Petr Charvát - Mesopotamia Before History (2008, Routledge)

The mesolithic or epipalaeolithic 11

even the ABC of chemical production, visible in the lime plasters of Qermez Dere (Watkins 1990, 339–341), were introduced. The traditional pattern of a calendrically determined nomadic cycle following the availability of subsistence resources in space and time clearly survived but that various communities could follow various trajectories is clearly demonstrated by differences in the composition of game even on neighbouring sites (goats against sheep at Shanidar and Zawi Chemi). Such transfers in space may be attested to by the occurrence of imported obsidian which the ancients may have procured in the course of their sojourns in the montane valleys of what is now eastern Turkey. Specialization and rationalization does not leave aside even the production sphere; witness the site of Karim Shahir, clearly concentrating on the exploitation of the local sources of stone for the production of chipped industry.

The Mesolithic economy thus shows, embedded in the traditional lifestyle, early human capacities for the observation of regularities in nature, for the recognition of their mechanisms and of their significance for the human world, as well as for putting these observations to practical use in subsistence activities, including regional specialization and obvious sharing of the results of labour of various communities.

Society

In this area the developments assumed rather inconspicuous forms, resulting in situations different from the preceding age only by shades and hues but sometimes eloquent enough. First and foremost, men and women of that age invented fashion: not content with ornaments from perishable matter which must have been frequently worn from time immemorial, they now decided to apply both their skill and their energy to the shaping of even the hardest materials available such as stone (but also bone) into pendants, bracelets and rings. Why they did this is not clear and we can only suggest that as a part of their vision of the world, they now perceived more clearly, or rather ascribed greater significance to, particular features of the individual community members both within their respective groupings and vis-à-vis the external world. In this aspect we may recall the most pertinent observations of Lewis Mumford in the sense that ‘the first attack of primitive men and women on their “environment” signified most probably an “attack” on their own bodies’ and that such phenomena be best explained as a human effort to

dictate their terms to nature, however clumsily defined. All this, of course, points in a most prominent manner to deliberate attempts at mastering one’s own self, at the assertion of one’s own self and, regardless of the perverse and irrational manner in which this happens, at the perfection of one’s own self.

(Bruce Dickson 1990, 44)

This tendency to classify fellow human beings together with the rest of the world may well have led to the formulation of the first principles governing typically male and typically female behaviour, documented by an ingenious analysis of the Neolithic Catal Hüyük materials by lan Hodder (1987). Unfortunately, these attempts at formulation of the essentials of public relations are very likely to have led also to the confrontation of both human individuals and communities and to interactions ranging from affectionate

Mesopotamia before history 12

Figure 2.2 Two of the phases of the aceramic Neolithic house at Qermez Dere (ninth—eighth millennium BC). The walls and floor were plastered with mud covered by a fine white layer. The two pillars modelled from clay would be present throughout the entire ‘life period’ of the house. In a later phase (below), a stone which had once stood between the two pillars was erected independently in a plastered and red-coloured niche in one of the building’s walls (after Watkins 1996, 83, Fig. 2 and 84, Fig. 5).

The mesolithic or epipalaeolithic 13

friendliness to violent conflicts (Kozlowski and Kempisty 1990, 349; Watkins 1990, 344; Vencl 1991). The fact that even in this period of plenty, human beings could not refrain from applying the ingenuity with which they procured their subsistence to plotting against their brothers and sisters does not sound particularly encouraging. Nevertheless, it is a fact.

