Ancient Iraq

by Georges Roux

  In the middle of the fourth millennium B.C. the climate of the Near East, which for some two thousand years had been warm and humid, slowly began to change and became increasingly cooler and drier. Irrigation agriculture had by then proved so successful in southern Iraq that immigrants from the dry-farming plains and hills of northern Mesopotamia moved into the lower Euphrates valley, where archaeological surface surveys have detected a sharp increase in the number of village-size settlements for that period.2 The new villages, like the old ones, were situated on river banks, but they tended to cluster around those Ubaid period settlements which were both the abodes of the great gods upon whom all prosperity depended and the centres of sizeable agricultural communities. The need to feed a much increased and fast-growing population challenged man's natural ingenuity: the plough was invented, and also the sled for dragging grain, the chariot for carrying goods and the sail for travelling faster on waterways. These technical improvements generated a large surplus of food that could be stored, redistributed or exchanged for imported raw materials and luxuries, while other inventions – such as the potter's wheel and the casting of copper alloys – opened the era of industrial production.

  This went on for three or four centuries, but towards the end of the millennium the effects of desiccation started to be felt in southern Mesopotamia. As the Euphrates carried less and less water, many of its tributaries dried up. The hitherto familiar landscape of anastomotic watercourses and extensive marshes was gradually replaced by a new landscape not very different from the present one: bands of palm-groves, fields and orchards along the few remaining streams and, in between, patches of steppe or even desert. Many villages disappeared, their inhabitants regrouping themselves within and around the larger centres, which rapidly grew to the size of towns. To extend the areas of cultivable land artificial irrigation was developed, but the enormous common effort required to dig and maintain big canals and the need for an equitable distribution of water considerably reinforced the authority of the traditional town chiefs, the high priests. This, together with the scarcity of fertile land, led to the concentration of power and wealth in a few hands and in a few places, to further technical progress, to remarkable architectural and artistic achievements, to the invention of writing as a means of recording transactions, but also to armed conflicts. Thus, it would seem, were born the city-states of ancient Sumer, with their fortified cities and well-defined territories, with their population of priests, scribes, architects, artists, overseers, merchants, factory workers, soldiers and peasants and their religious rulers or war leaders.

  The five hundred years which saw these developments have been divided, somewhat artificially, by archaeologists into a ‘Uruk period’ (c. 3750 – 3150 B.C.) and a ‘Jemdat Nasr period’ (c. 3150 – 2900 B.C.) but there is little doubt that the people responsible for the urbanization of southern Mesopotamia were closely related to, or had been absorbed by, the Ubaidians, for there is no clear-cut break between the Ubaid culture and the Uruk culture and no sign of armed invasion and destruction. On all the sites excavated, such as Eridu, Uruk and Ur, the new temples are built over old ones, on the same plans and with the same materials, and the distinctive Uruk ware – a wheelmade, mass-produced, unpainted but sometimes highly polished buff, grey or red pottery, which in some of its forms seems to copy the metal vessels now used by the wealthy – very slowly replaces the Ubaid ware. As for the other elements of the Uruk and Jemdat Nasr cultures (cylinder-seals, cone-mosaic wall decoration, reliefs and sculptures in the round, temples on high terraces), they either derive from older Mesopotamian models or can be credited to the inventiveness of local artists and architects. We are therefore confronted here not with a civilization imported ready-made, but with the final stages of an evolution that had begun with the foundation of Eridu and possibly even earlier in northern Iraq.

  The Uruk Period

  The site which gave its name to that period is Uruk (biblical Erech, modern Warka), whose large and impressive ruins lie in a non-desert area about half-way between Baghdad and Basrah, not far from the small town of Samawa. It is one of the most important sites of the Near East, not only by its huge size (four hundred hectares), but also by its virtually uninterrupted occupation from Ubaidian to Parthian times and by the rich archaeological and epigraphic material it has yielded.3

  The city of Uruk was born of the coalescence of two towns 800 metres apart: Kullaba, devoted to the sky-god An (or Anu), the supreme god of the Mesopotamians, and E-Anna (‘House of Heaven’), the main abode of the love goddess Inanna (called Ishtar by the Semites). In the centre of E-Anna can still be seen the remains of a mud-brick stage tower (ziqqurat) built by the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu (c. 2112 – 2095 B.C.) over a large temple raised on a platform and dating to the Jemdat Nasr period. It is in this area that the German archaeologists, who since 1912 have been digging on and off at Warka for about fifty years, have unearthed at least seven adjacent or superimposed temples and various other cultic installations dating to the second half of the Uruk period. It is also there that they sunk a twenty metre deep well reaching the virgin soil and obtained a stratigraphic section of the site, apparently founded during the Ubaid period.

