Tell al-'Ubaid

Listen to the ground first. Under your shoes, the surface is a dry crust of pale earth, broken by small hard fragments that click against each other as you walk. Many of those fragments are pottery. Some are thousands of years old. The wind moves across the open plain with very little to stop it, and the light here is wide and flat, bleaching the colours out of everything. This is Tell al-'Ubaid, a low mound in the south of Iraq, in Dhi Qar Governorate. It does not look like much. But its name now covers a whole chapter of human history.

A tell, in the archaeology of the Middle East, is a mound built up by people. Each generation built on the ruins of the last. Mud brick walls collapsed, new floors went down on top, and slowly the settlement rose above the plain. So the hill you are standing on is not natural. It is layers of houses, rubbish, ovens, and graves, stacked over a very long time. Tell al-'Ubaid is small compared with the great city mounds nearby. That modest size is part of its surprise.

Look toward the southeast. A few kilometres away lies Ur, the ancient Sumerian city with its great stepped temple tower, the ziggurat. On a clear day you may be able to pick out its shape on the horizon. Ur and al-'Ubaid belong to the same landscape. In ancient times this land was not empty desert. Rivers and canals ran close by, and the people here lived on farming, herding, fishing, and the reeds of the marshes. Over thousands of years the rivers moved, and the land around the mound dried out.

The first modern excavation here came in 1919, led by the British archaeologist Harry Hall for the British Museum. A few years later, in the early 1920s, Leonard Woolley took up the work. Woolley is better known for his later digs at Ur, where he uncovered the royal tombs. But al-'Ubaid came first. Here his team found something unexpected: very early painted pottery, older than the cities of the Sumerians, lying in the lowest layers of the site.

That pottery changed how scholars understood the region. It is usually a pale greenish or buff clay, painted with dark brown or black designs. The patterns are geometric — lines, bands, triangles, and repeated shapes. Archaeologists soon found the same style at many other places across southern Mesopotamia, which is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They needed a name for this early culture. They took the name of this mound. Today the whole era is called the Ubaid period.

The Ubaid period is very old. It began roughly in the sixth millennium before the common era and lasted for well over a thousand years. During this time, villages in the south grew into larger towns. People built temples of mud brick, dug irrigation channels, and traded along the rivers and down into the Gulf. Ubaid-style pottery has even been found on the Arabian side of the Gulf. In many ways, this was the foundation on which the later Sumerian cities were built.

Here is the second surprise. Tell al-'Ubaid is famous not only for its early villages, but also for a temple built much later, in the Early Dynastic period of Sumer, around the middle of the third millennium before the common era. The temple stood on a raised platform and was dedicated to Ninhursag, a mother goddess linked with the land, birth, and the fertility of animals. A foundation inscription found at the site names a king of Ur called A-anne-pada as the builder.

The decoration of this temple was remarkable. Woolley's team found fallen pieces of the façade near the platform. There were columns covered with inlay of shell, red stone, and black bitumen. There were clay cones shaped like flowers, which once studded the walls. And there were animals made of copper — standing bulls, shaped over a core and fixed to the building. For a small temple in a farming district, it was richly made.

The most famous piece is a large copper relief. It shows a lion-headed eagle, a mythical bird known in Sumerian as Imdugud or Anzu, with its wings spread wide. In its talons it grips two stags, one on each side, with their antlers branching outward. The copper was hammered into high relief, so the animals almost step out of the panel. This relief is now in the British Museum in London. It is one of the best surviving examples of Sumerian metalwork on this scale.

Another find from the temple is a frieze showing daily life. In small figures of shell and limestone set against a black background, men are shown milking cows and working with milk in large jars. Nearby, cattle come out of a reed shelter. It is a very early picture of dairy work, and it fits the goddess of this temple well. The frieze is now held in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Seeing it after standing here makes the scene easy to imagine.

So what remains on the mound itself? Very little that is grand. The excavated areas have weathered, and the mud brick has softened back toward the earth. What you can still see is the shape of the tell, the scatter of sherds on the surface, and the long open views. That is honest archaeology. Most of the evidence went into museums and published reports, and the place itself returned to quiet. If you look closely at the ground, you may still notice fragments of painted pottery.

Please treat those fragments as part of the site. Leave them where they lie. Each piece helps archaeologists read the history of this mound, and removing objects from archaeological sites in Iraq is against the law. The region around Ur has strict rules for visitors, and a local guide or the site guards can tell you where it is safe and permitted to walk. The ground can be uneven, and in summer the heat is severe.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment and look out across the plain. Feel the dry wind and notice how little shade there is. Thousands of years ago, people here painted bowls with careful dark lines, herded cattle, and later raised a temple decorated with copper and shell. Their name for this place is lost. Ours is Tell al-'Ubaid. As you walk back down the slope, listen again to the pottery under your feet.