Metaphysics

Far from having at our disposal knowledge of the same character as that of the preceding period, we shall have to be content with the observation of differences. The first feature to strike the eye is without doubt the ritual character of settlement sites, mirrored clearly by archaeological evidence. The site of Qermez Dere in north Iraq (Wilkinson and Matthews 1989; Watkins 1990 and 1996) included sunk features, the interiors of which were carefully coated with clay and provided with good-quality lime plaster. In their central parts their builders erected free-standing pillars of clay on stone cores, which bore moulded decoration and a coating of red clay and white lime plaster and laid down pits and hearths (Figure 2.2). Unlike the ordinary settlement features, these buildings were kept scrupulously clean throughout their existence and after the extinction of their functions they underwent deliberate demolition and levelling with clean clay. The lower parts of the levelled ruins served as repositories for some rather unusual objects such as bones of large animals in the case of the earlier house or stone pendants and six human skulls in the later one. These ‘houses of life’ (see p. 5 for the colour symbolism) may well have embodied a ‘codification’ of the proper relationships among the inhabitants of the site and their environment, both visible and invisible, by means of ritual procedures which did not yet assume an institutional character but nevertheless reflect an increasing interest in (and therefore presumably a growing sense of responsibility for) legitimate relationships between people, animate and inanimate nature and the supernatural world. Of course, this ‘higher’ component of metaphysical thought constantly saturated common everyday practices likely to have had a magical significance. At this historical moment, we find the very first entry of such a ubiquitous category of archaeological finds from Mesopotamia as the anthropoand zoomorphic statuettes of clay (mostly of women and cattle, on which see in general Hamilton et al. 1996). The quantity of materials at our disposal does not suffice for an assessment of the measure to which the Palaeolithic character of female statuettes, portraying mature women of all age categories and likely to have served in common everyday rituals accompanying brides, wives, mothers and household managers all through their lives (Bruce Dickson 1990, 211–214) underwent transformation in the Mesolithic. Certain parallels with the burial rite, such as the occurrence of a female statuette deposited in a pit with red pigment at Karim Shahir compared with a body of a woman buried with red pigment at Shanidar Bl, suggest the possibility of substitution rituals but this is just one of the interpretation possibilities. Another feature to be noted here is the foundation of the most ancient cemeteries of Mesopotamia (Shanidar B1). Of course, these constitute little more than a sample of the original population (children in this instance). What was the postmortal treatment of the rest of the population we may only guess, the only hint at partial burials being supplied by the Qermez Dere human skulls. All this points to a more deeply nuanced vision of human society expressed in the particular treatment of various groups of deceased

The mesolithic or epipalaeolithic 15

environments such division lines can be quite sharp and well-defined.

c)In the spiritual sphere a definition and creation of material incarnations of a balanced, harmonious and generally acknowledged structure of relationships among people and

their visible and invisible environment, periodical renewal of this balance and practical application of such principles and ideas in the form of everyday-life rituals which may have employed the stratagem of substituting images for either initiators or targets of such rituals.

In the area of mental development of the human race, we perceive today the inhabitants of Mesolithic Mesopotamia—together with other contemporary populations of the Near East—as those who laid the foundations upon which all subsequent developments within this civilizational context rest. They clearly indulged in the essential activities of any civilized human group, so pertinently described by Claude Lévi-Strauss: the evidence, gathered through the experience of any human community, is classified and ordered into a systematic explanation of the structure of the world and of the situation of the human race within it. This system then defines practical attitudes towards the world and is expressed by various symbol structures, among which the system of audio-oral symbols, or human speech, and of visual symbols, namely all forms of representative arts, occupy the most important positions. The essential characteristics of all human communities up to recent time—economic specialization, social differentiation and complex spiritual reflection of the visible world—may be documented in this period of time. The difference between this and later epochs of human history does not seem to lie in the absence of certain human traits—our Mesolithic ancestors were presumably just as ‘civilized’ as we are—but rather in the context, or ‘lifestyle’, in which these traits were embedded and which constituted the set of coordinates and the frame of reference defining the sense of application of the human intellect.