  The archaic temples of Uruk were very similar in plan to those of the Ubaid period at Eridu already described: the buttressed façade, the long cella surrounded by small rooms, the doors on the long side testify to the persistence of architectural traditions as well, probably, as of belief and cult. In E-Anna, they were arranged in pairs, a fact that led Professor H. Lenzen to suggest that they were dedicated not only to Inanna but also to her lover the fertility-god Dumuzi.4 Particularly remarkable were the lowermost levels with their enormous temples – one of them, built on limestone foundations, measured 87 by 33 metres – and their extraordinary ‘mosaic building’. The latter consisted of a large courtyard extending between two sanctuaries, with a raised portico of eight massive mud-brick columns, three metres in diameter, arranged in two rows. The side walls of the courtyard, the columns themselves and the platform on which they rested were entirely clad in a coloured pattern of geometrical design formed by the flat end of terracotta cones, seven to ten centimetres long, which had been painted in black, red or white and then stuck into the mud plaster. This original and very effective type of decoration was widely used during the Uruk and Jemdat Nasr periods, and loose clay cones can still be picked up by the thousand in the ruins of Warka. The colour, when preserved, has lost its brightness, but little effort is required to imagine what a fresh cone-mosaic faade must have looked like in the glaring oriental sunlight. This taste for colour is also manifest in the use of wall painting. One of the archaic temples of E-Anna, the so-called ‘Red Temple’, owes its name to the pink wash which covered its walls, and at Tell ‘Uqair, eighty kilometres south of Baghdad, the Iraqis excavated in 1940 a temple of the Uruk period decorated with frescoes which, when discovered, were ‘as bright as the day they were applied’:5 human figures, unfortunately damaged, formed a procession, and two crouching leopards guarded the throne of an unknown god. All these temples, it must be noted, rested on low brick platforms, as did the temples of the Ubaid period at Eridu; but with time the platform became higher, tending to be more important in size than the building itself. Here in all probability is the origin of the ziqqurat, the stage-tower topped by a shrine so typical of the Mesopotamian civilization in historical times. This evolution is illustrated by the Anu temple of Uruk, where six temples built in succession were finally included in a truly monumental platform rising some fifteen metres above the plain. At the top of this platform are the amazingly well-preserved remains of a sanctuary dating to the late Uruk period, the so-called ‘White Temple‘, and to stand between these walls, at the very place where officiated, five thousand years ago, the priests of the sky-god, is an experience which no visitor will easily forget.

  Domestic architecture is poorly represented in southern Iraq, but we may catch a glimpse of it on other, distant sites – for the Uruk cul
ture progressively spread throughout Mesopotamia and covered roughly the same area as the Ubaid culture. Near Erbil, for instance, at Tell Qalinj Agha,6 two large residential quarters were separated by a main street, 2 to 3 metres wide, intersected by smaller streets at a right angle, and the same regular plan can be seen at Habuba Kabira, on the great bend of the Euphrates, a city which covered not less than 22 hectares and was surrounded by a wall with square towers.7 In both places the houses, carefully built of oblong bricks, consisted of three buildings of two to four spacious rooms each, around a large hall or courtyard.

  The magnificence of the Uruk temples and the near-luxurious aspect of private houses tend to dwarf the other forms of art. Yet the seal impressions of the Uruk period are little masterpieces. At that time the stamp-seal of earlier periods was almost entirely superseded by the cylinder-seal. This was a small

  Diagrammatic section through the archaic layers of Uruk (E-Anna) Successive temples on 3 levels. Note the temple on platform (Jemdat Nasr period ) under the ziqqurat built by Ur-Nammu (Ur III period) and the test pit with models of pottery, going down to the Ubaid period. Reconstruction by the author based on H. Lenzen's plans in Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, XLIX, 1949

  Cylinder-seals of the Uruk period.

