The whole is different from the sum of its parts. Source.

Summary of this post. As Ubaid settlements prospered in southern Mesopotamia, the Ubaid culture’s major contributions combined to form a culture that was more than, and also different from, a mere sum of the Ubaid inventions.

Review of Ubaid inventions. Over the past ten posts, we found numerous developments among the Ubaid which laid the foundation for a revolution in humanity’s progress away from the hardscrabble subsistence of Neolithic farmers and hunter-gatherers, and toward a division of labor that would take mankind into unsuspected breakthroughs and intellectual advances.

1. Large scale irrigated farming with excess production generating wealth and exports.
2. Dense housing protected by city walls supporting (1.) above, with surrounding farmland.
3. Organizational complexity to manage (1.) and (2.) above.
4. Tripartite architecture for houses, temples, and administrative structures.
5. Buttressed wall structures with recessed niches allowing monumental construction.
6. A sense of personal identity which shows in self-decoration and housing.
7. City craftsmen supported by excess food production.
8. Standardized pottery, slow wheel production, with low decoration as first consumer goods.
9. Widespread material culture fosters trade from Persian Gulf to Mediterranean.
10. Community cemeteries.
11. Chalcolithic beginnings of copper mining, smelting, casting, and working.

All of the above emerged slowly, but as the whole gained critical mass, it was repeated until a community of southern Mesopotamian proto-cities emerged, each with its own farmland and irrigation within range of a short daily round-trip walking commute. As these settlements grew, it becomes clear to us, at a great distance in time, and eventually to the inhabitants, that they were the first of something we now call city-states—something far different than their forebears had ever experienced. We are familiar with Gestalt Theory and can see how the 11 listed Ubaid inventions lost their identity as something larger emerged. That idea is illustrated by the above picture of four melanges of objects which reveal the existence of things far different than what we perceive when examining each black object singly, rather than contextually in its array.

Major paleoclimatic events. In today’s world, we are constantly bombarded by claims and rebuttals regarding global warming and hypothesized consequences. Fifty years ago, the talk was about global cooling into another ice age. Warming and cooling events and trends have shaped man’s surroundings as far back in the past as we can find factual evidence of the temperatures and collateral changes in environment. If our present 20,000 year global warming had not started, most of the developed world would still be under the Northern Hemisphere glacier of the last ice age—and I doubt any of us would have been born, because life expectancy would still be at Ice Age hunting-gathering levels, i.e. man’s population would still be hovering at the then-sustainable level with less than 30 year lifespans. Infant mortality would be horrendous, and world population would remain static until something improved.

Thankfully, something did improve: the weather.

Below are listed the sequence of the larger natural events which shaped man’s direction out of that last ice age and into the Holocene and agricultural revolution, then through the Halaf-Ubaid-Uruk-Flood sequence to produce the Sumerian culture. Study this list to grasp the enormity of climate’s impact upon man’s progress through the Holocene.

1. Dansgaard–Oeschger (DO) events. These are evidenced by cyclicality of short but intense warming trends, followed by longer cooling trends, and have been identified through the past ice age. Their periodicity has been estimated as every 1470 years. These phenomena track with the following events.
2. Bond Events. These are best described as DO events extending into the present global warming period and causing the following paleoclimatic events with their creative destruction, closing chapters, and opening new ones.
3. 8.2 kiloyear event. (6200 to 5900 BC). A 300-year aridification and cooling in Mesopotamia. Its accompanying meltwater pulse expands the Persian Gulf, isolating the Ubaid from cousins in Susiana, while concentrating early Ubaid as encroaching coastlines force them to flee to higher ground. Aridification gave a huge stimulus to Ubaid irrigation farming, and a severe blow to Halaf dry farming, driving refugees into Southern Mesopotamia.
4. 5.9 kiloyear event. (3900 to 3200 BC). Long-term desiccation of Mesopotamia. Famines in the dry farming zone. Mass immigration to Southern Mesopotamia, diluting while cross-pollinating the Ubaid culture, thus producing the Uruk period.
5. Piora Oscillation. (3200 to 2900 BC). The Uruk period ends in a “Dark Age of Floods.” The havoc of the floods served as a catalyst leading to Dynastic Mesopotamia and the Sumerian culture, as chronicled in the Sumerian Kings List.
6. 4.2 kiloyear event a.k.a. 22nd century BC event. (2200 to 2100 BC) A century of aridification of Mesopotamia, leading to the depopulation of Northern Mesopotamia. Refugees flooded Southern Mesopotamia, overwhelming the Sumer-Akkad civilization, and led to its takeover by Gutian tribes from the Zagros Mountains. This event also ended the Old Kingdom in Egypt.

Having studied the above, you can review, enrich, and fortify your new understanding by studying this paper, and then this Chart of Climate and Civilization Changes.

Uruk Period. (3900 through 2900 BC).  This cultural environment extended from the end of the Ubaid period (marked by the 5.9 kiloyear event) to the end of the Great Floods (marked by the Piora Oscillation). You can gain a solid introduction to the Uruk Period by studying this and this.

Sumerian Kings List. This clay tablet (document) was just the latest (ca. 2000 BC) update of an already ancient list. It identifies prehistoric Sumerian kings and their cities of the Uruk Period, “Then the flood swept over,” followed by the succeeding Sumerian dynasties and their cities following the flood up to the moment the document was written.

Cities Before the Flood (all)

1. Eridu
2. Bad-Tibira
3. Larsa
4. Sippar
5. Shuruppak

“Then the flood swept over”, picture

Cities After the Flood (first three of many)

1. First Dynasty of Kish
2. First Dynasty of Uruk
3. First Dynasty of Ur

This is a good place to end today’s post. We’ll resume digging into the Uruk Period in the next post.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke

Halaf and Ubaid Territories Before Ubaid Displaces Halaf. Source.

Summary of today’s post. We will now reach closure on the Halaf and Ubaid predecessors to the Sumerian culture, summarizing the most comprehensive and current views on the Halaf-Ubaid Transition. As the Ubaid culture supplants the Halaf and spreads northwest through Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean and north into the Zagros Mountains, it also spreads southeast down the north coast of the Persian Gulf. In the Ubaid homeland of South Mesopotamia, Ubaid villages grow into cities which morph into Uruk and the other cities of South Mesopotamia.

We have been mining the 2010 Oriental Institute’s published report, Beyond the Ubaid, which contains the final versions of scholarly papers presented at an international workshop held in Grey College at the University of Durham, UK, in 2006. This is the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey of archaeological thinking on the Ubaid culture, its displacement of the Halaf culture, and its contributions to the Uruk culture. I suggest, if you haven’t already, that you download the PDF copy of the full book, offered free by the Oriental Institute via the link below.

Philip Karsgaard authored the 4^th theoretical framework (page 51) of Beyond the Ubaid  which is titled The Halaf-Ubaid  Transition: A Transformation Without A Center? He proposes there is little evidence the Ubaid material horizon expanded from Southern Mesopotamia into the Halaf territories by migrations of the Ubaid. Rather, he proposes that such an expansion is a figment of imagination incited during the first half of the 20th century by premature conclusions, poor choices in labeling ceramic artifacts, and an early bias toward attributing changes in material horizons to conquests. He suggests that the labels Ubaid and Halaf were misidentified with people groups rather than with two horizons of material artifacts named after the earliest excavation sites where they were identified.

