Tell Madhhur, excavated by a British expedition in 1977 – 80, is of particular interest as it contained ‘one of the best preserved prehistoric buildings ever to have been found in Mesopotamia’.33 This was a relatively small house built on the ‘tripartite plan’ characteristic of all the main buildings of the Ubaid period (temples included), with a central cruciform hall and smaller rooms on two sides. The walls were still more than six feet high, and the doors and windows remained perfectly visible. A ramp in one of the rooms suggested an upper floor, but this could not be proven. The house had been destroyed by fire, which preserved most of its contents, including pottery in situ and basically the same agricultural tools and household implements as elsewhere in those days, with thousands of clay sling-bullets, but no baked clay sickle.

  If we now turn to the north, we are confronted by a somewhat different picture. Reed habitations are unknown and all buildings are made of bricks. Stone is commonly used and stone stamp-seals, very rare in the south, are here quite numerous; they bear linear designs, but also representations of animals and human beings arranged in what may perhaps be considered as mythical scenes or ritual dances. At Tepe Gawra,34 the most important site of that period in northern Iraq, the three large temples with painted walls that form a grandiose ‘acropolis’ in level XIII closely match the Eridu temples, but two tholoi betray the persistence of regional traditions, as do the Halaf-style sitting and painted female figurines. More important, perhaps, the burial customs are very different from those of the south. At Eridu, in a large cemetery outside the settlement, adults and children alike are lying supine on a bed of potsherds in cist-graves lined and covered with mud bricks. At Gawra there is only one burial of that type; the other graves are simple pits grouped around the houses, and the bodies lie, flexed, on one side; children are buried in urns. This would suggest that the bearers of the Ubaid culture were in the minority in the north. Outnumbered but not eliminated, the descendants of the ‘Halafians’ still probably formed a large part of the population, whereas the south was entirely ‘Ubaidian’. In the next chapter we shall see how the gap between the north and the south gradually widened and how the south took the lead in the march towards civilization.

  These differences, however striking, do not fundamentally alter the unity of the Ubaid culture. Whether imported from south-western Iran or, as is increasingly probable, developed locally, this culture – which lasted at least a thousand years – spread all over the cultivable areas of the Mesopotamian plain with the notable exception of the middle Euphrates and lower Tigris valleys. The highest chains of the Taurus and the Zagros mark its limits, but neither these mountains, nor the rivers, nor even the sea offered an insuperable barrier to commercial intercourse. The reality and extent of this trade is attested by the presence of obsidian on many sites of southern Iraq and of gold and amazonite (a semi-precious stone obtainable only from India) at Ur, as well as by the presence of unmistakable Ubaid pottery at Ras Shamra, on the Syrian coast, and on the Arabian shores of the Gulf.34 In southern Mesopotamia the Ubaid settlements were situated along the Euphrates and its branches and communicated with each other by water, as illustrated by the clay models of boats found at Eridu and Ur. Most of them were villages, but there were larger centres from which were to spring later on all the main cities of ancient Sumer. Another fact has yet wider implications: of all the buildings of the Ubaid period, the temple was always the largest and best constructed. It therefore looks as though the future Sumerian cities grew not around a palace or a castle, but around a shrine, and it is perhaps not unreasonable to think that the temple was already the hub around which most social and economic activities revolved. It wo
uld be bold at this early stage to speak of ‘Sumerians’, but there is strong reason to believe that the Ubaid period represents the first stage in the development of the Sumerian civilization.

  CHAPTER 5

  BIRTH OF A CIVILIZATION

  During the fourth millennium B.C. the cultural development already perceptible during the Ubaid period proceeded at a quicker pace and the Sumerian civilization finally blossomed. This, however, took place only in the southern half of Iraq, the northern half following a somewhat different course and lagging behind in many respects. Much attention has been paid in recent years to the reasons that concurred to endow the south with such a privilege,1 and an oversimplified, though plausible, sequence of events is described below. The reader must be warned, however, that all such ‘explanations’ are largely conjectural and that we shall probably never know what really happened.