  A. Parrot, Archéologie Mésopotamienne, II, 1953.

  cylinder of ordinary or semi-precious stone, varying in length from 2.5 to 8 centimetres, as thick as the thumb or as thin as a pencil, and pierced lengthwise throughout, so that it could be worn on a string around the neck. On its surface was engraved a design which, when rolled on clay, could be repeated ad infinitum. These early cylinder-seals were already made with great skill, and the designs – which ranged from friezes of animals or plants to scenes of daily life or mythological subjects – were composed and arranged with considerable ingenuity. Their interest, however, goes far beyond their artistic value, for they are the only objects of the Uruk period that are alive with people and give us an inkling of their occupations. For instance, a cylinder-seal representing a massacre of prisoners bespeaks war, while the frequent occurrence of cattle walking in herds, gathered around their pens or attacked by lions evokes the farmers' main preoccupation. Mysterious ceremonies performed by naked priests are also frequently represented. We have here for the first time, besides an art in miniature, a source of information which at all periods will prove useful to the historian of ancient Mesopotamia.8

  But the Uruk period witnessed another novelty immensely more important than the wheel, the cylinder-seal or the cone mosaic decoration, an epoch-making invention comparable only to the invention of agriculture in Neolithic times. It is towards the end of the period, c. 3300 B.C. in the archaic temples of E-Anna in Uruk, that writing appears for the first time in the form of pictographic tablets.9

  The writing used in Mesopotamia throughout history and known as ‘cuneiform’ was originally – as all primitive writings, past or present – a collection of small, simplified drawings, or pictograms. The earliest texts from Uruk and elsewhere are already too complex to represent the first attempt made by men to preserve their thoughts, and in all probability the first pictograms were engraved on wood or painted on skins or leaves, but such media must have disintegrated long ago in the humid subsoil of Iraq, and the only documents that have survived are written on clay. The process of writing was in itself very simple: the scribe took a lump of fine, well-washed clay and shaped it as a small, smooth cushion, a few centimetres square. Then, with the end of a reed stalk cut obliquely he drew lines dividing each face of the cushion into squares and filled each square with incised drawings. The ‘tablet’ was then either baked or left unbaked. Baked tablets are nearly as hard as stone; old, unbaked tablets crumble into dust between the fingers, but if they are collected with care, allowed to dry slowly in the shade and hardened in an oven they become almost indestructible. It must be added, however, that a number of archaic inscriptions were engraved in stone, at first with a bronze point, then with a cold chisel.

  In the course of time the Mesopotamian script gradually lost its pictographic character. The signs were laid down in horizontal lines rather than in squares or in vertical bands. They

  Examples of changes in cuneiform signs throughout centuries. Beside their phonetic value in the Akkadian language, most signs have one of several logographic values. Thus, SHU (in Sumerian the hand) can be read in Akkadian qâtu, hand; emûqu, strength; gamâlu, protection, etc.

  became smaller, more compact, more rigid, more ‘abstract’, finally bearing no resemblance to the objects they represented. The awkward curves disappeared and were replaced by straight lines, at first, of equal width, then – as the prismatic stylus was forced into the clay prior to being drawn on its surface – vaguely triangular or wedge-shaped. Towards the middle of the third millennium B.C. this evolution was completed and the true ‘cuneiform’ writing (from Latin cuneus: wedge, nail) was born, though minor changes never ceased to occur thereafter, enabling the specialists to date a text as surely as archaeologists date a piece of pottery.10

