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.
FROM PREHISTORY TO HISTORY
Now it is time for the conventional ancient historians to take over the story from me. Remember this when you read what they write. Their real base-line is with cultures ruled over by later kings and emperors, whose writings describe military campaigns and the administration of laws and fully organized trading ventures. To these historians, the Proto-Literate phase is still a simple beginning for what is to follow. If they mention the Ubaid assemblage at all—the one I was so lyrical about—it will be as some dim and fumbling step on the path to the civilized way of life.
I suppose you could say that the difference in the approach is that as a prehistorian I have been looking forward or upward in time, while the historians look backward to glimpse what I’ve been describing here. My base-line was half a million years ago with a being who had little more than the capacity to make tools and fire to distinguish him from the animals about him. Thus my point of view and that of the conventional historian are bound to be different. You will need both if you want to understand all of the story of men, as they lived through time to the present.