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In the ‘kiln stratum’ of our great Flood-pit the layer of al ‘Ubaid potsherds that was spread over the mass of silt was relatively thin and very soon showed an admixture of the monochrome ‘Uruk’ wares; by the time the broken ‘wasters’ from the kilns had attained a depth of about two feet al ‘Ubaid disappeared and all the recognizable fragments were of the Uruk type. An early culture has therefore been replaced by another; and since the change is not abrupt but gradual it is clear that the two cultures overlapped, existing for a while side by side; that much can safely be deduced from the evidence, but that is all. In view of the complete difference of technique in the manufacture of the two classes of pottery—one is hand-made, the other turned on the wheel, one is painted, the other fired in a well-regulated smother-kiln to produce a monochrome effect—we should suspect the intrusion of a new race rather than a mere process of development on the part of the local stock; but of this we could not be certain. Apart from the Flood-pit we have found nothing at all to witness to the Uruk Period at Ur; had our deep digging been inside the walls of the ancient city we should presumably have found plenty of remains, but as it was we found nothing. Fortunately the Warka excavations have thrown a great deal of light on the period; it introduced the age of metal to the Lower Euphrates valley, it was rich and important and it lasted for a considerable length of time; further, its character makes us fairly sure that the Uruk civilization came into the country from outside, from the north. The fact that the Uruk pottery was used and was made at Ur means that in the course of time the northern invaders came to the place, settled down there alongside the 38 survivors of the pre-Flood population and ended by acquiring such a supremacy over them that the old arts and techniques were superseded by those which they brought with them. All that we have then is proof that Ur lived through an Uruk phase; it is not much, but at least it supplies a link between the al ‘Ubaid culture and what was to follow.

The upper layers of potsherds in the kiln stratum of our Flood-pit consisted entirely of Jamdat Nasr ware. Above the kiln stratum lay the ruins of houses, and the three lowest layers of these also belonged to the same period as was proved by the pottery in them and, more particularly, by the occurrence in the third level from the bottom of a curious rough hand-made bowl which has since been found on a number of other sites and is a sort of hall-mark of the Jamdat Nasr potter. The mass of potsherds accumulated on the kiln site and the three building-levels on the top of them together testify to a reasonably long period of Jamdat Nasr occupation; to that occupation, fortunately, the sherds are not the only witness.

Between 1930 and 1933 we were working on the Ziggurat area, trying to trace its history previous to the time when Ur-Nammu, of the Third Dynasty of Ur, built the great structure whose ruins are to-day the outstanding feature of the site. Since we were obliged to respect that monument and its dependent buildings the investigation of the underlying levels was none too easy, and though we were in the end able to work out a good deal of the plans of two successive buildings both belonging to the Early Dynastic Period (these will be described later) it was seldom that we could, in the confined space, dig down to any earlier strata. But a cutting made in the west corner of the Ziggurat terrace gave us just the evidence we wanted. Underneath and, partly cut away by the foundations of the earlier walling of the Dynastic Period there was a length of wall whose sharply sloped face proved it to be the retaining-wall of a terrace; it was built of a peculiar small-size type of mud brick which at Warka is characteristic of Uruk construction, but it had been strengthened by the addition of a new facing with bricks of a different type resembling those in the Jamdat Nasr house-walls in our 39 Flood-pit. Behind the wall stretched a mud-brick floor which was littered with thousands of small cones of baked clay, sharpened at one end and blunt at the other, rather like crayons, most of them about three and a half inches long and half an inch in diameter; they were of a light whitish yellow clay and while some were plain others had the blunt ends covered with red or black paint. Now just a hundred years ago the English traveller and archæologist, Loftus, discovered at Warka a mosaic-covered wall, part of a building which has since been unearthed by the German excavators there. This was a palace[6] with huge mud-brick columns and panelled walls, but that rather prosaic material was entirely disguised by the surface decoration. The walls and columns were thickly plastered with mud and into the mud were pressed little burnt-clay pegs such as we find at Ur; they were driven deeply in, so that only the flat ends showed, touching each other, and the pegs of different colours were so arranged as to produce elaborate patterns, vandykes, lozenges, triangles, etc., in unending variety over the whole building [Plate 3]. In the light of this we can safely say that at Ur in the Jamdat Nasr Period there was already a Ziggurat, set high on an artificial platform—of which we found the terrace wall—and richly decorated with a mosaic of coloured cones.