  The earliest texts in our possession were probably written in Sumerian. This language being largely monosyllabic, writing was based, as in Chinese, on the principle: one object or idea equals one sound equals one sign. The first pictograms were therefore extremely numerous (more than two thousand). Some of them represent objects that are easy to identify, such as agricultural tools, vases, boats, heads of animals or parts of the human body, while others appear to be purely conventional. But because it is very difficult to represent abstract ideas graphically, one pictogram was often used to express several words and could be read in several ways. For instance, a foot would not only mean ‘foot’ (pronounced du in Sumerian) but also ideas related to the foot such as ‘to stand’ (gub), ‘to go’ (gin), ‘to come’ or ‘to bring’ (tum). Reciprocally, some concepts totally unrelated but pronounced with the same sound were grouped under the same sign. Thus the sign of the bow was used for ‘arrow’ (ti), but also for ‘to live’ (ti or til). In classical Sumerian, the correct reading of a sign is normally indicated either by the context or by other signs called ‘phonetic complements’, ‘determinatives’ or ‘grammatical particles‘; but the archaic texts had nothing of this kind. Moreover, the signs were laid down in apparent disorder, and some of them, used only in the earliest periods, were later abandoned so that their phonetic value (or values) is unknown. For these reasons we cannot read the pictographic tablets. All we can say is that they have all the characteristics of economic documents (lists of workmen, lists of goods, receipts, etc.). This is not surprising since writing was invented purely for accounting purposes. As early as the seventh millennium, there appeared on several sites in Iraq and Iran small balls, cubes and cones of baked clay which were first thought to be toys but were later recognized as token or ‘calculi’ the size and shape of which indicated units and subunits or undetermined goods that were exchanged. In about 3500 B.C. these calculi were found in envelopes of clay bearing drawings of their contents.11 Simple tablets with nothing but numerals (circles and short lines) were also found in illiterate places such as Khafaje, in the Diyala valley, Tell Brak and Habuba Kabira.12 It is remarkable that from such humble beginnings writing developed in southern Mesopotamia within a relatively short time into an extremely sophisticated system which was used to express all mental activities, including a vast and admirable literature.

  The Jemdat Nasr Period

  In 1925 a distinctive pottery consisting, in the main, of large thick jars decorated with geometrical or naturalistic designs in black and/or red paint applied directly on the buff clay was discovered at Jemdat Nasr, between Baghdad and Babylon.13 Later, the ‘Jemdat Nasr ware’ was found, usually in small quantities, on other Mesopotamian sites and was taken as the hallmark of a cultural period immediately preceding history, the so-called ‘Jemdat Nasr period‘. It must be borne in mind, however, that between the cultural elements of that period and those of the Uruk period there is no fundamental differen
ce, but simple variations in style and quality. Architectural remains are rare but sufficient to prove the absence of drastic changes in the plan and decoration of temples, though emphasis is now laid on their platforms, and the cone-mosaic decoration is generally applied in panels instead of covering every inch of the walls. Cylinder-seals carry the same religious and secular scenes, though these tend to become stereotyped and conventional. Writing is more and more in use, but the pictograms are less numerous, less ‘realistic’ and often used for their phonetic value alone. The bulk of the ceramic is identical with the plain Uruk pottery and the rare ‘Jemdat Nasr ware‘, perhaps of Iranian inspiration, may represent nothing more than a transient local fashion. All things considered, sculpture is perhaps the only original contribution of the new period to the progress of the arts.

  Almost forgotten since the Samarra period, sculpture suddenly reappears, soon reaches a high degree of perfection and is applied with passion to a large variety of objects. Lions attacking bulls, heroes mastering lions, sullen boars, peaceful ewes and rams are carved in relief or in the round on stone vases and bowls, on troughs, on mural plaques and on the back of the rare stamp-seals that have survived. Also from that time date numerous statuettes of worshippers offered as ex-votos, and a rather crude basalt stele found at Warka, which represents two bearded men killing lions with spear and arrows, is the oldest known ancestor of the famous Assyrian hunting scenes. If all this is not always of excellent quality, two objects – both found at Uruk – are as yet without rival in the whole world for that period.14 One is a one-metre-high alabaster vase carved in low relief with perfect skill, where the goddess Inanna is shown receiving gifts from a man of high rank, perhaps a priest, a chief or even a god. This vase was already regarded as a valuable objet d'art in antiquity, for it had been repaired with metal clips. The other masterpiece is an almost life-size mask of a woman made of marble. The eyes are unfortunately missing, but the face is modelled with a mixture of realism and sensitivity rarely found before the classical period of Greek sculpture.