Painted pottery excavated at Ubaid cemetery at Ur by Sir Leonard Woolley. Source.
Preview of this post. Last week we introduced Tell Sabi Abyad, its excavation director Professor Peter Akkermans, and further insights into the Halaf Phenomenon which dominated Northern Mesopotamia from 6100 to 5100 BC. The Halaf were adversely impacted by the 8.2 Kilo-year Event, a 400 year world cooling period from 6200 to 5800 BC. These effects are now being studied by Dr. Akkermans, but we know that from 5400 to 5000 BC, the Halaf began to be supplanted by the Ubaid culture (6500 to 4000 BC) growing out of Southern Mesopotamia. We will want to look closely at this Halaf-Ubaid Transitional Period, but for this post, we’ll revisit the Ubaid culture as it grows stronger in South Mesopotamia, before expanding north. To do this, we’ll introduce facts from a powerful resource published in 2010.
“Beyond the Ubaid.“ This link is to a free PDF copy of a book by that name published in 2010 by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. It contains 23 articles by top archaeologists about the Ubaid Phenomenon. These papers were presented at a conference titled: “Ubaid Expansion?” that was held at Durham College April 20-22, 2006. This is the latest mainstream thinking on precisely the subject we are now ready to take on at this stage and location in our review of the prehistoric and proto-historic Fertile Crescent. So…carpe diem!
The subject this conference addressed was a growing recognition that the term “Ubaid culture” might better be expressed as “Ubaid phenomenon.” In sum, the conference sought to deconstruct prior thinking about the Ubaid. The name “Ubaid” comes from an excavation site named “Tell of al-‘Ubaid” in chapter eight of A Season’s Work at Ur, Al-‘Ubaid, Abu Shahrain-Eridu-and Elsewhere… by H. R. Hall. It was named in accordance with what the locals called that particular mound of ruins covered by pottery fragments and only four miles from the ruins of Ur. Artifacts from the lowest level (further excavated by Leonard Wooley) defined a type of ceramics called “Black on Buff” which was being found at other sites in South Mesopotamia. As Ubaid artifacts became ubiquitous, the term Ubaid came to represent, in people’s minds, something bigger and more significant than just a pottery style.
Romantics like myself find in the Ubaid a rich tapestry to attach our fancies, such as the romantic legends tracing back to Dilmun which were cherished in Sumerian literature for millennia. To Dilmun I whimsically credit the earliest important people group in South Mesopotamia, the hypothetical–perhaps mythical–ancestors of the Ubaid, fishing and gathering shellfish at the delta of the now-submerged Tigris-Euphrates valley at the end of the last ice age. Little marine archaeology has been done on this valley floor of the Persian Gulf.
The first article in Beyond the Ubaid, titled Deconstructing the Ubaid, presents a collection of “core traits” cited by the authors as unique to the Ubaid, whom they want to deconstruct.
(1) A unique ceramic style frequently called “black on buff.” Inspect these examples of Ubaid ceramics. Remember to click each picture in this collection and check its label, as many are not Ubaid. Look at these examples long enough and you’ll soon start picking the Ubaid pieces out from the Halaf and other ceramics. This style remained popular while evolving over millennia. It had none of the beauty of Halaf-ware, especially that of Arpachiyah, but it obviously served the hoi polloi well. Compare that to today’s world panting after annual styles!
(2) Homes and temples with a tripartite architecture. Imagine approaching an elite Ubaid house from the street. You enter through the front wall via a single door into a foyer whose back wall faces the street, blocking a view of the interior. There is no external window or other door in the exterior walls. In the foyer, you turn left and enter a roofless courtyard which is perpendicular away from the street. Doors on the left and right side of the courtyard open into rooms that extend to the house’s outer walls. At the far end of the courtyard, you see a wall paralleling the street behind you; it has only one door. Entering the door you find a great room whose rear wall, left wall, and right wall are exterior walls of the house. The great room’s length, left to right, equals the width of the courtyard plus the lengths of the rooms on both sides of the courtyard. The courtyard is sheltered by an overhang on all four sides, thus providing a walkway shaded from sun and rain.
This floor-plan for a single great room with a door in the center of the courtyard also serves well for a temple, or a king’s throne room. The format of the courtyard and great room would be like a “T” with side rooms to the courtyard for storage and offices. Larger facilities might have a second story along the sides, and the great room could have a very high roof.
