648 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1959 
In the life of these early people, bitumen proved to be a most 
useful substance. It is pliable, resilient, and hardens in time; it is 
an adhesive; it can also be used for insulating and waterproofing. 
The earliest food stores, the underground silos of Hassuna village, 
south of Nineveh, were coated with bitumen. The early agriculturists 
of Hassuna and those of Jarmo, a settlement of even greater antiquity, 
used bitumen for toolmaking. Bitumen was the adhesive that held 
flints in the wooden hafts of tools, especially sickles used to harvest 
wheat and barley some 7,000 years ago. 
At the hands of the Sumerians the humble mineral pitch became 
a material of prime importance. It was the material that bonded 
the particles of artificial mountains, the ziggurats like that of Ur; 
it held the burnt bricks together; it insulated the buildings, covered 
the pavements, and lined the boats made of reeds. Later, at the time 
of the Neo-Babylonian rule, Nebuchadnezzar recorded in his inscrip- 
tions that he fortified the walls with bitumen and covered with glisten- 
ing asphalt the roads of Babylon. 
Bitumen made possible the evolution of mosaic pictures. One 
of the most important achievements of early Sumerian art is the 
Standard of Ur, which comes to us from ca. 2600 B.C. One side 
shows an army going to war in leopard-skin coats, wearing helmets 
and carrying adzes, driving 4-wheeled battle chariots, which trample 
the enemy underfoot. The other side shows a peaceful feast—the par- 
ticipants wear only the fringed loincloth, the gada. They eat, drink, 
and listen to the singer and the harpist. This work of art, salvaged 
and preserved with infinite care by the hands of British scholars, 
is now the pride of the British Museum. A fine reproduction is in 
the collection of Mesopotamian pictures by Christian Zervos (1935). 
The oldest specimen of inlaid pictures comes from Al-Ubaid; it 
is the famous frieze of white cows, calves, and stocky Sumerians 
processing milk around the sacred stall gate of the goddess Inanna, 
contrasting strikingly with a black shale background. This frieze is 
dated to ca. 2800 B.C. 
STONE CUTTING 
As all stone objects found in southern Mesopotamia are made from 
imported material, it is little wonder that much care was taken in 
carving and embellishing these precious objects. Stone door sockets 
of temples were usually marked with cuneiform signs; millstones 
were important economic assets. One of the Sumerian weapons, 
perhaps the oldest one, used by kings and often dedicated to gods, 
was the stone mace. Sacred traditions seemed to demand stone vessels 
with which to honor gods and royalty. Marble, alabaster, and carnel- 
ian were carved into vessels of exquisitely harmonious, simple shapes. 
