Uruk and Yortan

Abstract

Much water, both clear and muddy, has flowed under the bridge since 1903 and we can now form some idea of Anatolian cultures in the third millennium B.c. We can recognize a Troadic area in the west, a group of pre-Hittite sites in the centre, a rather shadowy Cilician culture in the south, an equally vague culture in the Van district, and a very important group of sites in the Upper Euphrates valley and its tributary vales, a country populated in historic times by Subaraeans and other less important peoples. One of the most recent contributions to the prehistory of Anatolia is provided by certain passages in Dr. Frankfort's Archaeology and the Sumerian Question, a most valuable and stimulating book; if I criticize one section of it I trust that it will be realized that I differ from him chiefly on certain emphases and stresses, and admire the treatise in general as much as any of his readers. In his general review of Mesopotamia Dr. Frankfort notices certain peculiarities in the culture of the Uruk period for which he can find no prototypes in the preceding al 'Ubaid culture. These peculiarities he proceeds to derive from Anatolia, though he admits that they may have been derived thence indirectly. The more important of these supposedly Anatolian characteristics were the use of a slip, the use of clays of purposely different composition to obtain the red colour and muffled firing to obtain the grey, the vertical piercing of the lugs, and the occurrence of stone vases. The pottery, according to Frankfort, indicates 'migratory movements'. 'Both the grey and the red wares are in reality rooted in the black ware technique which was practised in Anatolia, whereas the Iranian Highlands and the Syrian coastal regions produced two varieties of painted pottery.' Various elements of the Uruk culture, the dress fashions, the practice of writing on clay tablets, use of stamp and cylinder seals, building with mud bricks and adorning the walls with vertical grooves or by the insertion of baked clay cones, were characteristic also of the later Sumerian culture.2 Were the Uruk folk then already Sumerians? This question must be abandoned at present, but we may remark that there are many elements in the Uruk culture, especially the pottery, that can hardly be derived from the preceding al 'Ubaid culture. The plain pottery of Uruk has been found at Tepe Gawra and Nineveh in Assyria, at Kish, Ur, Warka, and Telloh in south Mesopotamia, and in deposits Ic and Id at Susa in Persia.3