But while we have to look to Warka for examples of the architectural grandeurs of this early time, Ur has given us a cemetery which illustrates very well its domestic crafts. Our deepest digging in the Royal Cemetery area had already brought to light a few graves which seemed to belong to the Jamdat Nasr Period and had also produced quantities of inscribed tablets and seal-impressions of a very early type scattered in a rubbish-stratum into which the Early Dynastic graves had been dug.

We generally connect seals with written documents, and for many historical periods that is natural and correct; but seals as marks of private ownership antedate by many 40 centuries the invention of the art of writing—indeed, they go back as far as the Stone Age. The impressions found in this rubbish-stratum were on lumps of clay that had secured the tops of jars—a piece of cloth had been tied over the jar’s mouth and clay spread over that, and the seal stamped on the wet clay. Some of them bore very simple geometric designs, others had animal figures or human figures, and the designs become more and more elaborate and complicated and there appear what are clearly conventionalized symbols which are repeated in differing connections; this is the beginning of writing, and our seal-impressions give us in graphic detail the evolution of the Sumerian script. In the season of 1932-3, in order to obtain more of these very important objects, we resumed work here and at once found the seal-impressions and the tablets; but the stratum was relatively thin and below it came the ordinary mixed soil of the old rubbish-mounds. In this nothing of great interest could be expected, but there was a possibility of graves lower down, and in any case to carry on the work down to virgin soil would give us a useful check on former results and theories; so we went down. At four feet below the seal-impression stratum we came upon numbers of large clay bowls—the rough hand-made bowls characteristic of the Jamdat Nasr Period—set upside down in the ground, and two feet below those the graves of the Jamdat Nasr Period with which the bowls were associated by some ritual of burial. The graves, most of which were poor, lay thickly together and one above another, and the lowest of them contained pottery vases decorated with red and black paint on a buff ground of the sort found at Jamdat Nasr itself [Plate 4]. The discovery was so important that excavation on a larger scale was called for, and therefore in the following season I marked out over what I hoped would be the centre of the graveyard an area of some twelve hundred square yards and started to dig a pit which, since our graves lay fifty-six feet below the modern surface, was almost a rival to the Flood-pit. Close to the surface was the Temenos Wall built by Nebuchadnezzar and part of a contemporary building lying inside it; lower down there were the ruins of Kassite houses, two layers of them, of which the 41 earlier might date to about 1000 B.C. Dug down into their ruins were burials in clay coffins of the Persian period and a few Neo-Babylonian burials with the bodies doubled up inside two large clay jars set mouth to mouth; below the Kassite floors were burials in brick vaults or under inverted clay coffins which had belonged to the dwellers in the houses. Thus far then we had a very satisfactory historic sequence, but below that there were no buildings; the site had been used for dumping builders’ rubbish and had lain derelict throughout all the days of Ur’s greatness.[7] At about eighteen feet down, on a line following the slope of the rubbish-mound, were hundreds of graves of the time of Sargon of Akkad, an extension of the great cemetery wherein we had dug in former seasons; below these were the outlying graves of the Royal Cemetery, also on the slope, and then, under the tail-end of our “seal-impression stratum”, the Jamdat Nasr cemetery, grave above grave so that sometimes they lay eight deep, the lowest dug down to and into the silt of the Flood.

Because the cemetery was in use for a long time and the graves were superimposed more than half, perhaps two-thirds, of them had been destroyed; the diggers of a late grave, happening on an old burial, made off with any objects of value that it contained and smashed the rest without the least compunction; but even so we recorded three hundred and fifty graves in all.

