Note 79 — II. THE PREHISTORY OF THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

The oldest of these is marked by various kinds of simple pottery wares (Hassuna ware) decorated with incisions or merely burnished to a high gloss. In addition there were sickles with flint “teeth” and underground silos for grain storage. Sheep, goats, oxen, and asses were kept. In a second stage appears fine painted pottery, called Samarran—an offshoot of a ceramic tradition at home in Persia. It was, in its turn, displaced by another type of pottery called Tell Halaf, which is found from the Gulf of Alexandrette to the region east of Mosul. The archaeological material is fully discussed in Ann Louise Perkins, The Comparative Archaeology of Early Mesopotamia (Chicago, 1949).