After first reading his paper, I wanted to ridicule the idea, because there are some features of the Ubaid phenomenon that speak of a unique people, clearly different from the dry dirt farmers of Halaf. After forming and writing down my arguments, I checked his paper in several places and started to perceive wisdom in what he was saying. So, I spent several hours studying the article and reshaping my snap judgments. He presents several arguments, and I will summarize these to you as best I can.

Population Density of Northern and Southern Mesopotamia.

In Figure 4.4, p.58, Dr. Karsgaard compares the maximum and minimum settlement densities for five regions. To define settlement density, take the defined area in square kilometers and divide it by the number of settlement sites it contains. I will use the “maximum settlement density” numbers: Southern Mesopotamia [60 Km², 4.4 Km], Tell Beydar [50 Km², 3.9 Km], Deh Luran [20 Km², 2.5 Km], North Jazira (Northern Mesopotamia) [10 Km², 1.8 Km] , and Tell Brak [15 Km², 2.2 Km]. The first number shown above in brackets is the average area surrounding each settlement site (square kilometers), and the second number is the radius of this surrounding area (kilometers). (One Km = 0.6 miles. One Km² = 0.36 miles².)

The author’s intent is to show that in Southern Mesopotamia, on average, there is one known settlement site on every 60 Km² at maximum population density, and one site per 160 Km² at minimum population density—far less dense than the small towns and hamlets of the other regions in his list. He cites a study suggesting that northern Mesopotamia was more populated than the South in the late Halaf period, while ignoring the paucity of southern excavations.

This imbalance of sites exists because Archaeological field surveys are many and work well where the site reaches the surface (e.g. Tell Zeidan in the Jazira where pottery shards litter the surface)). However, these surveys don’t work at all where the sites are 50 to 100 feet down in the alluvial soil in Southern Mesopotamia, mostly without a trace, and remain forever abandoned in prehistory. Not all is lost, however, since new technologies such as Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) promise to allow much more economical surface surveys within the GPR’s depth limit.

Moreover, Dr. Karsgaard’s proposal that northern Mesopotamia had higher population density than the south is untenable on a more basic level, given the much smaller food-growing capacity of dry farming (with its variable rainfall, drought risks, and limited arable land) in most of the Halaf regions, especially when compared to wet (river irrigated) farming in the Ubaid region in the south. The Ubaid started first-time farming on virtually unlimited virgin, fertile land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and that land could be expanded for centuries by simply digging more canals to more virgin land. To produce crops on a rapidly expanding scale, the Ubaid opportunity and early success attracted huge canal and farming work forces cohabiting in dense cities and surrounding hamlets out to 5 Km (3 miles), while providing a wide variety of craftsmen and protection to inhabitants.

After the first couple hundred years into this urbanized farming system, the Ubaid would have been multiplying like rabbits. But the dry farming region of the Halaf would soon reach its sustainable population limit. A good question would be whether the boom-times in the south drew immigrants from below the dry farming line to the north (with less than 20” of annual rainfall) and from excess population above the dry farming line who wanted their own land. Such migrations seem logical to me.

Late Halaf and Early Ubaid Ceramics.

In Figure 4.1, Dr. Karsgaard presents comparisons of two rare Ubaid bowls with very fancy decoration from Tell Haji Mohammad and Tell Eridu. He then compares them with much more familiar fancy Halaf bowls from Tell Arpachiyah. He asserts all these finely decorated bowls are from the same time period. Then he points out that the decoration of the vast majority of Halaf and Ubaid pottery after this period was less decorated, most being undecorated. From this, he hypothesizes that these gaudy decorated Halaf and Ubaid pottery indicate a banquet-centered luxurious display of wealth during interactions among and between late Halaf and early Ubaid elites. If his provenance and dating are correct, this hypothesis seems reasonable.

Mature Ubaid Ceramics.

Dr. Karsgaard then attributes the later decline in decoration as a trend away from such personal (even diplomatic) showmanship toward some sort of communal, rather than personal, aggrandizement. By this stage, Ubaid ceramics are ubiquitous across the northern and Levantine Fertile Crescent from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, and the Halaf material horizon is no longer distinguishable.

He also suggests that during the Halaf-Ubaid transition, the slow potter’s wheel (tournette) led to faster production and to decorations easier to apply on the wheel, and thus simpler. And with demand for household ceramics, rather than elite conspicuous consumption, decorations became increasingly rare, as he illustrates in histograms for Tells ‘Abr and Eridu (p.55 Fig. 4.2) and in specific examples of simpler decorations in later Ubaid Ceramics (p. 56, Fig. 4.3).

Dr. Karsgaard’s Conclusions.

He said at the beginning of his article, “Peer-polity interaction is also explicitly concerned with increasing sociopolitical complexity, a developmental trajectory that is indeed often assumed for the Halaf-Ubaid transition and later Ubaid period, but perhaps less successfully demonstrated (p.60).” On first reading this, I challenged the good doctor’s words. “Increasing sociopolitical complexity…(is) less successfully demonstrated?” I was surprised he didn’t consider the appearance of large cities, the organization of canal digging and maintenance, huge monumental temples with infrastructure, the organization of large populations in burgeoning cities, and the emergence of community cemeteries to be more complex than managing dry farming in Halaf hamlets above the dry farming line where most Halaf populations were located. Perhaps I misread his statement and he meant, “Peer-polity interaction is also explicitly concerned with increasing sociopolitical complexity…(which is) perhaps less successfully demonstrated (in the erstwhile Halaf region after the Ubaid material culture displaced it.)”

Dr. Karsgaard concludes his arguments with the hypothesis that the Halaf-Ubaid transition was a “transformation without a center.” There is a systemic problem in hypothesizing “transformations without a center” and similar arguments where the data is limited and imbalanced by exogenous variables i.e. ancient sites (e.g. Tell Zeidan) representing one side of the argument are at or close to the surface and far cheaper to excavate than those on the other side of the argument, which are 50-100 feet (or more) below alluvial deposits and mostly unidentified. His conclusion from artificial—albeit well understood–silence (paucity of southern sites) is unconvincing. I would be more convinced if the impediment to the other side of the argument: the depth to be excavated, prohibitive expense to locate more settlements in southern Mesopotamia, and effects of the state of war in Iraq were factored into his conclusion.

New ways to date artifacts and thus test hypotheses

I would like to conclude today’s post by turning your attention to the promise offered by new technologies, and rapid improvements in earlier ones. Therein, I believe, lie the tools to better resolve many current conundrums, such as the Halaf-Ubaid transition. Today’s tool of enhanced C14 analysis is explained by Felix Höflmayer in Chronologies of Collapse: Climate Change, wherein he applies it to resolve a specific archaeological hypothesis in this Oriental Institute presentation.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke

]]> http://www.raisinguppharaoh.com/2015/09/26/61-roots-of-sumer-10-halaf-ubaid-peer-polity/feed/ 0 http://www.raisinguppharaoh.com/2015/09/19/60-roots-of-sumer-halaf-ubaid-at-tell-zeidan-part-9/ http://www.raisinguppharaoh.com/2015/09/19/60-roots-of-sumer-halaf-ubaid-at-tell-zeidan-part-9/#comments Sun, 20 Sep 2015 00:03:43 +0000 http://www.raisinguppharaoh.com/?p=3552  

Overview of this post. In the past eight posts, we have examined the material cultures of the Halaf in the northern and western Fertile Crescent, the Ubaid in southern Mesopotamia, and Susiana to the east, while declaring them roots of the Sumerian culture. If we had not investigated these predecessors, we might have mistaken the birth of Uruk and the Sumerian culture as spontaneous and inexplicable in both their rapid expansion and complexity. These three cultures evolved with limited interaction over the seventh and early sixth millennia BC.

