i86 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



stumps of a gigantic edifice that had been reconstructed once or twice 

 in the Jemdet Nasr period. These walls in turn rested on ruins of a 

 no less imposing building, the Red Temple ; a veritable cathedral adorned 

 with a mosaic of clay nails and with friezes of stucco beasts. The Red 

 Temple itself was twice remodelled and was after all only the successor 

 of a still earlier, but no less monumental, cathedral, termed in view of 

 its unusual stone foundations the Limestone Temple. Now you do not 

 build a cathedral every fifty years, even if it be built only of mud brick. 

 This series of three prehistoric temples with their several reconstructions 

 must cover a period of several centuries. (Incidentally writing was 

 invented during that period.) 



But even in the Limestone Temple we are dealing with a highly- 

 organised urban civilisation presupposing centuries of experimentation 

 and development. Some aspects of that development are explicitly 

 revealed in the archaeological record. From the floor level of the Lime- 

 stone Temple the Germans sank a shaft, 17 m. or just under 60 ft. deep 

 to virgin soil. It was dug entirely through the debris of prehistoric 

 dwellings. As one winds down the ramp into that dizzy abyss one can 

 distinguish in the pit wall 18 layers marked by hearths, floors, stumps of 

 walls and heaps of sherds and artifacts. As Dr. Randall Maclver has 

 insisted, nothing could be more perilous than an attempt to estimate in 

 years the time taken for such an accumulation to form. But I must 

 confess that nothing has driven home so vividly the antiquity of settled 

 life in the Tigris-Euphrates delta as the descent of that great shaft. 

 Admitting that I am now guessing perhaps rashly, I cannot believe that 

 the al'Ubaid culture represented in the lower levels at Erech is later than 



4500 B.C. 



But no one has ever suggested that the geologically very recent delta 

 of Lower Mesopotamia was the cradle of food-production. It is in fact 

 evident that the al'Ubaid farmers who settled on the freshly emerged 

 land-surface there, brought with them from older regions a culture 

 already mature. And in the last five years the excavations of Mallowan 

 and Speiser in Assyria and Syria have given us glimpses of what preceded 

 al'Ubaid in the Fertile Crescent. It is true that history does not fully 

 dawn there till relatively late — till the time of the Dynasty of Akkad 

 indeed. But relations with Lower Mesopotamia were so close and so 

 continuous that the archseological record provided by the prehistoric 

 levels of Gawra, Nineveh and Chagar Bazar can be proved parallel to 

 that from the protohistoric levels of Sumer. Imported Assyrian pottery 

 actually found at Tel Asmer thus shows that Gawra VI is at least Early 

 Dynastic and Gawra Villa not later than Jemdet Nasr in Babylonia. 

 Below the last-named level come four or. five architectural periods, 

 Gawra Vlllb to XII, presumably parallel to the Uruk period of Sumer. 

 So when we find in Gawra XIII pottery and other relics typical of the 

 earliest or al'Ubaid phase of Sumer's prehistory, we have no reason to 

 doubt that al'Ubaid in Assyria is virtually contemporary with al'Ubaid 

 in Sumer. But Gawra XIII already boasted a cluster of three handsome- 

 and monumental temples, decorated with painted buttresses and niches 

 and grouped round a court 20 m. by 14 m. in area. 



And the al'Ubaid temples at Gawra are perched upon a tell, formed 