In most cases the body to be buried was wrapped in matting—this may indeed have been general, for where we recorded a ‘simple burial’ because we could see no trace of matting this may have been due simply to the decay of the fragile material; one only was in a rectangular wickerwork coffin. Most of the graves lay roughly N.N.E. by S.S.W., but the uniformity was probably due only to the need of economizing space in an overcrowded graveyard; inside the grave it was a matter of indifference at which end the dead man’s head was placed. What was interesting was the attitude 42 of the body. Whereas in the al ‘Ubaid graves the dead lay extended on their backs, and in the Royal Cemetery lay on one side with the legs slightly bent in the position of sleep, here the body, lying on its side, was tightly flexed, the head bent forward over the breast, the legs brought up so that the knees were at right angles to the body or might even almost touch the chin, while the heels came against the buttocks; the hands were held in front of the face and a little way away from it, usually holding a cup or small vessel; apart from the complication of the cup it was the embryonic attitude—‘as a man came out of his mother’s womb so shall he return whence he came.’ Now the attitude in which a man is buried is part of a solemn ritual dictated by religious beliefs, and any change in it means a change in religion; the difference therefore between the Jamdat Nasr graves and those of the al ‘Ubaid Period on the one hand and of the Royal Cemetery on the other implies a serious break in the continuity of the country’s history and is probably to be interpreted as evidence for a foreign occupation. A good many other facts support the same conclusion.

Since the graves were often superimposed they could not all be of precisely the same date—the lower were necessarily the older—and it was possible to draw up something like a sequence within the general period represented by the cemetery. The difference in the contents of graves at the successive levels showed a cultural development which required a considerable length of time; a whole range of vase types common in the lowest graves disappears altogether in the higher; there is an intermediate phase in which many of the old types vanish and no new ones are introduced but stone vessels preponderate instead of clay, and a third phase marks the appearance of numerous pottery types not found before. At the beginning we constantly get large clay pots over whose mouths are inverted plain lead tumblers; there are examples of black or smoky grey pottery produced in a ‘smother-kiln’, and others with a plain red wash highly burnished; with them come simple bowls or cups of white limestone. In the next stage the stone vessels were more numerous and more varied and amongst the pottery vases a 43 good many were of ‘reserved slip ware’, that is, vessels which after making had been dipped in a bath of watery clay of a different colour from the body-clay of which the pot was made, and then this ‘slip’ had been wiped off in stripes so as to expose the body clay. The slip, standing out in slight relief and contrasting with the body clay in colour and texture, produces an unambitious but rather pleasing decorative effect. In the topmost graves pottery was almost entirely lacking and its place was taken by an astonishing wealth of cups, bowls and vases in limestone, steatite, diorite or basic diorite, gypsum and alabaster [Plate 4]. It will be noticed that all this material had to be imported, much of it from far away—Mosul in the north, the Persian Gulf and the Persian mountains to the east; but the vases were made at Ur. In the rubbish-mounds over the graves we found examples of the stone drill-heads used in vase manufacture; for the hollowing-out of a steatite bowl a start might be made with a narrow-edged metal chisel, steatite being a soft stone, but even in that case the finishing, or in the case of a harder stone the whole of the work, would be done with a bow drill whose head was of diorite. The vase-makers were certainly masters of their craft; many of the shapes are really beautiful, and constantly the shape is modified to suit the character of the material; thus, with a semi-transparent stone like alabaster the wide flat rim may be cut to almost paper-like thinness, while the solidity of the big black diorite vase U.19519 on Plate 4, and the severe strength of its outline, would have done credit to an Athenian artist of the early fifth century B.C. Certainly the vase-maker of Ur could produce a beautiful thing without having recourse to surface decoration, and the great majority of the vessels are plain or at most bear a band of rope moulding in relief; but a few are more elaborately carved, and these show the Sumerian predilection for animal motives. A curious example of this is an alabaster lamp in the form of a tridacna shell (we found in the graves several real shells of the sort cut open to make lamps) the five projecting horns serving as troughs to take the wicks; but moved by some whim of fancy the maker has added underneath a bat’s head 44 carved in the round, and seen from below the lamp has all the appearance of a flying bat, the horned ‘shell’ becoming its ribbed extended wings. One alabaster toilet-box is supported by the figure of a ram; two limestone cups have the outside decorated with a procession of oxen carved in low relief; but none of them are very well worked. It has to be remembered that the objects placed in graves would be of the kind normally used by the man in his lifetime, and our graves do not seem to have been those of people of the wealthier class (our pit did not hit the centre of the cemetery as I had hoped it would; the better graves lay at the south-west limits of the pit, and presumably the best lay beyond) so that we could not expect to find in them masterpieces of contemporary art such as adorned the temples and palaces of Erech and were found there by the German expedition. Actually the finest example of Jamdat Nasr sculpture that we got came not from the cemetery but from one of the houses in the Flood-pit; this is a steatite figure of a wild boar [Plate 5a] made as a support for some object and originally set into a stand—the deep grooves on the sides suggest that the animal was crouched between flat-leafed reeds perhaps of bronze or gold—and as such is truly statuesque; there is a touch of realism in the wrinkling of the upper lip over the tushes, but otherwise all accidentals have been deliberately eliminated in favour of an abstract balance of mass; it is indeed a most successful composition. The bull bowls were crude, as I have already said, but that is because they were cheap ‘bazaar’ goods not claiming to be works of art and reproducing only the general idea of the real masterpieces; the magnificent steatite bowl shown on Plate 5b may rank as one of the latter. It is not dated by any external evidence, for it was found in the ruins of a Persian house and certainly does not belong to that period, nor can one guess how it got into such surroundings; it is probably rather later in time than Jamdat Nasr, but it illustrates the artistic tradition which Jamdat Nasr started and may well be a faithful reproduction of the actual products of that age.