In the late sixth millennium BC, the more efficient and collaborative Ubaid culture spread through the Halafian and Susianan territories, and grew predominant. In the early fifth millennium BC, the maturing Ubaid culture gave birth to the city of Uruk and its southern Mesopotamian sister cities, which in turn birthed the foundational Sumerian culture. In today’s post, we’ll examine the spread of the Ubaid material culture into Halafian territory at the Tell Zeidan excavation. 

The Halaf and Ubaid Cultures Before Ubaid Supremacy.

In this 9^th post on the predecessor roots of Sumer, you may be questioning the reason for dwelling so long on the prehistoric cultures leading up to the Sumerians—especially the idea that anything foundational could have occurred over the two millennia 7000 to 5000 BC. After all, you might say, that period started in the Neolithic and finished in the Chalcolithic—and those people were such slow learners. On the contrary, such thinking is identical to the modern Millennials’ contempt for the two millennia from 0 to 2000 AD, and their refusal to study and understand the thoughts of “dead white men.”

 Without those dead white men and their innovations, we would still be living in the Middle Ages as tenant farmer slaves of large landowners, periodically and mercilessly thinned by plagues, famines, and feudal warfare, with an average life expectancy of 40. (see footnote One below). And without the earlier innovations of the Ubaid, we would likely be living in an even more brutal world, in small dispersed and illiterate communities enslaved to natural hazards such as famine and pestilence and an average life expectancy of 30. After all, man had lived through prior ice ages and warming periods just like ours—but made no lasting progress before our current global warming. Progress is not an entitlement, despite today’s Progressive fantasies. Rather, it is a reward for individual merit, creativity, hard work and accomplishment–and a society that gives the highest rewards to those who demonstrate such virtues will progress mightily. Clearly, we know of such folks in recent millennia. And we can be certain there were such folks among the Ubaid.

Therefore, I think this would be a good time for you to hear an eminent archaeologist speak on the importance and the artifactual evidence of that critical transition in the period 6500 to 5000 BC. For this, we will watch the 57 minute Oriental Institute video Exploring the Roots of Mesopotamian Civilization at Tell Zeidan Syria, presented by Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute and author of the 2^nd article in our PDF book Beyond the Ubaid, which we’ve cited in prior posts. In the next link, skip the introduction and go directly to minute 4:53, where Dr. Stein takes the podium. Here is Dr. Stein’s presentation.

Now, after Dr. Stein’s presentation, think about his excavation in Syria. Happily, we’ve already gotten a lot out of Tell Zeidan, well into the Halaf, and with prospects of finding even earlier Neolithic and Paleolithic artifacts. But, that won’t happen soon, as Syria has unraveled before our eyes in the short time since Dr. Stein’s presentation. Lately, ISIS has been methodically destroying artifacts—remember Dr. Ackerman’s excavation at Tell Sabi Abyad and the destruction of his dig house? Expect much the same for Tell Zeidan.

This is a good time to remember that, by far, most Middle Eastern artifacts are still safely buried underground—and the best that have been excavated are dispersed around the world in museums. So we shouldn’t lose heart. It is too late for these cultural Luddites to roll back history. But a lot of blood will flow before they are stopped. And the Millennials will find themselves forced to fight or die in the conflict, regardless of their lofty sounding but spineless sophistry, just like hundreds of millions died in prior generations in all wars.

Today’s young adults are not the first generation to which a political deceiver has proclaimed, “Peace in our time,” while a murderous enemy could still be easily stopped. Eighty years ago, Prime Minister Chamberlain said “Peace in our time” to his fellow Britons and they sat on their hands, and World War II came to their homeland from existential foes similar to those arrayed against us today. Here’s the WWII butcher’s bill.

In 700 BC, someone said, “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” In 900 BC, someone said, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” More recently, someone said, “’Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Gil Stein’s video is a tough act to follow, so this is a good point to end this post. We’ll take a last look at the Halaf-Ubaid transition in the next post, then move on to Uruk and the Sumerian culture.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke

FOOTNOTE ONE: If you really want to understand the Middle Ages from 500 to 1500 AD, I recommend that you become familiar with Professor Philip Daileader and his magnificent 72 DVD lectures covering the full period: Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. I and one of my sons took all 72 lectures at a one or two per day pace last year (2014). There is not one “yawner” in the series. We were both amazed at what we learned about the profound changes (yeah, real progress) over this 1,000 year period–an epoch, in truth, connecting the late Roman Empire with today’s world. I have no ax to grind here. Never met the man. No $ involved. I just appreciate superior accomplishment and want to credit everyone who demonstrates it. And I want to share this with you, because you have an interest in investigating our cultural roots.

Harbor at 4th millennium Eridu. By Таис Гило [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Preview of this post. We will continue to mine Beyond the Ubaid, the 2006 conference papers published in a PDF book by the Oriental Institute in 2010. We are assuming you have retained the copy downloaded in the prior post, and remember the instructions on how to maneuver through it using Adobe Reader. If not, you can easily repeat those steps by going to the download and Adobe Reader links in Post 57 in the right column on this page.  This post will focus on the excavations at Eridu and the topline conclusions of Dr. Joan Oates regarding what was discovered there, the issue of how to handle artifactual information that contradicts earlier hypotheses, and how likely we are to find more new facts about the early Ubaid in Southern Mesopotamia. Then we will refocus on the 5.9 kilo-year event, its impact upon greater Susiana, specifically Choga Mish and Susa, and upon Eridu and the Ubaid in Southern Mesopotamia.

Credit: www.ancient.eu

Use the PDF’s Maps. The above map will support this post pretty well, but refer to the three maps in the first pages of the PDF of Beyond the Ubaid for all the book’s mentioned sites labelled with the name of their excavations. I prefer the above map because it shows the extent of the Persian Gulf in the Ubaid period. The PDF’s map on page ix shows today’s Persian Gulf coastline. As you’ll see in today’s post, that coastline rose to Ur and Eridu by the 5^th millennium BC, then silted down to today’s coast over the next 6,000 years.

Paper 3. More thoughts on the Ubaid Period. Joan Oates. P.45-50.

The following is my personal summary and conclusions from this paper, tempered by material in my earlier posts.

Author Joan Oates is expert in the prehistory of Mesopotamia and the Director of the Excavation at Tell Brak.

Eridu is the earliest city in Mesopotamia and is still considered the first city in the world. More remarkable, Eridu remained prominent for several millennia, from deep prehistory into historic times, and wasn’t abandoned until about 600 BC, nearly five millennia later!

Here is a slide show of the present condition of Eridu. Note that in slides 2 and 15 you can see the ziggurat at Ur in the distance. Here are more photos of the Eridu excavations and artists’ conceptions of the city at various times.

Excavation of Eridu.

In the excavations of Eridu there were 15 material layers below (deeper and older than) the earliest Ubaid layer. Artifacts in the bottom (oldest) 12 layers (#37 up to #26) were labelled “Eridu” and the one above at level #25 showed a ceramic style recognized and  named after its type site at Hajji Muhammad. Based upon purely ceramic identification, this caused some to think that these lower layers represented cultures that predated the Ubaid, because the first definitely Ubaid ceramics appear in the next layer up i.e. layer #24.

Note. The labeling convention is that layer #1 is the topmost and you count layers down. The Eridu excavation goes down to layer #37 at the bottom at Eridu. “Bottom” is usually defined as coming to virgin soil, however Leonard Woolley dug down through many levels and found nine feet of pure clay at Ur. He didn’t stop digging and found many more layers of Ur below the clay, which was deposited by a big flood. The Sumerian Kings List says something about that flood. How deep would a flood be to deposit nine feet of clay?

