Page 30 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

CHAPTER I
THE EMERGENCE OF SUMERIAN ART:

THE PROTOLITERATE PERIOD1
<CIRCA 35OO--3OOO B.C.)

Introduction

Mesopotamia is ill defined. To die west it fades into the emptiness of Arabia; in the
north it can barely be separated from the fertile plains of north Syria, with which it is,
indeed, connected by a main artery of caravan traffic along the Euphrates. Eastwards a
wide range of foothills leading up to the Persian and Armenian highlands is under the
influence of the people of the plains, but never wholly under their control.
The great transition from relative barbarism to civilization took place in the extreme
south of Mesopotamia, in the region called Sumer or Shumer by its early inhabitants.2
The earliest settlers had descended from south-west Persia, when a progressive change
in the climate was slowly turning the highlands into deserts and the pools and reed
swamps of the plain into marshes which were, here and there, inhabitable. The earliest
settlers arc called the Al ‘Ubaid people,3 after the place where their remains were first
discovered and the period of their predominance the Al ‘Ubaid Period.4 They were
established in the plain, as is generally thought, by 4000 B.C., and may have arrived
earlier. Fardier to the north, where diluvial soil had provided dry land, immigrants from
Persia had arrived at an even earlier age. Their distinctive pottery, found at Samarra on
the Tigris, at Baghouz near Abu Kemal on the Euphrates, at Nineveh, at Hassuna, and a
number of other sites in the north, is superior to that of the Al ‘Ubaid people, and may
serve here as representative of prehistoric art in Mesopotamia (Figure i).5 Its decoration
consists chiefly of narrow zones closely packed with ‘geometric* designs, but on the in­
side of plates or open bowls appear more ambitious compositions, which show a ten-
dency to whirl-likc movement. Notice the streaming hair of the women, and also the

Figure 1. Three prehistoric bowls, from Samarra

.