Plate 3

Palace wall at Warka decorated with a mosaic of coloured pegs

Plate 4

Vessels of the Jamdat Nasr period; above: two painted clay pots; below: alabaster and diorite vases

The decorated stone vases, indeed the vast bulk of the stone vases in general, came from the later graves in the upper levels of the cemetery (one of these contained no less than thirty-two stone vessels), but since the three-coloured clay vases which are the hall-mark of Jamdat Nasr occurred throughout the whole series the differences between the early and the late graves denote no more than stages of progress in a single period. One peculiarity they had in common. Whereas most of the graves produced beads, of carnelian, shell, lapis lazuli, hæmatite, glazed frit and gold, which were worn generally as necklaces, sometimes as bracelets or bangles and fairly often as belts round the waist, and beads are, of course, strictly personal belongings, there were no tools or weapons such as are normally found in the graves of other periods. Metal was freely used—we found plenty of copper pots, especially in the lower levels—and therefore metal weapons must have been common enough; we can only conclude that their absence from the graves was due to religious beliefs of which we know nothing.

Something more, though not a great deal, relating to the religion of the Jamdat Nasr age can be got from the seal-impressions found in the rubbish-stratum overlying the graves.[8] Here we have lumps of clay which was plastered over the stoppers of store-jars and then stamped with the owner’s seal. Some of them bear pictographic signs—conventionalized pictures which are the beginnings of writing; most are decorative, i.e., have mere patterns, more or less geometrical, patterns distinctive enough to identify ownership, or they are pictorial. The last are very interesting, for side by side with drawings of birds and animals and what are clearly domestic scenes we find primitive versions of religious scenes which were to be revived, or continued, in the art of later times. Thus we have the ritual banquet, with two seated figures facing one another and drinking through tubes; the scene of worship wherein the god is shown in his shrine, the naked priest brings goats for the sacrifice and the traditional jug for libations, and draped worshippers follow with their offerings; the god enthroned on a boat; the milking-scene outside the byre as we have it on the Nin-harsag temple at al ‘Ubaid; the ritual dance; all these show that the 46 religion of classical Sumer has its roots at least in the Jamdat Nasr age.

