Hello I’m Paul Collins, I’m the curator for Ancient Near East at the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, and I’m going to show you some objects from the Halaf Period. This is a very important period in Ancient Mesopotamian civilisation. It’s a moment when North Mesopotamia - that’s Northern Iraq and Syria, are unified by a shared culture. This is a period from around about 5500BC to around 4500BC. You’ll find the dates vary between publications, but it’s approximately 1000 years. In this period we see similar forms of architecture, pottery, figurines, spread in a broad area from Northern Iraq, through Syria, right the way across to the Mediterranean. And it’s presumably the background to common economies, common ideas, perhaps even common languages, we don’t know for certain, because of course at this period there’s no writing, there’s nothing to tell us about these people’s ideas, or indeed their languages.
What we do have however, are a number of small, village communities, with common architecture. And during the Halaf period we see a popular form, known as a ‘tholoi’, what archaeologists call ‘circular buildings’. Rectilinear architecture had been used in Mesopotamia for a thousand years by this date, but for some reason that’s unclear, circular buildings returned to be a common form in these small agricultural villages across North Mesopotamia. In these ‘tholoi’, which were clearly domestic in character - it was where ordinary people lived and worked and slept, and we find very distinctive types of pottery. And this really helps to define the Halaf period.
This is a typical Halaf bowl or plate; it’s very finely made. Halaf pottery is among the finest pottery ever made in the Near East, and that includes even more recent periods. The reason for that is that they had developed the technology of firing. Kilns – a two-tier kiln had been invented, which allowed much greater control of the temperature. So earlier pottery, which had been in existence since at least 7000BC was quite crude. Low-fired, it meant that it could crumble very easily, and didn’t produce a strong, hard, ceramic. But by the middle of the 6th Millennium BC, and the emergence of the Halaf period, the technology is in place to produce very fine ceramics indeed. This particular bowl comes from a site called Chagar Bazar in Northern Iraq. And you can see that it’s painted in a very elaborate fashion. Earliest pottery really very poorly painted, if at all, but now we see painting coming to represent, perhaps, ideas of identify within these village communities.
The decoration itself uses paint in various colours, in this case it is black, charcoal, and then a red ochre to differentiate the design. And we have bands of red paint separating very complicated structures represented in black. The patterns you see depicted on bowls like this may well reflect the weaving of baskets. Baskets of which don’t survive in the archaeological record. Organic material made from plants and other materials like leather don’t survive well in the archaeological record in Mesopotamia. So what we see in these ceramics is perhaps a reflection of the type of material which would have been much, much more common in these village communities. And it’s through the weaving of these patterns and the form that they take, that perhaps people identified themselves, much as we might identify ourselves with a flag, for example.
Patterns like this are found in Halaf pottery, right the way across this broad area of North Mesopotamia. And for many years it was thought that there were production centres where the finest pottery was made, and then it was exported to the surrounding regions. Now it is recognised from analysis of the clay, that in fact there were lots of production centres with variations in the designs, which, again, may reflect local customs and traditions.
Whatever the case, these ceramics were quite high-prestige, and we perhaps used in feasting opportunities, perhaps largely among men. As mobile populations moved between villages, part of the economy of the Halaf period was largely cattle-based, so one can imagine herds of cattle being taken across the undulating plains of North Syria and Iraq, between these village communities, and it’s through feasting on vessels such as this, that communication was established.
This is another Halaf bowl. Again showing very clearly the quality of production. Very little of it survives, it’s been heavily restored. The undecorated section here having been put in place to hold the different sherds together, but nonetheless the thinness of the wall, almost eggshell thin, indicates, again, the quality of the production and the way in which the technology has enabled really high-quality ceramics to be produced.
So here we have small village communities, living in their tholoi, communicating through ceramics like this. Also found in these village communities are little figurines like this one. Move the bowl out of the way you can see it clearer. These, on the whole, depict females. They are always shown in a very similar fashion of about this sort of size. They have very heavy legs, focusing on the thighs. The arms are held in front of their body, cupping the breasts, which are, as it were, held up and projected to the viewer, so a very obvious feature. And painted on the figurines are lines, representing, perhaps, jewellery or tattooing or parts of the costume – it’s unclear, there’s a lot of variation in that.
This particular example is very interesting, because – surprisingly enough – it’s shown with a head. And many of these Halaf figurines, when they’re discovered, are missing the head. This particular example has enormous eyes painted on the sides of her face, with long eyelashes. The heads that are missing clearly were broken off deliberately, and this has suggested to people their use. It’s generally thought that these figures perhaps had religious significance. Were they mother goddesses? Were they fertility figurines? Today we think perhaps not. We shouldn’t explain everything just in terms of religion.
In fact, she’s never shown pregnant, and she’s shown with all this jewellery and accoutrements. And it’s been suggested, and it’s just a theory, that perhaps these little figurines took part in rituals, again perhaps between men, who were moving between villages and making alliances, and most importantly marriage relationships. So one perhaps might imagine a little figurine like this representing the daughter of one of the leaders of a village, perhaps, who then comes together with a member from another village, and the figurine is passed between them, and ceremoniously the head is snapped off. Part of a marriage contract. It’s a theory, it’s an idea, that perhaps takes us away from automatically assuming every ancient figurine has some sort of religious connotation.
These villages were connected, through their economies, across North Syria and Northern Iraq, but also there were links to the wider world, and although there’s very little metal found in these village communities and suggests that metal was not a crucial part of their way of like, what we do find are examples of volcanic glass. This is obsidian, which can only have arrived in North Syria from sources in Central and Eastern Anatolia. So from the mountains of modern-day Turkey. This volcanic glass would have been carried in small chunks down onto the plains of Syria, where it would have been fashioned into extremely sharp tools. A very delicate, cutting edge here in this blade, or a larger blade in this particular example. These would have been highly valued, both for their cutting edge but also, probably, for their great symbolic value: this beautiful, glass substance, which shines in the sun.
So many of the ideas embedded in these objects we don’t really, fully understand, but we can begin to speculate, as all of them serve as systems of communication between these different farming communities across this vast region. By around 4500BC the Halaf culture, all these elements which we can define as a culture, had begun to disappear, and were gradually replaced by another culture, one we call the Ubaid, which has its origins in Southern Mesopotamia.