Prehistoric Men

by Robert J. Braidwood

CLASSIC SOUTHERN MESOPOTAMIA FIRST OCCUPIED

Our next step is into the southland proper. Here, deep in the core of the mound which later became the holy Sumerian city of Eridu, Iraqi archeologists uncovered a handsome painted pottery. Pottery of the same type had been noticed earlier by German archeologists on the surface of a small mound, awash in the spring floods, near the remains of the Biblical city of Erich (Sumerian = Uruk; Arabic = Warka). This “Eridu” pottery, which is about all we have of the assemblage of the people who once produced it, may be seen as a blend of the Samarran and Halafian painted pottery styles. This may over-simplify the case, but as yet we do not have much evidence to go on. The idea does at least fit with my interpretation of the meaning of Baghouz and Samarra as way-points on the mud-flats of the rivers half way down from the north.

My colleague, Robert Adams, believes that there were certainly riverine-adapted food-collectors living in lower Mesopotamia. The presence of such would explain why the Eridu assemblage is not simply the sum of the Halafian and Samarran assemblages. But the domesticated plants and animals and the basic ways of food-production must have come from the hilly-flanks country in the north.

Above the basal Eridu levels, and at a number of other sites in the south, comes a full-fledged assemblage called Ubaid. Incidentally, there is an aspect of the Ubaidian assemblage in the north as well. It seems to move into place before the Halaf manifestation is finished, and to blend with it. The Ubaidian assemblage in the south is by far the more spectacular. The development of the temple has been traced at Eridu from a simple little structure to a monumental building some 62 feet long, with a pilaster-decorated façade and an altar in its central chamber. There is painted Ubaidian pottery, but the style is hurried and somewhat careless and gives the impression of having been a cheap mass-production means of decoration when compared with the carefully drafted styles of Samarra and Halaf. The Ubaidian people made other items of baked clay: sickles and axes of very hard-baked clay are found. The northern Ubaidian sites have yielded tools of copper, but metal tools of unquestionable Ubaidian find-spots are not yet available from the south. Clay figurines of human beings with monstrous turtle-like faces are another item in the southern Ubaidian assemblage.

SKETCH OF SELECTED ITEMS OF UBAIDIAN ASSEMBLAGE

There is a large Ubaid cemetery at Eridu, much of it still awaiting excavation. The few skeletons so far tentatively studied reveal a completely modern type of “Mediterraneanoid”; the individuals whom the skeletons represent would undoubtedly blend perfectly into the modern population of southern Iraq. What the Ubaidian assemblage says to us is that these people had already adapted themselves and their culture to the peculiar riverine environment of classic southern Mesopotamia. For example, hard-baked clay axes will chop bundles of reeds very well, or help a mason dress his unbaked mud bricks, and there were only a few soft and pithy species of trees available. The Ubaidian levels of Eridu yield quantities of date pits; that excellent and characteristically Iraqi fruit was already in use. The excavators also found the clay model of a ship, with the stepping-point for a mast, so that Sinbad the Sailor must have had his antecedents as early as the time of Ubaid. The bones of fish, which must have flourished in the larger canals as well as in the rivers, are common in the Ubaidian levels and thereafter.

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.