At the time of Eridu’s excavation, the theory was these changes in material culture marked an invasion by the folks with the new material cultures. This could be a good assumption if the prior material culture was capped by a destruction layer. Such “invasion” thinking was the default at the time, because the predisposition of archaeologists was to see an invasion as the only reason for changes in material culture. The fly in this ointment at Eridu was there were no identifiable destruction layers at these transitions to support the hypotheses of invasions.

It is now recognized that these same two material cultures (Eridu and Hajji Muhammad) are also found below the lowest Ubaid layer at the type site Tell Al-Ubaid, without destruction layers. Lacking a significant time gap (C14) between the transition layers, it’s a fair assumption that these lower layers are de facto the earliest phases of the first indigenous culture at Eridu and Al-Ubaid. This thinking would hypothesize that there’s no earlier “people” to be found in southernmost Mesopotamia, and the earlier layers add up to evolution leading to the Ubaid material culture. Ergo, lacking any reason not to do so, I’ll identify Eridu city as proto-Ubaid, and the Ubaid people—as I did previously—as immigrants from “Dilmun Valley.”

Note that it’s too late to relabel the earliest Eridu, Hajji Muhammad, and Al-Ubaid material artifacts as Ubaid because that would create a logistic (and fractious theoretical) nightmare. Moreover, this idea begs the question. We are only talking about labels for material cultures–not people groups. I am looking for a Ubaid people group. Many archaeologists at this conference were trying to deconstruct that very idea, especially outside of South Mesopotamia. Archaeologists won’t introduce ambiguity in ceramic labeling and risk losing consistency of the ceramic labeling references from over a hundred years of published archaeological research.

This revision of hypotheses (and its impact on prior published research) is a recurring issue in archaeology, but it’s important for us to understand. Such revision is also precluded by the certainty that there is never “settled science” and someone will invariably excavate something inconsistent which has revolutionary implications for prior theoretical constructs. Isn’t that the purpose of scientific research: to get closer to truth? Will we ever be able to excavate widely enough to increase the data?  Dr. Oates suggests that’s unlikely because these ancient folks picked geographically favorable locations that are now covered by modern towns and cities.

Meltwater pulse (MWP-1C) raises Persian Gulf coastline.

Paper 15. A monumental failure: The collapse of Susa. Frank Hole. P.227-244.

You will see in the above chart of ancient sea levels that during the period 6000 to 5000 BC (8000 to 7000 BP) there was a 10 meter surge in sea level worldwide , including the Persian Gulf. This surge represents the 8.2 Kiloyear Event (6200 BC) resulting from the rapid draining of North American glacial lakes into the North Atlantic. As you can see in the earlier map, this 10 meter rise in the Persian Gulf isolated much of Susiana from their prior close communication with the developing Ubaid culture (compare the coastlines in the map). Along with this event also came a severe cooling period that lasted about 150 years. The combination of cold and rising sea level would have greatly stressed those living in Susiana and the Ubaid, as elsewhere.

Choga Mish (near Susa) was occupied from 6800 BC (8800 BP) through the Uruk period to 3000 BC (5000 BP), and therefore during the 10 meter rise in sea level and severe drop in temperature. Following the surge, the sea did not recede but continued to rise to this day. Rather, the delta continued to solidify with river silt. Thus the dividing water was slowly displaced by new alluvial plains relinking Susa with Southern Mesopotamia by 4000 BC.

Choga Mish had shared the Southern Mesopotamian culture including oral legends and mythology related to snakes until their separation by the new bay. Dr. Hole hypothesizes that the large platform-temple at Choga Mish was dedicated to using magic to control macro environmental hazards such as storms, sea level, earthquakes, floods, droughts – things like the 8.2 KY event. The passage of time and occurrence of environmental catastrophes eventually demonstrated magic didn’t work and the platform-temple at Choga Mish was destroyed as evidenced by an ash level. (Global Warming shamans beware!)

Dr. Hole presents rubbings (drawings) of various stamp seals from throughout Susiana on PDF pages 235 and 236. In these images we see men and snakes, men handling snakes, and men handling various animals. He interprets these as clues as to both the magicians at Choga Mish and their evolution toward a more priestly role as intermediaries between people and gods at Susa, later.

After an indefinite period, another platform-temple was erected nearby at Susa, with the priestly focus proposed by Dr. Hole. This platform (temple) was dedicated to spirits (gods) as prime movers behind those large natural hazards, and to priests devising increasingly complex rituals aimed at influencing the gods. Whatever they did didn’t work at Susa, either, and the temple was destroyed, marked by an ash level. (Global Warming priests beware!)

Meanwhile, across the bay at Eridu, the Ubaid were developing their own primitive cosmology. They had somehow concluded that beneath the earth’s surface was a limitless underground sea of living fresh water which they deified as Abzu. Nonetheless, they continued to produce those Ophidian, snake-headed figurines. Did the figurines depict priestesses and priests to Abzu? Is Abzu the next personification of the Snake? After all, both conceptions reside underground.

This is a good point to end this post.

We’ll resume surveying Beyond the Ubaid in the next post, learning how the Ubaid material culture expanded northwestward while forming the foundation of the coming Sumerian culture in southern Mesopotamia.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke

Ubaid “Ophidian” Figurine of Mother Nursing Child. 4500 BC  British Museum.

Overview of this post. We will continue to use the 2010 Oriental Institute publication, Beyond the Ubaid, to dig deeper into the prehistoric Ubaid phenomenon. The Ubaid accomplished the transition from Neolithic hunter-gatherers (7500 BC) to surplus-producing agricultural and urban communities. By 4000 BC, the Uruk culture emerged, and after the great Mesopotamian flooding around 3000 BC, morphed into the Sumerian culture.

This week, I will be using less web links and more references to the free PDF copy of this book, with occasional author and page cites. I believe it is necessary for many of you that I provide instruction on how to maneuver in Adobe reader to take advantage of this PDF book and other PDF documents which I will use in the future. When you learn this, you will be able to access a vast treasury of PDF research papers, which would be ponderous to read–at best–without this knowledge. All you will need to know is in this short Adobe Reader instruction page, so add it to your web favorites and read it now.

Then, download the PDF of Beyond the Ubaid from its link above to your desktop for your short-term convenience (you can delete it after we finish using it, because you can find it again at the same Oriental Institute website). Be sure to expand the PDF’s print size using the “+” and “-” buttons atop the Adobe Reader page (I like 150% because the font quality and readability is vastly better). Use the Adobe Reader up/down arrow to go down to the book’s index. Use Adobe’s PDF page box to get to specific articles and authors. Use the Adobe “Edit/Advanced Search” box to check the entire book on any specific topic you choose, such as “headshaping.”

Try out these reading and search features on the Beyond the Ubaid PDF before proceeding below. My writing in this post is meant to suggest a useful structure for the Ubaid findings, and to send you to read articles in the book that are essential to understand that structure. How much you get out of this resource will entirely depend upon your attention to these instructions, and your reading of the suggested papers, and others in the book that attract your interest.

Last week, we identified five unique artifacts that differentiate Ubaid settlement layers in archaeological excavations from other settlement layers in southern Mesopotamia, the homeland of the Ubaid, and throughout the northern arch of the Fertile Crescent.

1. “Black on buff” pottery.
2. Homes and temples with tripartite architecture.
3. Flanged disks or labrets.
4. Infant head shaping.