Chapter Three

The Neolithic

PlLOT SITES

Jarmo, or Qalaat Jarmo

A tell in an extensive montane valley 12 km east of Chemchemal. A US excavation of 1948, 1950–1951 and 1954–1955 directed by R.J.Braidwood. The current size of the tell (axe lengths) amounts to c.90 by 140 m with the thickness of the cultural layer reaching up to 7 m. A series of nineteen C-14 dates indicates dating between 9290 BC and 4545– 3395 cal. BC (Annex 716–717). The analysis of charcoal pieces shows that the site was once surrounded by an open woodland-steppe landscape featuring oak, tamarisk and the Prosopis shrub, while the animal remains suggest that the site’s inhabitants moved about in savannah landscapes but also in open stony plains, as well as in woods and mountain forests. The local community procured their subsistence by a series of approaches. They clearly experimented with the cultivation of emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum) and einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum) but did not advance as far as the full domestication of these cultigens. Of course, they far from neglected the gathering of wild plant food such as wild barley, wild peas, wild lentils, wild beans and other pulses, among which some clearly approached the threshold of domestication, pistachios and acorns. Fully domesticated animals of Jarmo include dog, goat and, in later strata, pig; the local hunters brought in onager(?), gazelle, wild sheep and wild goat, wild cattle, wild pig, deer, hare, wolf, fox, bear and various kinds of birds and fish. A sample of collected food includes snails, turtles, molluscs and crabs. The architecture present at the site could be articulated into sixteen phases most of which belong to the pre-pottery age. Only the five uppermost strata have yielded pottery finds. The locals built their houses of pounded earth on stone foundations. Clay floors sometimes received reed-mat substructures and doors may have turned on stone pivots set both into the thresholds and the architraves. The windows were hardly more than loophole-shaped apertures so the house interiors must have been very dark and their inhabitants probably performed their daily activities in rectangular court areas (crushing of plant food, cooking on hearths situated both on the surface and in pits, heating of furnaces situated in house interiors). Individual households were dispersed over the site without any apparent and systematic layout. The local community employed a series of materials. The most usual resource of ancient Mesopotamia, clay, was used for building but, in the final stages of the site, also for the production of pottery (large storage jars, pots, bowls, cylinder-shaped goblets, all of light and burnished ware sometimes decorated by splashes of red colour), for the shaping of pendants and for clay statuettes of women and animals of which some 5,000 were found (a proportion among them bearing the red paint). The local population shaped various kinds of stones into chipped industry (mainly blades, in a number of instances from

The neolithic 17

sickles and sometimes bearing traces of the bitumen hafting, less numerous scrapers, borers, notched blades and microliths, the quantity of which amounts to almost 40 per cent of all chipped industry) and worked with imported obsidian. By grinding and polishing rock pieces they manufactured axes or hoes, bored stone discs (digging-stick weights?), grinding-stone sets, stone vessels, of which fragments of at least 350 items were found here, and, to a more limited extent, spoons, whetstones or pendants. The site has also yielded remains of at least 225 polished stone bracelets and what may be carved images of circumcised penises. The local specialists seem to have mastered the technique of rotation boring of stone items with the addition of an abrading agent (Larsen 1991, 139). Bone was used for turning out awls, rings and pendants. Of metals, the Jarmo community knew lead (Moorey 1985, 122). Quite definitely they worked with organic materials but only traces of matting and basketry, impressions of fine textiles and bitumen products survived. On the site see Braidwood and Howe 1960, 26–27, 38–40, 42–48, 64–65 and 172; Hrouda 1971, 30; Jawad 1974, 13; Gebel 1984, 274–275 and in the register on p. 319; Watson 1997.

