Changes [Dec 03, 2007]
BibliographyLecture notes
Hassuna-Samarra-Halaf cultures
“All objects of pottery… figments of potter’s will, fictions of his memory and imagination.” J. L. Myres 1923, quoted in Wengrow 1998: 783.
Pottery is perhaps the most useful artifact for the Near eastern archaeologist. The skill of transforming clay through heat into hard and durable products was started to be developed in the Neolithic period in the Near East to make pots for food storage. But as the techniques of making good quality pots developed, they also became prestige objects, depending on its painting, its shape, function, the type of clay used in it, its chemical composition, the degree it was fired, handmade or wheel thrown. But all of these variety of aspects of pottery help the archaeologist date sites and the levels accordingly. Different techniques of manufacture, and of decoration then help archaeologist identify them as characteristic to certain periods of time and certain geographies.
Technologies of clay:
Wengrow suggests a symbolic association between technologies of clay, and sedentary, settled lifestyles, that involve plant cultivation and animal domestication. We must also consider the craftsmanship involved in these levels of production, often associated with magic, as they involve specialized technologies of production of skill.
Map : distribution/spread of separate pottery styles (Roaf).
Near Eastern Late Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic are marked with increasing economic specialization, especially in the 7th and 6th millnnium BC when Northern Mesopotamian steppes and the Southern Mesopotamian alluvium were settled by societies who developed various styles of pottery, used for storage, food preparation, and consumption. Their ceramics were largely crude chaff-tempered pots but they also developed much more elaborate prestige ceramics. These cultural groups are defined by culture-historicist archaeologists based on their pottery styles, as Hassuna, Samarra and Halaf cultural complexes (these are the names of type-sites), with distinctive, sometimes spatially and temporally overlapping with each other. These categories are based on the assumption that pots=people, which is now quite an out-of-date understanding of ancient societies. We should tehrefore carefully avoid associating these groups of shared material culture with ethnic segregations.
In the mid 7th millennium, a distinctive pottery type is identified in several different sites in the Upper Tigris area in Northern Iraq, around a site called Hassuna, which became the type site. This Hassuna style pottery was an elaborate painted and incised pottery type replacing earlier coarse ware. This is also taken as evidence for the intensification of the textile production. Some textiles being applied on wet clay surfaces of pots and making impressions, as well as woven baskets.
At the end of the 7th millennium, a wider area witnessed settlements with a new ceramic type called the Samara pottery, named after Samarra in Middle Tigris, not far from Baghdad. This was a well-fired and painted chocalate brown color pottery with really astonishing patterns. In the Samarran sites, architecture was also getting rather sophisticated with a great innovation for our attention: the introduction of moulded rectangular mudbrick, allowing a much more regular plans in the construction of houses. These were 60 cm long bricks, and when they were constructing the walls, at the junctions of the walls, the builders of the Samarran sites were creating buttresses for extra support. This elaborately buttressed design later became an important element in the design of the temples. It not only gave an absolute sense of the strength of the structure but also a nice light-shadow play on the façades.
In the Northern Mesopotamia, in an area that stretched from Carchaemish to the Hamrin basin, but not including the Southern alluvium, what archaeologists called the Halaf culture replaced Hassuna culture, and lasted some 600 years between 6000 BC and 5400 BC (or 5900-5300 BC according to some scholars). The most striking common feature of all these Halaf-type sites was the exquisitely fine and painted pottery fired in two-chamber kilns (Tell Sabi Abyad on the Balikh). Elaborate geometric patterns, or figurative ones with human and animal shapes. Sometimes an “intense fusion of images” often correated to the intensive production of textiles and basketry. Mid 6th millennium BC (ca 5500 BC) pottery with “mineral-tempered fabric, excellent firing properties, thin walled, complex vessel shapes, and extensive painted decoration in lustrous red or black” (Akkermans and Schwartz 2003: 136). Especially geometric designs, but also figurative aspects such as plants, birds, animals, bull horns.
Stamp seals ins clay, wood, bone and shell, impressed on clumps of wet clay or plaster used for sealing of containers such as pots, baskets, stone vessels, textile sacks etc.. Useful tool in the organization of storage and exchange.
A circular house type is also introduced in the late 7th millennium BC with domed roofs. These houses varied in size between 3 to 7 m in diameter, and oftentimes a rectangular annex was added to the domed main space. The central circular space was compartmented with nitches. Mudbrick and stone was used in the construction of these structures. Good examples of these buildings are known from Tell Sabi Abyad, Tepe Gawra, Yarim Tepe II, Arpaciyeh in Northern Iraq. “The presence of pestles, spindle whorls, loom-weights and bone awls testify to food processing and weaving within round buildings, while rectangular buildings were used exclusively for the storage of grain and the conduct and the recording of economic transactions.” (Wengrow 1998: 786)-they found clay decorated tokens.. Are we seeing here a gender-differentiated spatial structure? It seems at least that the use of the spaces are markedly different.
