Information AboutUbaid |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT UBAID PERIOD | |
| history of iraq | |
| ancient history | |
| archaeological cultures | |
| SHOPPER'S DELIGHT | |
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The Tell (mound) of Ubaid near Ur in southern Iraq has given its name to the Prehistoric Chalcolithic culture which represents the earliest settlement on the Alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia . The Ubaid culture had a long duration beginning before 5300 BCE and lasting until the beginning of the Uruk Period , circa 4000 BCE. The Ubaid period is divided into three principle phases:
Ubaid culture is characterised by large village settlements, characterised by multiroomed rectangular mud-brick houses and the appearance of the first temples of public architecture in Mesopotamia, with a growth of a two tier settlement hierarchy of centralised large sites of more than 10 hectares surrounded by smaller village sites of less than 1 hectare. Domestic equipment included a destinctive fine quality buff or greenish coloured pottery decorated with geometric designs in brown or black paint; tools such as Sickle s were often made of hard fired Clay in the south. But in the north, stone and sometimes metal were used. The Ubaid period as a whole, based upon the analysis of grave goods, was one of increasingly polarised Social Stratification and decreasing Egalitarianism . Bogucki calls this a phase of "Trans-egalitarian" competitive household in which some falls behind as a result downward Social Mobility . Thus Ubaid culture would seem to be one in which Morton Fried and Elman Service have hypothesised the rise of an elite of inherited Chieftain s, perhaps heads of kin groups (a Shiek dom?) linked in some way to the administration of the temple shrines amd their granaries, were responsible for mediating intra-group conflict and maintaining social order. It would seem that various collective methods, perhaps through what Thorkild Jacobsen called Primitive Democracy , in which disputes were previously resolved through a council of one's peers, were no longer sufficient to the needs of the local community. The Ubaid culture was clearly intrusive into southern Iraq, though it has clear connection to earlier cultures in the region of middle Iraq. The appearance of the Ubaid folk, has sometimes been linked to the so-called Sumerian problem, related to the origins of Sumer ian Civilisation . Whatever the ethnic origins of this group, we here see for the first time a clear tripartitie social division between intensive subsistence peasant farmers, with crops and animals coming from the north, tent-dwelling nomadic pastoralists dependent upon their herds, and hunter-fisher folk of the Arabian littoral, living in reed huts. EXTERNAL LINKS
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