This week, we are going to add to, further describe, and categorize that list in order to identify both new and older hypotheses found in Beyond the Ubaid. Our purpose is to flesh out the Ubaid people as unique from the Halaf people who appear to have later adopted the Ubaid material horizon or, perish the thought, been absorbed in a Ubaid expansion (migration) into Halaf lands. You and I will examine these characteristics and decide for ourselves whether they are sufficiently unique to identify the Ubaid as distinctly “other” than the Halaf. Some archaeologists among the 23 authors in this book are reluctant to see a Ubaid people, rather than simply a material horizon that became increasingly popular (like the global reach of Apple phones and Coca-Cola). I ask you, “Is there sufficient evidence that the characteristics described below would describe a people who thought themselves distinctly different from the Halaf people to their North and West?” I’ll try to present the evidence without bias so you can decide for yourself. Below are the enhanced artifactual markers, and my analysis of what they imply.

(1) The material culture. Read Article 2. Local Identities and Interaction Spheres: Modelling Regional Variation in the Ubaid Horizon. Gil J. Stein more precisely describes the characteristic pottery called “black on buff” or “brown on buff” as “chocolate-brown greenish ware ceramics made on a tournette or slow wheel.” (p.23). There are tools and weapons which he identifies as unique markers of an Ubaid site: baked clay mullers (of tea, spices, herbs), baked clay sickles, polished stone mace heads, and polished stone palettes. (p.34). I suggest that baked clay sickles (rather than wooden Neolithic sickles with flint or obsidian inserts for cutting edges) are made because clay was abundant in Southern Mesopotamia, whereas flint and obsidian had to be imported. In the 7^th through 5th millennia BC, firewood to bake the clay would have been abundant because the area was still moist, but would become rare after the 5.9 Kiloyear event (You will recall Dr. Akkerman’s study of the effect of this on the Halaf in post 56). Other artifactual markers unique to the Ubaid include labrets, shaped skulls, Ophidian figurines, communal cemeteries, tripartite home and temple architecture, and buttress-recess public architecture, all of which are treated separately below.

(2) Concept of Personal Identity. Read Article 8. Figuring Out Identity: The Body and Identity in the Ubaid. Karina Croucher. The Ubaid identified a subset of their population by headshaping some infants (see Art. 9. Lorentz p.125ff). Another subset wore labrets in their lower lip, and others wore ear spools. (Stein p.30) (We do not currently know who were in these subsets i.e. what differentiated them, except that none of these were found in Halaf levels of excavations). The Ubaid were also the first people known to bury their dead in community cemeteries. Their tripartite home architecture introduces a recognizable desire for personal privacy (along with personal safety), a huge leap forward from the beehive of Catalhoyuk.

(3) Burial practices massively shift to once-and-final cemetery interment in 5th Millennium. (Croucher p.116) The Ubaid were also the first known to bury their dead just once in community cemeteries outside the town. This replaced first burying (or exposing the body) to remove the flesh, then a second time in a family bone repository, or final burial under or beside the home. Ubaid buried adults with standardized grave goods (Sievertsen p.201) and adornment (Croucher p.116) signifying there may have been only minor social distinctions. Archaeologists look for evidence of distinctions among people as a marker that a “complex” society exists, and as evidence of the wherewithal by which city living can be managed. (Think about the quality of city life without effective management–like some cities in today’s news.) This burial practice was implemented across the full Ubaid horizon (Stein p.30)—concurrent with the spread of the Ubaid material culture. Implementation of this practice is now starting to look more like the city culture of the 4^th Millennium BC i.e. Uruk. Without cemeteries, it would be difficult to control the spread of plagues and lesser epidemics in the close quarters of cities.

Female “Ophidian figurines with coffee-bean” eyes. Univ. of Pennsylvania

(4) “Ophidian” figurines with “coffee-bean” eyes. Read Article 10. A Snake in the Grass: Reassessing the Ever-Intriguing Ophidian Figurines. Aurelie Daems. Archaeologists named figurines like the one atop this post, the two figures above, and the one below “Ophidian” because the faces look like snakes i.e. ophidia.

“Ophidian” nursing mother and child figurine. Univ. of Pennsylvania

As I pondered the two figurines depicting mothers and  nursing babes, the two female figurines side-by-side above, and the hooded “cobra” figurines from Susa (Daems p.156), I was struck with a recognition, of sorts. The Biblical relationship between Eve and the Snake originated in a pleasant garden similar to mythical Dilmun. This is an ancient story which could have spawned a conception in Ubaid oral-mythology of Eve’s fallen offspring as spiritual children of the Snake. A child of the Snake would have snakelike features and inherit characteristics of its father.

This would be consistent with a spiritual interpretation of the long-term consequences of the Biblical story: (1) humanity descended from Adam and Eve and are no longer children of their creator, but children of the Snake; (2) the attitude of these descendants progresses into an ever-increasing alienation from their creator; and (3) there are no exemptions from the creator’s decree. Various philosophies and religions offer ways to redeem devotees from this slavery to sin and death. Feel free to skip over my personal belief about this conundrum as a Christian, but here it is, and here’s how I was persuaded to accept it as a matter of my own free will. The Ubaid had nothing but their folklore and traditions to work with, but their fear-filled path spawned the subsequent Sumerian pantheon of rebel demons against the creator.

These reptilian heads could imply the Ubaid were worshiping the Snake, and the shaped-headed infants were raised to be its priests and priestesses. Don’t misunderstand, this is just my first impression (albeit one I can’t shake) after seeing the mother and child. It is not archaeological thinking. I am an imaginative fiction writer looking at ancient artifacts, and want to share these observations with you to stir your curiosity about these figurines. Moreover, archaeologists still don’t know the background of these figurines, what they depict, or why there was headshaping.

(5) Home and Monumental Architecture. Read Article 14. Buttress-Recess Architecture and Status Symbolism in the Ubaid Period. Uwe Sievertsen. We discussed the tripartite home floorplan and its application to larger construction in the prior post (also see Carter and Philip p.4 and Stein p.23). Stein introduces the niched and buttressed tripartite design of Ubaid temples as a cultural marker. Some challenge that this architecture really was transferred beyond Southern Mesopotamia and the homeland of the Ubaid.

This is a good point to end this post. In the next post we will resume digging into and clarifying the Ubaid phenomenon, then begin to study the Halaf-Ubaid transition period.

Thanks for visiting.

R. E. J. Burke

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

Note on Revision 1 to this post: Corrected “anterior-posterior” head shaping to “circumferential” head shaping (or binding).

Halaf Culture Bowl and Plate From Arpachiyah. 5500-5000 BC. British Museum.

Preview of this post. Last week, we introduced the Samarra, Hassuna, and Halaf cultures of Northern Mesopotamia. We also observed the Ubaid refugees from the Dilmun Valley (finally filled with seawater and now known as the Persian Gulf) swelling the population of Southern Mesopotamia and gathering into cities to enable large mutually beneficial projects, foremost of which was to irrigate the remaining fertile but arid Tigris-Euphrates Valley. While great wealth (and thus power) was just forming in Southern Mesopotamia, we saw the three promising Neolithic cultures of Northern Mesopotamia merge into one: with the Halaf seemingly dominant. This week, we will look deeper at that Halaf culture, seeking to get a reasonably good feel for its nature. All the while, we must remember that we are searching the pre-literate Neolithic, and all of our conclusions will depend upon material artifacts, and archaeology’s hypothetical interpretations.