And the same must be true of Sumerian civilization as a whole. Together with the seal-impressions we find in the rubbish-stratum numerous clay tablets bearing inscriptions.[9] The stratification shows that they belong to the latter part of the Jamdat Nasr period, and their character is in agreement with that—the type of writing is less archaic than that of the tablets found at Jamdat Nasr itself (which presumably belong to the middle of the period) but more primitive than that of the Fara tablets which until our discovery had formed the next known stage in the evolution of the Mesopotamian script. It is a linear, not a cuneiform writing and still preserves some curvilinear forms, but not nearly to the extent to which such are found on the contemporary seal-impressions—evidently the seal-cutter, having an eye to artistic effect, was far more conservative than the scribe who merely wanted an easy medium for his records. Just because the tablets belong to so early a stage in the history of writing the interest of their contents is strictly limited. Man did not learn to write with the idea of perpetuating his thoughts and his actions; that was indeed impossible. The primitive script is pictographic—each sign represents, directly or by suggestion, a single definite thing, an ox, a house, a man, an ear of corn, a metal ingot or what-not; you cannot make a picture of an abstract idea, of a relation or of an action; so the earliest tablets give us lists of things and numbers, but no sentences because there is no grammatical construction. Of about four hundred tablets from Ur the great majority are lists of cereals and the products of cereals (flour, bread, beer, etc.) and of live-stock; seventy deal with landed property, four are lists of men’s names and about twenty are school texts some of which give lists of gods, and numerous temples are mentioned. This does not sound particularly interesting, and for the general reader most of it is not; but one curious point does arise, namely that none of the temples named in the tablets reappear in Ur of the Dynastic age, and of the 47 names of gods very few; if then I am right in thinking that the pictures on the seal-impressions imply a continuity in the religious ritual, none the less in a later age the gods themselves were called by other names than those used by the Jamdat Nasr people—and that is a change which can hardly be explained as the result of evolution.

Our excavations at Ur certainly produced much more material of the Jamdat Nasr Period than of the Uruk Period which preceded it, but admittedly it did not amount to a great deal—in the Flood-pit the piled sherds of the kiln stratum and the ruins of houses which replaced the vase factory, in the Ziggurat area a mere scrap of religious architecture, and finally the cemetery. Does this contribute anything to history?

In the first place the pottery (and pottery is generally our safest guide) does suggest the incoming of a new racial stock; the characteristic three-coloured ware is not developed out of anything made in the Valley before, and its closest analogies are in favour of its having been introduced from the east, i.e., from some part of what is now known as Persia or Iran. There is no need to assume an invasion and a conquest, on the contrary, a gradual infiltration is much more consistent with the facts, for the same factory continued in business, and although it turned out wares of the new type yet, as the mixture of sherds shows, for a time the old industry and the new went on side by side. Moreover, although the newcomers brought in their own arts and their own fashions, to a very large extent they adopted also those of the older inhabitants; we can trace back to the original al ‘Ubaid people many elements in the material civilization of classical Sumer and very likely should put with those the language also. But however peaceably they came in, the Jamdat Nasr people in time obtained the mastery over those amongst whom they had settled; State temples are built by rulers, and if at Ur the Ziggurat, the centre of the worship of the city’s patron god, was rebuilt in the magnificent style illustrated for us by the mosaic palace at Erech then we can only conclude that the government of the city had passed into the hands of the alien Jamdat Nasr stock. That conclusion is supported by what 48 happened later. The Jamdat Nasr Period ends very abruptly. Because the invaders had absorbed a great deal of the aboriginal culture their suppression did not involve a complete change, and certain things that they had introduced were too obviously valuable to be abandoned—thus, they had been responsible if not for the invention of writing at least for its development, and writing had come to stay; but the arts by which we nowadays can recognize Jamdat Nasr stop suddenly. The three-coloured painted pottery is found in their earliest and their latest graves alike; but not a single sherd of it occurs in the Early Dynastic Period, and their most typical vase-forms also disappear. All their buildings seem to have been violently destroyed, and in those that replaced them there is a remarkable and puzzling change. The Jamdat Nasr builders, like all builders before them, used a rectangular flat brick much like the brick we use to-day—it is the most obvious and practical shape; but the beginning of the Early Dynastic age is signalized by the general and exclusive use of a brick rounded on the top like a loaf of bread, the ‘plano-convex brick’ of our archæological jargon. Constructionally speaking, this is a thoroughly bad brick. Various suggestions have been put forward to account for its adoption by people who had plenty of experience of the better type, e.g., that it is an imitation of building in stone brought in by people accustomed to using mud and pebbles or rounded boulders; but the Early Dynastic people were not interlopers from abroad but Valley folk who had no such traditions of stone building and no knowledge of it; moreover, the builder in stone has a natural preference for flat stones and would never have been at pains to mould his mud substitutes into so uncongenial a form, nor could so absurd an imitation, if that were all it was, have been imposed uniformly upon every builder in the land and have been employed exclusively, as the plano-convex brick was, for centuries. There must have been a much more compelling reason for it.

