Ubaid period
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The Ubaid period, named for the site of al-Ubaid near Ur, covers southern Mesopotamia from about 6500 to 3800 BCE and is the cultural background from which the first cities emerged. The villages of the period were built of mud brick, sometimes with walls set on courses of reeds to keep out damp, and the houses show a standard plan of an L-shaped room, a store room and a courtyard. Potters made thin, greenish-grey ware with simple painted designs, and the figurines of the period, with their coffee-bean eyes and sloping shoulders, are among the most recognisable of early Mesopotamia. Irrigation began to shape the landscape: canals carried the Tigris and Euphrates water to fields, and the surplus they produced supported craftspeople who did not farm. Traces of the culture reach from the Gulf to the Levant, and temples such as the one at Eridu suggest a shared religious tradition. The Ubaid way of life continued into the Uruk period, when the settlements grew into cities, so that much of what is called Sumerian begins here, in villages that had no idea of writing. The period takes its name from the excavations of the 1920s, and its ware is still the marker by which archaeologists date the deep south of Iraq.