Prof. dr. Peter Akkermans. As I searched for the latest on Halaf, I concluded that Dr. Akkermans seems to have been doing the most visible excavating and publishing on Halafian origins, and is challenging prior hypotheses about the formation and nature of that culture. I added him to this website’s Archaeologists page, and now proceed to that excavation and begin to give you leads for your own research (as deep as you care to go) as-well-as a summary overview of his work. Of course, I’m certain you’re informed on the warfare in Syria and won’t be surprised to find that archaeological excavations have slammed on the brakes for now. Even worse, much of the artifacts from his most important dig, Tell Sabi Abyad, have been dumped out at the site’s storage facility. Of course, no one can assess that damage yet, but most modern archaeology makes digital images (often in 3D) of important artifacts as soon as possible after discovery. In this way, the artifacts along with the reports are digitized and added to the world’s “cloud,” hopefully.

Tell Sabi Abyad. This excavation website is terrific, one of the best–if not the best–I have seen in terms of user friendliness and thoroughness. I want you to take advantage of this website and carefully examine and read all the dropdown menus. As is the excavation, so is this website’s content supervised by Dr. Akkermans. Its great orderliness will give you a quick and thorough insight into this vitally important excavation, which will create the foundation for your understanding and enjoyment of what follows below, and your own inquiries. For those of you starting the Fall trimester or semester, this would be a good object lesson on how to approach all of your major inquiries. For the rest of us, a good “executive summary” is the best way to get our feet wet in a new subject. And don’t fail to add the Links and the Publications to your source list. I already downloaded a handful of Akkermans’ PDF documents on subjects that interest me.

Death and Dying in the Neolithic Near East. Burial customs are a defining attribute of any culture. Here, Dr. Akkermans describes those of the Halaf culture. You should read enough of this short section to get a feel for how burial customs are described by an archaeologist.

Old and New Perspectives on the Origins of the Halaf Culture. By reading this paper in its entirety, I gained a broad perspective of the similarities and differences between the surviving Halaf culture and those other cultures (e.g. Samarra) that were absorbed into it. I also gained insight into how much weight Dr. Akkermans gives different aspects of the comparison.

8.2 Kiloyear Event. This linked Wikipedia page describes this global Paleoclimatic event as resulting from rapid and massive inflows of glacial melt-water from the final collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet and the draining of Lake Agassiz into the North Atlantic. The 200 to 400 year drop in Northern Hemisphere temperature starting in 6200 BC coincides with transitional events in the Halaf culture currently being investigated by a new project led by Dr. Akkermans at Leiden University. It is very interesting that this Leiden project link refers to this new project with the enigmatic statement: “The integration of new data and insights from recent fieldwork will throw a completely new light on what has so far been one of the darkest periods in the history of the Near East.” Sounds exciting. I intend to stay tuned to this man’s work on this now recognized lead–a fine illustration of the slow process of “connecting the dots” across all of science. I suspect this 8.2K Event may prove to be the catalyst that caused the Halaf culture to collapse and submerge into the Ubaid. 

Tell Sabi Abyad on Wikipedia. This will give you more leads and references on this important dig.

Tell Sabi Abyad Facebook Page. This may be the best mechanism for keeping up with the dig.

Early Ubaid influence at Choga Mami in southern tip of Halaf Culture. Source.

Halaf Religion. Since we’re in the preliterate Neolithic, we can only probe Halafian religious culture by examining artifacts. Googling “ancient tell Halaf neolithic goddess sculpture” yields these photos. (Be sure to check the labels on each picture.) These mother goddess figurines predominate in the late Paleolithic and Neolithic, as we may recall they did in the Indus Valley Civilization (Harappa), and virtually everywhere in West Asia–except with the Indo-Europeans. These Earth Mother figurines uniformly portray morbidly obese female forms, which represent, among other things, a female deity who enjoys superabundant food.

Choga Mami. This link opens an Oriental Institute paper “Excavations at Choga Mami, Iraq,” wherein you will see an early encroachment of the Ubaid culture into the Halaf culture. You will recall my prior descriptions of the process by which the Ubaid immigrants in Southern Mesopotamia gathered in mega-villages to concentrate manpower in order to dig canals and irrigate the arid savannah between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Choga Mami had long been a Halaf town, but British archaeologists found clear evidence of irrigation canals in its later excavation levels. Such copycat diffusion of knowledge was one way that Ubaid culture penetrated the Halaf, and may be the way Halaf culture had spread among its predecessors.

This is a good point to complete this post. We will resume in the next post with a closer examination of the Ubaid culture, its development, and its assimilation of the Halaf culture.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke

End Note:

“Before Present” definition. I have been tardy in giving you the precise definition behind “BP.” It keys off 1950 as the “Present.” So if an artifact is radiocarbon dated at 5065 years ago, we would know that it will translate into 5000 BP (5065-2015+1950) i.e. BP means Before 1950.

Preview of this post. In the last post, we saw 800 miles of Tigris-Euphrates Valley sink below the waves as the global sea level rose 400 feet from glacial melt-water since the Last Glacial Maximum. We now call this submerged river bed the Persian Gulf. Those who moved upstream kept fond primal memories of life in the valley they left behind, which could never be found again, and which they called Dilmun and largely remembered as a paradise. We know about Dilmun from oral Sumerian folktales which were written down in cuneiform a couple thousand years later. Forced to abandon prior homes by the encroaching sea, the valley occupants had four choices: (1) move north into Iran, (2) south up the banks of the new sea to form (the new) Dilmun, (3) by boat to Meluhha (the Sumerian name for the Indus Valley civilization), or  (4) upstream into Southern Mesopotamia to form proto-Sumer, which I would identify with the Ubaid. These who came from Dilmun  into Southern Mesopotamia in the 7th millennium B.C. were not yet recognizable as Sumerians of the 4th millennium B.C. Rather, these immigrants formed the Ubaid culture, competed with the Halaf Culture of northern Mesopotamia, with Indo-Iranians in Susiana, and others for 2,500 years, and eventually absorbed most of them. The beginning of this long-term acculturation process is the subject of today’s post.

 Neolithic Age. Progress through the Neolithic is measured by artifactual criteria. The order and dates in which these defining criteria were fulfilled varied widely by location around the world. We have found isolated tribes in the past century which were and remain still stuck in the pre-Neolithic. The earliest and most thorough progress through these criteria has been recorded by archaeologists in the Fertile Crescent. As with all science, such “proof” is only temporary, until new evidence disproves the previous theory. There is no “settled science,” by definition.

Yarmukian Culture 6400-6000 BC. Excavation dating shows Jericho apparently led the way with Yarmukian pottery, thus positing the Levant as first in the introduction of ceramic pottery  (Remember that no science is settled. The next dig elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent could uncover a calibrated older pottery fragment). From there, the pottery revolution spread so rapidly into northern Mesopotamia that we could be accused of quibbling about a mere 400 year difference in C¹⁴ dating, which is customarily presented at one standard deviation and thus makes the difference statistically insignificant at a range of 8000 years.

The Dry Farming Line in the Fertile Crescent. Source.

Dry Farming. Farming developed in two directions in Mesopotamia: that which was done with adequate rainfall early in the Agricultural Revolution, and that which was later developed on a large scale using artificial irrigation from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. The line of the “southern limit of dry farming” runs right through the Levant and Mesopotamia in the above map. Rainfall north of the line was adequate to farm without irrigation. Rainfall south of the line was insufficient, thus driving urbanization to assemble the huge manpower needed to dig and maintain canals to distribute the substantial river water to the immensely fertile alluvial plain.

