Mesopotamian Prehistory

Mesopotamian Prehistory is the period in Mesopotamia that ends with the invention of writing (at the hands of the Sumerians) all the way back to the Arrival of the First Humans In Asia. Anatomically-modern humans first left Africa (permanently) probably between 70-50 ka. There is a high-probability that Mesopotamian Prehistory begins with the first arrival of humans around this time.

itself especially in the foothills that mark its northern reaches as you follow the line of the Zagros Mountains as their ridge runs up from the south generally northwest towards the Taurus Mountains, we see some of the first evidence of long term settlement in Mesopotamia.

Into modern Syria more than Iraq which covers southern Mesopotamia.

• Mesopotamian Prehistory After The Ice Age
• The Chalcolithic / Copper Age
• The Uruk Period

Mesopotamian Prehistory After The Ice Age / Great Flood

In the latter phases of Mesopotamian Prehistory, the era after the Ice Age known as the Holocene, we see peoples coming down from the north of the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia and settling these lands to the south. The oldest settlements of the Neolithic being found in northern Mesopotamia dating back to around 7000 BCE, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The oldest known human settlement is also in the area, going back to 10,000 BCE, we the monolithic stone architecture of Gobekli Tepe just on the northern borders of Mesopotamia. Overlooking the plains of the Fertile Crescent where human civilization first developed.

At first only the northern lands were settled. People at first only lived in the foothills of the Taurus mountain range that ridges the northern borders of Mesopotamia in Syria, and in the foothills of the Zagros which comes up from the south to meet the Taurus.

This was Mesopotamia in the Neolithic. Sometime near 10,000 BCE agriculture was introduced in northern Mesopotamia, and it was close to 8000 BCE that we see the first evidence of animal domestication.

Only in the Late Neolithic are the southern alluvial lands of Mesopotamia settled. About 6500 BCE we have a large settlement at Ubaid in Sumer. At first i is sites like Jarmo.

The Chalcolithic / Copper Age

From about 6500 to 4000 BC the major peoples of Mesopotamia were found at sites such as Ubaid, Halaf, Hassuna, and Samarra located throughout Mesopotamia. A culture is often then named after the site at which it was found, so we have the Ubaid Culture, Halaf Culture, Hassuna Culture, and Samarra Culture who defined the dominant centers of civilization during is 2,500 year period.

An important thing to note is that in the Near East ancient settlements are often found in the form of a tell, which is a local term for a great earthen mound which are covered in pottery and rubble, the detritus of ancient civilization.

Such sites are the remnants of the material culture of ancient peoples who sometimes occupied such a city for thousands of years. The larger the earthen mound of the tell, the longer it was occupied. As people continually inhabited a place dust, earth, and detritus was packed down (and probably swept) in the streets, lanes, squares, and homes as it was regularly trodden on by hundreds or thousands of people, going about their daily business.

The mainking place with the culture and site of Hassuna in the north, which emerged in the early 6th millennium at the Iraqi site of Tell Hassuna.

The greatest was probably the Ubaid Culture, whose remains are found at a tell of the same name. 6500–3800 BC. They are responsible for a great deal of development, and some see them as directly influencing somehow the slightly later Sumerian people. They were in southern Mesopotamia, SUmer. Excavated by Sir Leonard Wooley and Henry Hall. Earliest great southern period, early phases under alluvium.

The Halaf culture in the northwest, closer to Syria. They existed at the same time as Hassuna and Ubaid, but not for as long. The Halaf culture flourished at Tell Halaf. Samarra 5500–4800 BCE. the Samarra culture in central Mesopotamia and the Ubaid culture in the southeast, which later expanded to encompass the whole region.

The Fertile Crescent was inhabited by several distinct, flourishing cultures between the end of the last ice age (c. 10,000 BC) and the beginning of history.

One of the oldest known Neolithic sites in Mesopotamia is Jarmo, settled around 7000 BC and broadly contemporary with Jericho (in the Levant) and Çatal Hüyük (in Anatolia). It as well as other early Neolithic sites, such as Samarra and Tell Halaf were in northern Mesopotamia; later settlements in southern Mesopotamia required complicated irrigation methods.

The first of these was Eridu, settled during the Ubaid period culture by farmers who brought with them the Samarran culture from the north.

Uruk period

This was followed by the Uruk period. Named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia. It was followed by the Sumerian civilization.

The late Uruk period (34th to 32nd centuries) saw the gradual emergence of the cuneiform script and corresponds to the Early Bronze Age; it may also be called the “Protoliterate period”.

It is here, in the hot and once quite temperate and lush land covered in marshes, delta, as the two great rivers reach the Persian Gulf, that we see, once settled, give birth in many ways to Human Civilization on a completely new level and scale.