Umm Dabaghiyah

A tell 80 km south-west of Mosul. A British excavation of 1971–1974, directed by D.Kirkbride. This site is situated in a steppe-plain landscape with gypsum and salt outcrops in a limit zone of dry farming. Four strata of Neolithic settlement of Hassuna and pre-Hassuna culture (c.6000 BC). The local archaeological evidence indicates a series of subsistence practices carried out at the site and both in its close and farther vicinity. The limited extent of local agricultural production is indicated by scanty finds of barley, emmer and einkorn wheat. On the other hand, the presence of cultivated peas and lentils and of a single grain of the six-row bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) points to the possibility of contacts with agriculturally more favourable areas. Of the collected plant food, wild barley and wild grasses left their traces on the site. The same inconspicuous position is occupied by animal husbandry: some 9 per cent sheep and goat remains and less than 2 per cent cattle, pig and dog remains. The record of the subsistence activities is dominated by hunting gazelle (16 per cent) but especially onager (66–70 per cent). Hunting activities in the immediate vicinity of the site probably resulted in the deposition of the remains of fox, hare, rat, wild boar and various birds, while larger pieces of game such as aurochs or badger had to be carried from the piedmont area of Jebel Sinjar over a distance equal to about a three-day march. Materials turning up at the site suggest a similarly wide exploitation area. In addition to game, Jebel Sinjar is likely to have provided the site’s inhabitants with plate silex and tree trunks which they used for building construction. Long-distance exchange is represented by obsidian and by dentalium shells from the Arabo-Persian Gulf or the Mediterranean Sea. Grinding stones were made of material obtained from a source some 34 km from the site and averagequality chipped industry from silex turning up c.16 km away. The site is thus apparently characterized by a ‘broad-spectrum economy’, integrating agricultural, animalhusbandry, hunting and gathering subsistence approaches. The four architectural phases of the site are preceded by the earliest, fifth layer which left in the subsoil circular or oval gypsum-revetted basins and ashy refuse strata with evidence for the production of

Mesopotamia before history 18

Figure 3.1 A Neolithic ‘husking tray’ of pottery for cleaning cereal grain of impurities. Hassuna culture (seventhsixth millennium BC), from Yarimtepe I (after Munchaev and Merpert 1981, 97, Fig. 22).

chipped industry, as well as traces of painting of interiors of both geometrical and figural character and of using the colour red. From layer IV upwards (the layers being numberedfrom the uppermost one) the site always consists of a large complex of rectangular chamber building and a group of average-level living houses. The chamber complex consists of rows of rectangular chambers with floors of trampled earth (in most cases) and without doors, separated by walls some 50 cm thick of clay strongly tempered with chopped straw but without clay plaster. The chamber fillings have yielded outrageously few finds: hardly more than sherds, in one case some 2,400 smaller and c.100 larger balls of fired clay, possibly slingshot, a few items of chipped and ground stone industry and pieces of red pigment. Storage jars were sunk into floors in two cases. Large masonry pens and evidence for the butchering of hunted animals in the courtyards of the chamber complex point to a connection with treatment of food (a storage complex?). In contrast, the living houses accompanying the chamber complex display 2– 3 rooms with trampled-earth floors, each enclosed by thinner walls of sandy untempered clay, sometimes plastered with gypsum, with narrow loophole-shaped windows. Rooms had hearths and further facilities for processing food (basin-shaped storage spaces?) as well as other ‘furniture’ such as gypsum-stone shelves, wall niches and cellars(?) in floors. In some instances the visitors to such houses could admire fresco paintings of both