Early Halaf, Hassuna, and Samarra Cultures. Source.

Hassuna and Samarra Cultures  6000-5500 BC. These first farmers irrigated with rain north of the dry farming line. Both of these northern Mesopotamian cultures are identified primarily by specific styles of pottery. Hassuna pottery is represented by the first three items in the top row of the this link (you can check the rest of the items, but you must click each and assure its provenance).Hassuna ware is believed to be the earliest Neolithic pottery. You can easily see that Samarra pottery in this link has a finer fabric and is decorated more artistically than Hassuna (most of the first rows are Samarran but be sure to check the provenance of each).

Halaf Culture  6100-5100 BC. The Hassuna and Samarra cultures were absorbed by the Halaf culture, which farmed north of the dry farming line to their west. The development from Pre-pottery Neolithic to Pottery Neolithic and then Chalcolithic was pioneered here in the Fertile Crescent, ranging across the Levant and Mesopotamia, within the larger Halaf Culture (colored areas below) and the Yarmukian Culture along the Jordan Valley, west of the dry farming line. Halaf ceramics, especially those of Arpachiyah were the most elegant and beautiful I have encountered in any of the cultures of that era and for the next couple of millennia in Mesopotamia. Something magical happened at Arpachiyah, but subsequent Ubaid and Sumerian  “progress” in Mesopotamia snuffed it out. I dream of a colony of artists living in tholoi (see Arpachiyah site map) who took Halaf ceramics to their maximum potential, then evacuated to a more hospitable environment–perhaps Harappa–until the Indo-Iranians arrived. I chronicled their ceramics in my novels as antiques treasured by the elites centuries later.

Halaf Culture Absorbs Hassuna and Samarra Cultures. Source.

Ubaid Culture 6500-3800 BC. In the prior post, we studied the origin of the Ubaid people who migrated upriver from the 800-mile-long submerged stretch of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, now called the Persian Gulf. These people had been living within that river valley as sea level rose from glacial melt-water after the Last Glacial Maximum. This Ubaid migrated upriver, not changing their riverine lifestyle any faster than they had to.

By 6500 BC, those displaced upriver would have arrived in what we’re calling Southern Mesopotamia in large numbers. These immigrants from the erstwhile 800 mile-long riverine culture would have gradually concentrated in the dry but shortened fertile plain between the prosperous Halaf farmers north of the dry farming line and the delta facing the recently formed Persian Gulf.

It is not a stretch to perceive that the higher population density and compelling need to produce lots of food from the dry yet fertile savannah led to the invention of irrigation canals. It would have started on a small scale among the more sociable immigrant farmers–probably a large tribe. Once their success was seen, the assembly of other groups would rapidly follow until virtually everyone in Southern Mesopotamia had congregated into burgeoning towns. One can imagine something like the frontier towns in the western USA two centuries ago.

Their productivity would have far exceeded that of individual farming, and such success would have produced wealth beyond their wildest imaginations. The homes would become larger and more comfortable. A revolutionary new class of entrepreneurial craftsmen would begin forming, the earliest making immense fortunes. It doesn’t take a genius to imagine that such success would feed upon itself. The first cities would appear huge to their residents. Elites would form. Many would grow fat from the unprecedented abundance of food. Ambitions would grow boundless. Envy would arise and spread. 

Then they would look upriver at those previously envied farmers with the pretty pottery.

This is a good point to conclude this post.

In the next post, we’ll resume here as a confrontation of some sort looms between these uber-rich proto-Ubaid “modern” farmers and those hard-scrabble Halaf farmers upriver who live closest to the dry farming line and are surviving at the whim of their rain gods.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke

Sea Level Rises From Glacial Melt During Current Global Warming. Partial Source.

Paleoclimatology, Migration, and Cultural Memories. We can compare the facts shown in the above chart of the rise of sea level over time with the facts in the modern depth chart of the Persian Gulf shown below. For instance, we can locate the seashore of the people of the ancient Tigris-Euphrates valley at the 120 meter depth contour in the southeast corner of the map, lying unlabeled between the 140 and 100 meter contours. Just southeast of the 140 meter contour, the depth of the Gulf of Oman plummets to a 1,000 meter contour. The above chart defines the 120 meter contour as the lowest sea level of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). So, we can be confident that the ancestors of the people who migrated northwest up the Tigris-Euphrates Valley were located along the now-submerged 800 mile course (1250 kilometers) of the river and also in its ancient river delta, where the fresh river water flowed into very deep ocean (where the map is marked “Arabian Shelf).” Over 20,000 years ago, these people gradually moved upriver as the first Melt Water Pulse (MWP-1Ao) raised their shoreline to the 100 meter contour (their latest coastline) about 15,000 years Before Present; then with MWP-1A to the 80 meter contour about 13,000 B.P. and 60 meter contour about 11,000 BP; then with MWP-1B to the 40 meter contour about 8,000 BP, and 20 meters by 7,000 BP (5,000 BC), and had pretty much reached the present sea level around 5,000 BP (3,000 BC), the time setting of my novels. Wikipedia provides a useful summary of this Holocene Glacial Retreat in the Persian Gulf, and on a global scale. The marshy delta facing the sea was continually moving upriver toward today’s location as the sea level rose. We suggest that marshy delta on the Arabian Shelf at the LGM was the legendary paradise of Dilmun.

Persian Gulf Was a River Valley East of the Arabian Shelf at Last Glacial Maximum.

A Gentle Migration. Not everyone would have moved upriver with the rising sea level. During the Holocene Wet Phase (HWP), the last “Wet Sahara” moistened weather downwind across Egypt, the Sinai, and into the Arabian Peninsula from 7,500 to 3,000 BC. The south and north shores of the newly forming sea would have remained arable, especially during the HWP peak from 7,500 to 5,500 BC. Some of the riverine culture would have simply moved to the closest higher ground, into what is now Oman, the U.A.E., and Qatar on the south shore or into Iran on the north. But after 5,500 BC and with the slow shutdown of the HWP (desertification), many river folks would have followed the river delta upstream into southern Mesopotamia. Those who found a lively business trading with now blossoming southern Mesopotamia to their west and the budding Indus Valley civilization to their east, would have stayed put and pioneered shipbuilding and sailing to move trading goods over the new Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

By 6,500 BC the coastline of the newly formed Persian Gulf was above the 10 meter contour line in the above map (virtually at the classic Mesopotamian delta) after having submerged 800 miles of the lower Tigris-Euphrates Valley. Many migrants from the submerged valley now populated the delta. This moment also coincides with the beginning of the Ubaid culture in southern Mesopotamia. The coincidence is not a proof, but is certainly strong evidence, that the Ubaid culture came upriver from Dilmun, a legendary paradise in the people’s cultural memories. Our reasoning is fortified by the fact that the historical cultures and places called Dilmun, a land of traders, and Magan, a land of copper miners, were both located along the southern coast of the new Persian Gulf in Qatar, the U.A.E., Oman, Bahrain, and southern coast of Saudi Arabia. The map below shows the historical trading relationships between Mesopotamia, Dilmun, Magan, and Meluhha (see Indus Valley Civilization in prior posts 33-37 starting here). Don’t overlook that the trading was bilateral, everyone on the circuit had something to sell and wanted to buy from the others. So, at this point file away in your memory that Sumer in Mesopotamia had deep trading, cultural, and familial ties with both the mythical and the historical Dilmun. In my novels, I factored this cultural linkage into the plot, giving my characters reasons and means to travel throughout the entire Middle Eastern world of the 4th millennium B.C.