Plate 5

a. Steatite figure of a wild boar, Jamdat Nasr period

b. Steatite bowl in the Jamdat Nasr tradition

Plate 6

a. The grave of Mes-kalam-dug

b. Tomb-chamber of King A-bar-gi; showing the vaulted roof and arched doorway

It seems to me that the explanation is given by a discovery we made when digging the Ziggurat area. There had been here in the Jamdat Nasr Period a ziggurat with its girdle of walled terraces (we found only a fragment of the latter, but enough to prove that a ziggurat had existed), but this had been razed to the ground and its mosaic decoration torn down and new buildings had been erected on a quite different plan and with a different orientation. Now the underground foundations of the new walls contained a mixture of the flat Jamdat Nasr bricks and of the plano-convex bricks characteristic of the Early Dynasties, but the proportion of the former quickly diminished and by the time the wall rose above ground level it consisted almost entirely, if not entirely, of plano-convex bricks; it was clear that the builders still had some flat bricks in store and did not want to waste them, but could use them only for the underground work whereas for the wall proper the round-topped type was obligatory. And the other outstanding feature was the mud mortar used by the bricklayers. Mortar should be, and in every other building at Ur was, reasonably clean and smooth; but in this case it was mixed with a mass of small sherds of al ‘Ubaid pottery—well-nigh as much pottery as mud; and it was not a natural mixture due to the mud having been excavated from an al ‘Ubaid level, but artificial and deliberate. I believe that the Jamdat Nasr people, as aliens who had usurped the government of the country, incurred the hatred of the old inhabitants who at last rose in rebellion and put a violent end to the régime. The great buildings, palaces and temples, which had been set up by the tyrants and symbolized their domination had of course to be destroyed—and equally of course had to be replaced. But there had to be a complete change, and even the type of bricks used in those buildings had to be abandoned in favour of one which might perhaps be inconvenient but at any rate broke with the Jamdat Nasr tradition. So everywhere the plano-convex brick came into fashion, and in the first temple to be rebuilt, the central temple of the city’s worship, the people of Ur mixed with the mortar the pottery of the old al ‘Ubaid days; it was a gesture of ebullient nationalism whereby they linked themselves directly with the original founders of the State, disregarding the Jamdat Nasr interlude.

But for the history of Mesopotamia that interlude was of prime importance; by the time it ended Sumerian civilization was fully developed. The statement involves a question which has often been discussed, ‘Who were the Sumerians?’ Now the adjective ‘Sumerian’ has been formed by modern scholars from the place-name ‘Sumer’ which from the latter part of the third millennium B.C. was the name regularly used for southern Mesopotamia as opposed to ‘Akkad’, the northern part of the river valley; but the inhabitants did not call themselves ‘Sumerians’, they were simply ‘The people of Sumer’. For the modern historian the invention of the adjective ‘Sumerian’ was convenient for distinguishing a particular language, a particular people and a particular civilization. The language of the tablets is entirely different from any other ever used in Mesopotamia (but to what family of languages it belongs has not been determined) and thanks to the rich harvest of excavation we know exactly what we mean by ‘Sumerian civilization’. But the problem ‘Who were the Sumerians?’ remains. Ought we to apply the term to the old al ‘Ubaid stock? Undoubtedly they contributed much to the civilization which we know as Sumerian, but they were submerged before it had developed very far. To the Uruk people? They introduced metal and so made progress possible; but we know little more about them. To the Jamdat Nasr people? It is tempting to see an allusion to them in the Sumerian legend which tells how a race of monsters, half human and half fish, came from the Persian Gulf, led by one Oannes, and settled in the cities of Sumer and introduced the arts of writing, of agriculture and of working in metal ‘and since that time no further inventions have been made’; but that attributes to them too much. It is a fact that the Sumerian civilization was built up from elements derived from all three sources, al ‘Ubaid, Uruk and Jamdat Nasr, and only took on its characteristic shape after those three sources had amalgamated; it is safest to assume that only then could the people of the land be termed ‘Sumerians’. Just as England can be so called only after wave after wave of invaders had forced their way into Britain and by their joint contributions produced an island 51 culture which was not peculiar to any one of them, so we should, I think, reserve the name ‘Sumerians’ for the hybrid stock whose disparate forebears had made Sumer but, by the Dynastic Period, had merged their individuality in a civilization common to all.