THE UBAIDIAN ACHIEVEMENT
On present evidence, my tendency is to see the Ubaidian assemblage in southern Iraq as the trace of a new era. I wish there were more evidence, but what we have suggests this to me. The culture of southern Ubaid soon became a culture of towns—of centrally located towns with some rural villages about them. The town had a temple and there must have been priests. These priests probably had political and economic functions as well as religious ones, if the somewhat later history of Mesopotamia may suggest a pattern for us. Presently the temple and its priesthood were possibly the focus of the market; the temple received its due, and may already have had its own lands and herds and flocks. The people of the town, undoubtedly at least in consultation with the temple administration, planned and maintained the simple irrigation ditches. As the system flourished, the community of rural farmers would have produced more than sufficient food. The tendency for specialized crafts to develop—tentative at best at the cultural level of the earlier village-farming community era—would now have been achieved, and probably many other specialists in temple administration, water control, architecture, and trade would also have appeared, as the surplus food-supply was assured.
Southern Mesopotamia is not a land rich in natural resources other than its fertile soil. Stone, good wood for construction, metal, and innumerable other things would have had to be imported. Grain and dates—although both are bulky and difficult to transport—and wool and woven stuffs must have been the mediums of exchange. Over what area did the trading net-work of Ubaid extend? We start with the idea that the Ubaidian assemblage is most richly developed in the south. We assume, I think, correctly, that it represents a cultural flowering of the south. On the basis of the pottery of the still elusive “Eridu” immigrants who had first followed the rivers into alluvial Mesopotamia, we get the notion that the characteristic painted pottery style of Ubaid was developed in the southland. If this reconstruction is correct then we may watch with interest where the Ubaid pottery-painting tradition spread. We have already mentioned that there is a substantial assemblage of (and from the southern point of view, fairly pure) Ubaidian material in northern Iraq. The pottery appears all along the Iranian flanks, even well east of the head of the Persian Gulf, and ends in a later and spectacular flourish in an extremely handsome painted style called the “Susa” style. Ubaidian pottery has been noted up the valleys of both of the great rivers, well north of the Iraqi and Syrian borders on the southern flanks of the Anatolian plateau. It reaches the Mediterranean Sea and the valley of the Orontes in Syria, and it may be faintly reflected in the painted style of a site called Ghassul, on the east bank of the Jordan in the Dead Sea Valley. Over this vast area—certainly in all of the great basin of the Tigris-Euphrates drainage system and its natural extensions—I believe we may lay our fingers on the traces of a peculiar way of decorating pottery, which we call Ubaidian. This cursive and even slap-dash decoration, it appears to me, was part of a new cultural tradition which arose from the adjustments which immigrant northern farmers first made to the new and challenging environment of southern Mesopotamia. But exciting as the idea of the spread of influences of the Ubaid tradition in space may be, I believe you will agree that the consequences of the growth of that tradition in southern Mesopotamia itself, as time passed, are even more important.