Summary of the Hassuna-Samarra-Halaf complex with Wengrows’s flowchart (1998: fig. 2) . The “economic and political context of life” in the villages of the time period. Architecture as a component of material culture in creating gender-specific divisions of the social and econom ic sphere. Compare to the unified world of the house at Catalhoyuk. Use of architecture to consolidate social structures.
The changing face of clay: Transition of late 6th-early 5th millennium BC in the Near East (David Wengrow).
Image credit: Wengrow, David; 1998. “The changing face of clay: continuity and change in the transition from village to urban life in the Near East,” Antiquity 72: fig. 2. 789.
Ubaid period: birth of the monumental temple architecture, development of nitches and buttresses. 5500-4000 BC Late 6th- 5th millennium
The early settlement southern Mesopotamia in such substantial scale had to wait until the mid 6th millennium BC, or one could also say that very little of these early sites are excavated from this time period, and our ignorance is really due to the absence of relevant excavations. The southern Mesopotamian late prehistory is defined by a long period called the Ubaid period, named after the type-site Al-Ubaid. Ubaid period lasted from ca 5500 BC to 4000 BC in the south and marked by a series of very elaborate and extensively shared painted pottery culture, widespread construction of rectangular multi-room buildings (the tri-partite house). A significant change in the pottery technology is that while Halaf pottery as completely hand made, giving the craftsmen time and felxibility in design, in the Ubaid period, we see the introduction of the tournette: a pivoted work surface which regulated and accelerated the pottery prodiction both in terms of shape and decoration. It encouraged simple linear designs by means of applying paint to the rotating vessel.
Looking at the extent of the production of this particular ceramics (defined by its style and technology), has an incredible geographical spread, from southern Mesopotamia to the North and Eastern Turkey as well as the valleys of Zagros mountains in Iran, Western shores of the Gulf. My colleagues at the Institute John Cherry and Susan Alcock who is doing a regional survey in Armenia, told me that they have identified an Ubaid site all the way over there in the Transcaucasus.
Late Ubaid sites are associated with the appearance of durable items of wealth, especially jewellery made from precious and semi-precious stones such as lapis lazuli and carnelian (Pollock 1999:5).
Wengrow's hypothetical model of possible differentiations of space in the tri-partite Ubaid houses.
Image credit: Wengrow, David; 1998. “The changing face of clay: continuity and change in the transition from village to urban life in the Near East,” Antiquity 72: fig. 3, p. 790.
The tr-partite houses are the first attempts of monumentality in Near Eastern settlements. These buildings often became ceremonial places with wall-paintings, raised altars, façade decorations etc. Sometimes elevated upon massive mudbrick platforms which yield adminstrative seals of various types. Evidence for food processing, weaving, pottery production, storage, and ritual are found in these complex buildings. We are aware of this time period by the excavations of only a few sites, which has revealed some very interseting features for the early development of monumental building traditions. Ceremonial practice was certainly prominent among intersite and interregional. Scholars have argued that in the Ubaid period, “religion served as a form of ideology for legitimating emerging differentiattion among people” (economic/social hierarchies), and porbably had some institutional role in the control of labour, and collected surplus agricultural products (Tell Oueili and its granaries).
We will look at the site of Eridu in detail in Southern Mesopotamia, and also mention some contemporary sites to Eridu (Tell Oueili, Tell es-Sawwan, Hajji Muhammed, Choga Mami).
Eridu
Map-Mesopotamian in the Ubaid period
The site of Eridu is located in the Southern end of Mesopotamia, even to the far south into the desert today, but in the Prehistoric period we know from the excavations that a branch of the Euphrates passed just by Eridu, and the immediate environment of the site must have belonged to the marshy landscape of the south.
According to the Sumerian mythology, particularly a text found at Sippar, another Babylonian city, and the text is named “the creation of Eridu” some sort of a genesis myth from Babylonia, Eridu was the first city that humankind has inhabited. According to this Sumerian literary composition, the foundation of Eridu was associated with also the institution of kingship.
Eridu became associated with the water god Enki. The primary economy of the city must have been fishing and hunting, Enki was their city god, the god of fresh waters, and also known from the later mythology is that fish offerings were regularly made at the great sanctuary of Enki at Eridu, and large deposits of fish bones in some of the levels of the temple confirm this ritual practice. Being the most ancient city of Mesopotamia in the Sumerian belief, it was also the source of kingship.
Eridu-site plan
The site (modern name Abu Shahrein) was excavated in late 1940s by Fuad Safar, Seton Lloyd and Muhammed Ali Mustafa, and most of the work at the site at that time was concentrated on the excavation of eighteen successive layers of temple mudbrick architecture, which we can trace its architectural history from a small shrine to a monumental temple rising on a high mound. This rather deep trench was more than 14 m in height- 14 m of occupation, and showed the layers belonging to the entire Ubaid period, roughly from 5000 BC to 4000 BC, with 18 distinctive rebiuildings of this ceremonial structure..
