H— ANTHROPOLOGY 187 



from the ruins of older settlements and rising already 25 to 30 m. above 

 the plain. Below the al'Ubaid foundations come settlements belonging 

 to the Tel Halaf culture. Mallowan found the same culture beneath, 

 and therefore older than, al'Ubaid remains at Arpachiya, 38 ft. below 

 the historical horizon at Nineveh and in deep layers at Chagar Bazar. 

 The Tel Halaf culture is accordingly older than the al'llbaid— if you 

 want a guess, I would hazard 5000 B.C. as a moderate date — but it is no 

 less sophisticated. Monumental circular buildings, cobbled streets, 

 delicate and beautifully painted vases, ingeniously carved stone beads 

 and stamps already used for sealing property attest already a well-organised 

 society, an advanced economy, highly developed craftsmanship. If the 

 collection of pit-dwellings and wattle-and-daub huts sheltering under the 

 gigantic ramparts of Maiden Castle be termed a city, can we deny that 

 name to the Tel Halaf settlements at Arpachiya ? Its cobbled streets 

 disclose a community as well organised for works of public utility as 

 were Iron Age Britons for defence preparations. Even the economic 

 aspect of city life is represented. The richest house at Arpachiya would 

 seem to have belonged to an artist-craftsman presumably producing for 

 sale, not merely for the satisfaction of domestic needs. And even long 

 distance trade is dramatically attested by a shell of Cypraea vitellus 

 imported from the Persian Gulf to the Tel Halaf village at Chagar Bazar 

 on the Khabur. 



The Tel Halaf culture must have flourished for several generations. 

 Mallowan uncovered at least five building levels at Arpachiya and seven 

 at Chagar Bazar. And yet at Gawra, Nineveh and Chagar Bazar, the 

 oldest Tel Halaf foundations rest upon the ruins of villages characterised 

 by painted pottery of the Samarra style. Guessing frankly once more 

 these might take us well back into the sixth millennium B.C. 



Yet the culture revealed even in these remote depths resembles the 

 European neolithic only in the most formal sense — in the continued use 

 of polished stone adzes and some other tools. The earliest cultures of 

 the Fertile Crescent, like its Early Dynastic cities, are so unlike anything 

 we know in Cis-alpine Europe before Roman times, are economically 

 so far ahead of Koln-Lindenthal or Skara Brae or even Toszeg as to seem 

 almost incommensurable. Yet some comparison is inevitable if Montelius' 

 fifth postulate is to be objectively criticised. 



The abruptness of the contrast may to-day be softened by reference 

 to a region that is more than spatially intermediate between Mesopotamia 

 and Europe. During the last five years a promising beginning has been 

 made in reducing to a system Anatolian prehistory. The results are 

 relevant not only to the antiquity of Oriental culture, but also to the 

 probability of the diflFusion postulated in axiom 3 . 



The results of the long campaign conducted at Alisar Hiiyiik by the 

 Oriental Institute of Chicago which were published this year have given 

 the first definite clue to the culture-sequence on the plateau. In particular 

 they provide the skeleton of a chronology. Recorded history began 

 relatively late in the Halys basin ; continuous records disclosing names 

 and dates do not go back beyond the foundation of the First Hittite 

 Empire in the twentieth century B.C. But intercourse between Anatolia 

 and Mesopotamia is attested by business documents several centuries 



