Prehistoric Men

by Robert J. Braidwood

ART AND WRITING

If the architecture, even in its monumental forms, can be seen to stem from Ubaidian developments, this is not so with our other evidence of Proto-Literate artistic expression. In relief and applied sculpture, in sculpture in the round, and on the engraved cylinder seals—all of which now make their appearance—several completely new artistic principles are apparent. These include the composition of subject-matter in groups, commemorative scenes, and especially the ability and apparent desire to render the human form and face. Excellent as the animals of the Franco-Cantabrian art may have been (see [p. 85]), and however handsome were the carefully drafted geometric designs and conventionalized figures on the pottery of the early farmers, there seems to have been, up to this time, a mental block about the drawing of the human figure and especially the human face. We do not yet know what caused this self-consciousness about picturing themselves which seems characteristic of men before the appearance of civilization. We do know that with civilization, the mental block seems to have been removed.

Clay tablets bearing pictographic signs are the Proto-Literate forerunners of cuneiform writing. The earliest examples are not well understood but they seem to be “devices for making accounts and for remembering accounts.” Different from the later case in Egypt, where writing appears fully formed in the earliest examples, the development from simple pictographic signs to proper cuneiform writing may be traced, step by step, in Mesopotamia. It is most probable that the development of writing was connected with the temple and the need for keeping account of the temple’s possessions. Professor Jacobsen sees writing as a means for overcoming space, time, and the increasing complications of human affairs: “Literacy, which began with ... civilization, enhanced mightily those very tendencies in its development which characterize it as a civilization and mark it off as such from other types of culture.”

RELIEF ON A PROTO-LITERATE STONE VASE, WARKA

Unrolled drawing, with restoration suggested by figures from contemporary cylinder seals

While the new principles in art and the idea of writing are not foreshadowed in the Ubaid phase, or in what little we know of the Warkan, I do not think we need to look outside southern Mesopotamia for their beginnings. We do know something of the adjacent areas, too, and these beginnings are not there. I think we must accept them as completely new discoveries, made by the people who were developing the whole new culture pattern of classic southern Mesopotamia. Full description of the art, architecture, and writing of the Proto-Literate phase would call for many details. Men like Professor Jacobsen and Dr. Adams can give you these details much better than I can. Nor shall I do more than tell you that the common pottery of the Proto-Literate phase was so well standardized that it looks factory made. There was also some handsome painted pottery, and there were stone bowls with inlaid decoration. Well-made tools in metal had by now become fairly common, and the metallurgist was experimenting with the casting process. Signs for plows have been identified in the early pictographs, and a wheeled chariot is shown on a cylinder seal engraving. But if I were forced to a guess in the matter, I would say that the development of plows and draft-animals probably began in the Ubaid period and was another of the great innovations of that time.

The Proto-Literate assemblage clearly suggests a highly developed and sophisticated culture. While perhaps not yet fully urban, it is on the threshold of urbanization. There seems to have been a very dense settlement of Proto-Literate sites in classic southern Mesopotamia, many of them newly founded on virgin soil where no earlier settlements had been. When we think for a moment of what all this implies, of the growth of an irrigation system which must have existed to allow the flourish of this culture, and of the social and political organization necessary to maintain the irrigation system, I think we will agree that at last we are dealing with civilization proper.