(a): PREDYNASTIC EGYPT

Palestine during the neolithic and chalcolithic periods

Physical conditions in eastern Europe, western Asia and Egypt before the period of agricultural and urban settlement

The existence of a Neolithic culture in the Aegean area was first recognized during the opening years of this century—at Dhimini and Sesklo in Thessaly by Stais and Tsountas, in the regions of Elatea and Chaeronea (in Phocis and Boeotia respectively) by Soteriades, at Boeotian Orchomenus by a Bavarian expedition, at Cnossus in Crete by Evans. Within the first decade the picture of that culture was already filled in in considerable detail and subsequent excavations supplied it with both breadth and depth. But while stone artefacts of pre-Neolithic types were thought to have been found at times on the Greek mainland, no stratified remains surely of Palaeolithic or Mesolithic types were found until 1941, when Stampfuss cut a trench into the fill of the Seidi Cave, located at the south-east corner of the Copaic Basin, about two miles east of Haliartus. Only then was it fairly certain that men in the food-gathering, rather than the food-producing, stage had lived in Greece, but the exact date of these finds remained in question. It was the work of Milojcic and the German expedition to Thessaly which first lengthened enormously the record of human occupation in Greece, with the discovery in 1956 of an Aceramic Neolithic culture at Argissa and then, in 1958, with the location of numerous sites of Middle and Late Palaeolithic occupation along the Peneus River west of Larissa.’ These have been followed by similar discoveries in other parts of the Aegean as well as in Thessaly, and by a re-appraisal of earlier reports, so that a somewhat continuous sequence covering perhaps as much as 100,000 years now begins to take shape.

The Stone Age in the Aegean

BABYLONIA AND MESOPOTAMIA terminology Al-‘Ubaid is a small site which lies about 4 miles west of Ur along the bank of an ancient canal. There, H. R. Hall and Leonard Woolley were the first to discover and record a prehistoric pottery, hand-turned and decorated with simple designs painted in a dark pigment on a comparatively light ground; the predominating colours were black, green, brown or chocolate on pink or buff and the pots were sometimes slipped, sometimes unslipped. Characteristic of these so called ‘Ubaid wares was a carbonized, dark green, highly vitrified paint which had bitten hard into the clay, the result of over-firing; in the later stages of development this criterion makes ‘Ubaid singularly easy to distinguish. When the excavations revealed that this was a prehistoric pottery, the term ‘Ubaid was applied to it and was also used to define the period and the culture with which it appeared to be distinctively associated. After the excavations at the site of ‘Ubaid had been concluded, the same type of pottery was discovered in abundance at the neighbouring, and much greater, site of Ur. It soon began to be evident that this ware must have lasted for a long span of time, which Woolley consequently sub-divided into three periods. Later, however, when the Iraq Antiquities Department began to conduct excavations on a wide scale at the great site of Eridu, an even longer sequence, covering four successive periods, was established, and it became possible to classify this pottery into a number of dominant styles which had developed over a span of many centuries.

The development of cities : from Al-ʿUbaid to the end of Uruk 5

1. ONE OF THE MOST spectacular steps in the study of ancient chronology during recent years is the correction, by not less than 275 years, of the date of one of the most important and best known periods of oriental history, the time of Hammurabi of Babylon. This drastic change became necessary when Thureau-Dangin in 1937 recognized 1 that the archives from Mari (on the middle Euphrates) proved Hammurabi a contemporary of the Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad I, thus opening the way for applying Assyrian chronological material to the problem of dating the First Babylonian Dynasty. This consequence was first noted by Albright in 1938, who placed 2 Hammurabi's accession tentatively at " about 1870 B. c." Two years later the same author gave a more detailed report on the new chronology of Western Asia,3 dating Ham~murabi still later, at 1800 B. c. The present monograph by Smith, written without the benefit of Albright's revised results, arrives at essentially the same date, proposing for Hammurabi the years 1792-1750 B. c., and hence 1894-1595 for the First Babylonian Dynasty. Smith's book is divided into two sharply distinct parts. The first gives the arguments for the new chronology. The second draws conclusions about the history of Alalakh (a city on the lower Orontes near Antioch). The first part alone is the subject of this review, the purely historical problems being only touched upon in passing. My present aim is merely to discuss the validity of arguments adduced especially in their connection with astronomical datings. As to the historical proof, everything seems to me to depend entirely on the following two arguments: 4 first, Assyrian chronology (starting with Tiglath-Pileser I, TukultiNinurta I and Shalmaneser I) puts Shamshi-Adad I at about 1820 + 40; secondly, lack of reference to Egypt in the Mari correspondence, and evidence from Ugarit 5 place this period after the Twelfth Dynasty, thus after, say, 1780. These two time-limits are so narrow that the synchronism Mario-Shamshi Adad I-Hammurabi places Hammurabi within a small margin in 1800 B. c. The evidence from the stratification in Alalakh, as discussed by Smith, doubtless fits excellently with the chronology thus obtained, but it alone could never provide such sharp time-limits as the two above-mentioned arguments.

The chronology of the hammurabi age

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The chronology of the hammurabi age