10 Facts About Ubaid period

The name derives from Tell al-'Ubaid where the earliest large excavation of Ubaid period material was conducted initially in 1919 by Henry Hall and later by Leonard Woolley.

In South Mesopotamia the period is the earliest known period on the alluvial plain although it is likely earlier periods exist obscured under the alluvium.

Term "Ubaid period" was coined at a conference in Baghdad in 1930, where at the same time the Jemdet Nasr and Uruk periods were defined.

Ubaid period culture is characterized by large unwalled village settlements, multi-roomed rectangular mud-brick houses and the appearance of the first temples of public architecture in Mesopotamia, with a growth of a two tier settlement hierarchy of centralized large sites of more than 10 hectares surrounded by smaller village sites of less than 1 hectare.

Morton Fried and Elman Service have hypothesised that Ubaid period culture saw the rise of an elite class of hereditary chieftains, perhaps heads of kin groups linked in some way to the administration of the temple shrines and their granaries, responsible for mediating intra-group conflict and maintaining social order.

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Ubaid period culture originated in the south, but still has clear connections to earlier cultures in the region of middle Iraq.

The appearance of the Ubaid period folk has sometimes been linked to the so-called Sumerian problem, related to the origins of Sumerian civilisation.

Stein and Ozbal describe the Near East oecumene that resulted from Ubaid expansion, contrasting it to the colonial expansionism of the later Uruk period.

Around 5000 BC, the Ubaid period culture spread into northern Mesopotamia and was adopted by the Halaf culture.

Ubaid period artifacts spread all along the Arabian littoral, showing the growth of a trading system that stretched from the Mediterranean coast through to Oman.