On a decreasing scale, this same T-shaped floor-plan served for homes. The open air courtyard would serve the owner’s unique needs e.g. a corral; wagon parking; a large oven serving a blacksmith (Chalcolithic), baker, or potter; slaughter altar for a butcher etc. The side rooms could support other home functions requiring shelter, such as kitchen, bedrooms, and storage. There would be a stairway or ladder providing access to the roof which would serve as a open-air deck and place to sleep on sweltering nights.
This architecture remained commonplace over much of Mesopotamia in later millennia.
(3) Flanged discs or labrets. This linked paper demonstrates the use of labrets in various cultures around the world. Ubaid labrets were found in sufficient quantities and locations to establish their ubiquity. These items were attached to the lower lip by piercing. Mostly found in burials, one might question whether they were used in daily life. However, evidence of abrasion of the lower teeth against the flange of a labret seems to prove their daily wear at various Ubaid sites.
As the introductory linked paper explains, there is much evidence of labret usage around the world. However, I do not find published evidence of labret usage in Asia other than the Ubaid, and wonder if labret usage provides a Ubaid link to northeast Africa, notably Ethiopia and Sudan, where labrets were used as far back as 8700 BC–a couple thousand years earlier than the Ubaid artifacts we’re discussing. The above link to Africa states that the labret was invented independently around the world no less than six times. Lacking proof of linkage between labret users around the world since then, we’ll have to let that incredible statement stand. Incredible? That such a bizarre practice could have been independently created in the hoary past six times in widely separated places and grow popular and long-standing boggles my mind–but so do many present practices.
(4) Infant head-shaping. Despite the talk about there being nothing to identify Ubaid artifacts with a specific people group, rather than just as a material culture, a new artifact has emerged (finally been recognized) that is described in Chapter 9, “Ubaid Headshaping,” in the book Beyond the Ubaid. This practice is evidenced in Ubaid graves and appears to be unique to the Ubaid in all Asia, specifically the circumferential binding of infants heads to produce adults with elongated craniums. This is new information for middle eastern archaeology.
In fact, if circumferential shaped skulls are uniquely found among Ubaid artifacts in Mesopotamia, then we have a distinctly identifiable new people group. These may not be new genetically, but are new in an easily traceable cultural practice. This group might be foreign sourced slaves, a minority group of hoi polloi, the majority population, or an elite, but if it is proved to be unique and linked to other material artifacts, this could be decisive proof that there were uniquely identifiable people at those excavated villages having other Ubaid markers. If this practice was centered in Southern Mesopotamia, then we can identify it to a Ubaid “people” and not as adopted from Northern Mesopotamia or Susiana.
An earlier source on head shaping (1992) introduces other known head-shaping evidence found in the Fertile Crescent. This was not written as thoroughly (but 14 years earlier!) and the head-shaping does not seem to have been performed with anterior-posterior binding, but with other head shaping techniques. The shaping of the skulls displayed is less obvious. These were found in the Levant, Northern Mesopotamia, northwestern Iran in the Zagros mountains, and Southern Mesopotamia. The oldest mentioned was from pre-pottery Jericho. One of this source’s authors is Prof. Dr. Peter Akkermans, a key source on the Halaf in preceding Post 56.
A source on head-shaping in prehistoric Iran. Susiana (Iran) is at the east end of the Fertile Crescent and includes the east side of the lower Tigris valley and the Delta. Susiana’s oldest cultural links extend into the Zagros Mountains, but it ultimately melded into Sumer.
This is a good point to conclude today’s post.
We will resume with more about the Ubaid, before addressing the Ubaid-Halaf transition period. We shall dig deeper on this because, to my mind, this period builds the deep structural foundation for the subsequent Sumerian culture and its successors. It is useful to remind ourselves that 6500 BC (Halaf and Ubaid horizons) is near the beginning of the Holocene and Neolithic. These people with their labrets and infant head shaping were much more primitive than we might have realized up until now. This is a wake-up call to help us comprehend why the Halaf and Ubaid required another 2500 years just to produce the first glimmerings of Sumerian civilization at Uruk in 4000 BC.
Thanks for visiting,
R. E. J. Burke