Eridu temple-reconstructed superimposed layers of building
This temple of Enki was possibly the one known as E-Abzu (Abzu house), since the god Enki resided in the mythical subetrranean freshwater ocean, which was called abzu, which is the source of all the waters of the earth, and thus the source of life for the whole society. Enki is the god, who is the determiner of destinies, and he was the one who saved humankind from the great Flood in the Sumerian epics. Therefore, this particular temple was an extremely important shrine for the whole society of South and it was believed to have been ritually visited by other gods as well travelling in their boats.
Having shaped our mind with how this particular sanctuary was mythically conceived in the early Sumerian society, let us look its architecture. I will try to go in historical sequence. Eridu itself is a set of 6 mounds, distributed in the landscape, and the settlement moved from one mound to another in various points of history. The Ubaid period settlement and temple was excavated on Mound 1. While the settlement moved to Mound 2 in the Uruk period, and Mound 3 in the Isin-Larsa period, 4 in Kassite, 5 in Achaemenid/Babylonian and so on. Today we will be only dealing with Mound 1. The abandonment of one tell and the settlement on a very adjacent location illustrates very well the nature of settlement, bothe the environmental degradation, movement of the river course, and the overbuilding of the hills.
The earliest building that was discovered on virgins soil is a small structure, of almost 3 m square in size, ca 12 by 15 feet. The building that was built on top of it, i.e. Temple 17 had recesses and a podium in the middle of the room, which had traces of burning on it. This building was definitely identified as a temple because of several ritual features it contained: a niche in one wall, which probably where the statue or some other kind of amblem of the god Enki had stood. A little in front of it was a mudbrick platform, probably an offering table. As we will see altars and offering tables were standard features of Mesopotamian temples.
The temple at Eridu is a very important case for us since we can trace the phases of its architectural development from a small rectangular shrine into an elaborate design, a process of monumentalization, as the society developed more and more complex, and as there were more and more ritual requirements from the religious space.
The eighteen phases of the building is grouped under three major periods: 1. The first group of shrines, from 18-15, which are small non-monumental shrines which nevertheless have some identifiable religious features. After this period there is a gap in the sequence, and the temples 12 to 14 is not very well known, the evidence is too fragmentary. 2. The later phase of the temple in the Ubaid period runs from Level 11 to 6, which now displays the most obvious features of the Mesopotamian temples. These temples are fundemantelly different from the first set of shrines in terms of both design of the spaces and its elaboration. 3. The third major phase is the levels 5 to 1, which dates to the Uruk period, and essentially shows the continuation of the cult well into the Uruk period.
One fascinating aspect is the development of small buttresses on the outer façade of the building that brought not only a sense of strength to the building, but also a powerful play of light and shadow under the intense Mesopotamian daylight. It must have been very dramatic. We will see in the Mesopotamian temple architecture this architectonic feature was used quite extensively. Scholars suggested that the origins of this feature with the placement of roof rafters on the wall, and possible extended eves, but that is speculative. It is for sure that they had primarily a visual symbolic function.
In the development of the temple, we see that the unchanging feature was the central hall that acommodated the offering table and the altar, and several subordinate spaces were surrounding this space, and the primary approach to the main space was from the longer side of the cult room. You will see in your readings several scholars discussing this issue for Mesopotamian temples. The idea that the quality of the central cult room was never purely rectangular but very dynamic with recesses is also significant.
Note that in Temple VII, the sacred holy chamber where probably the image of the god had been hidden. The outstanding quality of the double chamber points out to this practice. We will see in the 3rd millennium temples that during special occasions the cult image was brought out to the large cult room, but it normally resided in a narrow and dark room, considered as the holly of the hollies. Make note how actually that space is elaborately enveloped on the outside as well as a significant mass in itself.
Please also make note that, as new and new temples built on top of the old ones, the site of the temple was always rising above its surroundings. Scholars often suggest that it is this rapid rising of the temple over the city, that developed the idea of a high terrace cult space eventually leading to the idea of a ziqqurat. It is definitely worthwhile to think about this. I think this might be a good research project for someone in the class if interested. The rebuilding and rebuilding of the tempel was probably a ritual requirement, and the temple ground rose higher than anything else. Notice especially in the later temples at Eridu, how stairs accompanied the approach to the entrance to the shrine. We will see how actually the shrine itself will become a minor element while the the ziqqurat mound itself becomes the monument. Elaborate on this. This will be much more clear in discussing Uruk.
I would like you to compare the Temples VII and VI interms of the proportions of the main hall, which drastically changes. This provides us an upportunity of discussing the possible roofing problem for such buildings. A central courtyard was a common feature in Near Eastern architecture, which becomes a very cool shady environment, so these middle hall type buildings of the early prehistory often suggested that their central hall were actually not covered, (measuring the width of the central hall proves the oofing to be rather difficult) and that was the reason why we had the niches to protect the ritual objects probably the statues of the god from rain and intense sunlight. But the transformation from Temple VII to VI suggests to me the roofing of the structure.
Compare this temple to Tepe Gawra Stratum XIII. In terms of recesses, and the proportions of the space, elaboration of the recessed surface. The wall as the dynamic recessed surface. The symmetrical formation of the corner bastions become rather impressive and distinctive.
Powerpoint presentation:
Hassuna.ppt