THE WARKA PHASE IN THE SOUTH
So far, there are only two radiocarbon determinations for the Ubaidian assemblage, one from Tepe Gawra in the north and one from Warka in the south. My hunch would be to use the dates 4500 to 3750 B.C., with a plus or more probably a minus factor of about two hundred years for each, as the time duration of the Ubaidian assemblage in southern Mesopotamia.
Next, much to our annoyance, we have what is almost a temporary black-out. According to the system of terminology I favor, our next “assemblage” after that of Ubaid is called the Warka phase, from the Arabic name for the site of Uruk or Erich. We know it only from six or seven levels in a narrow test-pit at Warka, and from an even smaller hole at another site. This “assemblage,” so far, is known only by its pottery, some of which still bears Ubaidian style painting. The characteristic Warkan pottery is unpainted, with smoothed red or gray surfaces and peculiar shapes. Unquestionably, there must be a great deal more to say about the Warkan assemblage, but someone will first have to excavate it!
THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION
After our exasperation with the almost unknown Warka interlude, following the brilliant “false dawn” of Ubaid, we move next to an assemblage which yields traces of a preponderance of those elements which we noted ([p. 144]) as meaning civilization. This assemblage is that called Proto-Literate; it already contains writing. On the somewhat shaky principle that writing, however early, means history—and no longer prehistory—the assemblage is named for the historical implications of its content, and no longer after the name of the site where it was first found. Since some of the older books used site-names for this assemblage, I will tell you that the Proto-Literate includes the latter half of what used to be called the “Uruk period” plus all of what used to be called the “Jemdet Nasr period.” It shows a consistent development from beginning to end.
I shall, in fact, leave much of the description and the historic implications of the Proto-Literate assemblage to the conventional historians. Professor T. J. Jacobsen, reaching backward from the legends he finds in the cuneiform writings of slightly later times, can in fact tell you a more complete story of Proto-Literate culture than I can. It should be enough here if I sum up briefly what the excavated archeological evidence shows.
We have yet to dig a Proto-Literate site in its entirety, but the indications are that the sites cover areas the size of small cities. In architecture, we know of large and monumental temple structures, which were built on elaborate high terraces. The plans and decoration of these temples follow the pattern set in the Ubaid phase: the chief difference is one of size. The German excavators at the site of Warka reckoned that the construction of only one of the Proto-Literate temple complexes there must have taken 1,500 men, each working a ten-hour day, five years to build.
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.”