Southern Mesopotamia, Dilmun, Magan, Meluhha trade 4-5,000 Years Ago

To wrap up this post, here are a few recent articles related to the still-unexplored bottom of the Persian Gulf, by Science Daily, Live Science, and Academia.edu.

We have now advanced our journey well into the heart of southern Mesopotamia and its earliest cultural roots. But, we’re just getting started in this easternmost corner of the Fertile Crescent. We have much more to learn in southern Mesopotamia before we can move northwest, but this is a good point to end this post. We’ll pick up seamlessly in the next post with further investigation of the Ubaid culture, and introduce an influence on the Ubaid from a northern Mesopotamian culture.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke

Sumer and Akkad in Southern Mesopotamia. Credit © 2008 P L Kessler

Preview of this Post. In this post, we’ll conclude discussion of the prehistory in Iran and turn to southern Mesopotamia. There, a people group speaking Sumerian settled the lower Mesopotamian plain in the 6^th millennium B.C. It is hypothesized that they previously populated the extended Mesopotamian river valley as it flowed down the floor of the Persian Gulf to the ocean. They called their ancestral home “Dilmun” which they described as a paradise. They migrated upriver over millennia  as  the sea level rose 500 feet from glacial melt. These people evolved in their new homeland through several distinct phases: Halaf, Ubaid, and Uruk. The Sumerian civilization they birthed and raised dominated the region from 5,500 to 2,000 B.C., formed the world’s first city states including the world’s most populous city, invented written language, and pioneered architecture, religion, and culture on a large scale. We will begin this journey by studying what these people said about themselves.

Prehistoric Iran. Last week, we wrapped up western Iran with Elam and Susa, both built as agricultural communities on the eastern end of the Fertile Crescent, living in a symbiotic relationship with the burgeoning agrarian culture to their west, which was rapidly expanding in the rich alluvial soil between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Although Elam and Susa had cultural roots in Iran’s Zagros Mountains, the juggernaut of Mesopotamian agriculture and superpower city-states made them dependent trading vassals—albeit rich ones. This relationship developed early in the Neolithic Revolution, and does not change until the 3rd millennium B.C.

Help from Linguistics. Our understanding of how Southern Mesopotamia and Susiana developed would have remained a mystery but for the acceleration of Scientific Archaeology and Linguistics in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The decipherment of cuneiform script and the Sumerian Language allowed piecing together literally tons of clay tablets and other inscriptions. In addition, linguistic work with the Indo-European family of languages, including Indo-Iranian, has advanced understanding of Southern Mesopotamia’s Chalcolithic culture far ahead of much younger proto-literate cultures (e.g. Mayan) and undeciphered languages (e.g. Harappan). Speculations about Elamo-Dravidian encourage us to hope for an avenue to deciphering Harappan and gaining new insights into substrates of the Sumerian language.

Proto-Euphratean Language. Some linguists suspect that there is a Proto-Euphratean language substrata beneath Sumerian. One of these linguists posits Sumerian as an early Indo-European language which he dubs “Euphratic”—which conveniently fits my creation of a thin, declining, but still dominant elite of city-states leadership in my novels’ set in 5,203 B.C. My fictional Indo-Iranian elite dates back to a period which the people recall as “when the kings came” in my Raising Up Pharaoh epic novels. The elite “before the kings came” was restructured “when the kings came” much like the English elite were replaced by William The Conqueror’s elite following the Norman Conquest of England.

Mesopotamian Creation Myths. A creation myth is a shortcut to understanding the character of a people, for most people groups consider their creation myth to be true metaphorically. So it will be worthwhile for us to look at Mesopotamian creation myths at the dawn of literacy, where we’ll get the least embellishment (i.e. well-intended, mal-intended or unintended but apocryphal revisions and accretions), and get insight into their earlier conceptions of the gods they worshipped.  Think about it for a moment: their creation myth was handed down from generation to generation by word-of-mouth before a script was adopted and literacy began (written scripts can be more easily controlled). Most people groups consider their creation myth a sacred story, so there would have been poets, priests, and acolytes who would memorize the “standard” oral version, and test each other for accuracy.

We have a good example of this oral process by studying the rigorous system of memorization of  the Rig Veda among the Indo-Iranians  dwelling in the Indus Valley. As for the creation myth embedded in these Vedas, does the following ring a bell? “By His utterance came the universe.” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.2.4 translation A but 1.2.4 translation B is worded differently). In this primordial thought (translation A) from four millennia ago in South Asia, I see a clear principle stated: a unique Someone created the universe. To find that in an ancient Indo-Iranian creation myth makes me smile. There is a common thread  between that  statement (read the linked summary of that first chapter) and the words of the first chapter of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, which original text hasn’t been going through much revision for over 2,000 years, as proven by the pre-Christian Isaiah Scroll found at Qumran. Regarding this, you might read William  Schniedewind’s  book How the Bible Became a Book, The Textualization of Ancient Israel. This book deals with the conversion of the Hebrew’s creation story, history, and canons from oral to a written version (click our website’s tab Bibliography to get particulars). While referring you to this book, I’m not agreeing with all of the book’s’ conclusions, but do think you should understand the methodology. I prefer to let the Bible speak for itself.

The Sumerian Creation  myth in the version excavated at Nippur that dates back to about 1,600 B.C., written in Sumerian cuneiform 1,400 years after the preliterate Uruk period, shows that the Uruk period’s creator god An has been demoted (in this version) to the role of sky god and the god Enlil, who was created by An, has been promoted by the other created gods to be chief of the created gods, pretty much like I told you in Post 47. The creation myth appears hijacked to record the rebellion of some created beings which have, or have been granted by their free will, the option to go their own way. Since these are not capable of creating a universe by their utterance, they don’t really deserve the title “gods”…”daimones” or demons seems more appropriate. What we don’t have is an earlier version of the myth i.e. what was the oral version in the earliest Uruk period? All we can do is look for older versions and compare them, and sift excavations for anything that might give insight into the preliterate, oral version.

The Enuma Elis is a Babylonian version of the creation myth, perhaps dating back to the time of Hammurabi (around 1,800 B.C. i.e. 1,200 years after the preliterate Uruk period). It promotes the Babylonian god Marduk to chief of those created gods. You can read the translation here. However, we are now dealing with an Amorite revision—and not the older Sumerian version—and this new version has a political element, substituting a new local favorite of Babylon to chief of the created gods.  You’ll note the above linked article addresses this “my local god is better than your local god” issue in the first paragraph. I suggest you read the summary and scroll down to the actual translated text, in order to get a feel for this version. I find it chaotic (city-state politics and fractious gods) and feel sorry for the people under the oppression of such idiotic gods. I want to ask, “How did these maniacs seize control of the asylum?” The answer to that question is at the core of the fears besetting the Mesopotamians. I think you and I can agree that the clamor of these brawling city gods speaks to a clamor between the cities.

We have now begun examining  the contributions of both archaeology and linguistics in our quest to understand these long-dead people of Mesopotamia. Archaeologists had to find and excavate their ruins to accumulate written specimens of their language—and they found much. Then linguists began the mammoth task of deciphering these people’s long-dead script and language before these documents could be read to reveal what we’re searching for: an understanding of these Mesopotamians, their achievements, pretensions, competitions, myths, and religions.

This will be a good point to conclude this post. In the next post, we will continue to examine Sumerian literature in its Laws, in search of further clues.

Thanks for visiting.

R. E. J. Burke