The neolithic 19

geometrical patterns and figural scenes (an onager frieze, a hunting scene?). Interior hearths could have been connected with kilns with chimneys adhering to the exterior house walls. The rooms were roofed with the aid of tree trunks and the accessibility of roofs is borne out by remains of staircases. As early as the ancient layer IV some of the living houses had to give way before the enlargement of the chamber complex. Layer III virtually duplicated the plan of layer IV; in the final phase of this settlement the site was evacuated and the house entrances immured. Phase II structures must have been deserted when the site was in full bloom, as is indicated by the quantity of remaining household articles such as pottery, and they displayed evidence for caved-in roofs. At that time, a part of the work was probably carried out in the open (the occurrence of paved areas). The inhabitants employed a variety of materials. They used clay for the building of houses and for the production of mobile items like pottery (decorated with moulded blobs in the forms of onagers or people, with painting and incisions, burnished and fired at low temperatures; see Bernbeck 1994, 116–119), slingshot, ornaments or figurines. The local sources supplied materials for chipped industry (arrowheads, blades, scrapers, borers, burins, microliths) while the imported flint and obsidian came in in the form of readymade, mostly blade tools. The ground and polished industry featured axes used obviously for the butchering of game, grinding-stone sets, bored stone spheres, beautiful vessels of marble and alabaster as well as some ornaments such as bracelets. Bone served for the production of various awls, scrapers and spatulae. Other work carried out at the site included the production of textiles and the burning of lime. A cemetery in which the bodies were laid to rest in a crouched position but had no grave goods, situated on the slope of the site, may belong to the local Neolithic community. On the site see Munchaev and Merpert 1981, passim, see the register p. 317; Kirkbride 1982; Mortensen 1983; Gebel 1984, 277 and in the register on p. 321; Bernbeck 1994, 116–119.

Tell Hassuna

A site 30 km south-east of Mosul. A British-Iraqi excavation of 1943–1944 directed by S.Lloyd and F.Safar. C-14 dates: layer la: 1690–820 cal. BC (erroneous?), layer V: 6435– 5420 cal. BC (Annex 714) or 5301 BC (uncalibrated; Bernbeck 1994, 346). The series of fifteen settlement layers excavated in this tell may be divided into several units: layers Ia, Ib–VI and VI–XV. The layers denoted as la obviously represent remains of seasonal campsites (at least three). Evidence for the subsistence procurement from here is very limited. Goat bones imply animal husbandry while massive stone axes or hoes indicate substantial interference with the environment (felling of trees?). Sickle blades are missing but clay spheres and ovals (slingshot?) do point to the exploitation of uncultivated landscape. Thick ashy strata supply an eloquent testimony both of the role of fire in this community and of the very simple manner of rubbish disposal. No traces of architecture have survived and only hearths, some of which were paved with pebbles and sherds set occasionally into ‘primitive mortar’, around which the artifacts clustered, could be excavated. Again, the site hosted experts in work with various materials. Clay served for the production of both coarse and large storage jars and fine burnished pottery vessels (see Bernbeck 1994, 126–127). Stone was chipped (scrapers, blades, fewer borers and burins), ground and polished (axes or hoes with traces of bitumen hafting), procured from both near and far (obsidian). Awls of bone represent another artifact category while

Mesopotamia before history 20

Figure 3.2 One of the tells in the clayey steppe of southern Mesopotamia. To this day, the local landscape is studded with thousands of such sites, perpetuating the memory of generations of people who gave the land their best efforts and ultimately found their last resting place in it.

the metals procured by these food-gatherers were antimony and malachite. Treatment of organic materials is represented by traces of woven mats and spindle whorls for spinning thread. The local settlers left behind not only blocks of red pigment but also a child burial in a storage jar and, in another case, a body of a deceased adult close to which a storage jar and an axe/hoe of stone were found.

Layers Ib, Ic, II, III, IV, V and VI are characterized by the first occurrence of claybrick architecture and by a change in the cultural character of the site. From now on, the subsistence procedures adopted by the local inhabitants included agriculture (two-row barley?) or rather consumption of plant food attested to by the frequent occurrence of sickle blades and grinding stones and by storage spaces in houses but also animal husbandry (sheep, goat, cattle) and hunting. The character of treatment of natural resources is sufficiently elucidated by the excavation of room 17 in layer II. In addition to pottery and storage jars, this room contained a workshop for the production of chipped industry, especially of sickle blades (cores, blades, flakes, a finished sickle with a cutting edge composed of blades hafted into the wooden handle by bitumen), as well as five bone awls, a goat’s or ram’s horn (raw material?), clay spheres and ovals (slingshot?) and blocks of red pigment. Overland contacts are borne out by the occurrence of obsidian and