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The tell (mound) of Ubaid (Arabic: عبيد) near Ur in southern Iraq has given its name to the prehistoric Pottery Neolithic to Chalcolithic culture which represents the earliest settlement on the alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia. The Ubaid culture had a long duration beginning before 5300 BC and lasting until the beginning of the Uruk period, c. 4100 BC. The invention of the wheel and the beginning of the Chalcolithic period fall into the Ubaid period. The Ubaid period is divided into three principle phases:
Image:Frieze-group-3-example1.jpg Pottery jar from Late Ubaid Period
The Ubaid period as a whole, based upon the analysis of grave goods, was one of increasingly polarised social stratification and decreasing egalitarianism. Bogucki calls this a phase of "Trans-egalitarian" competitive household in which some fall behind as a result downward social mobility. Thus Ubaid culture would seem to be one in which Morton Fried and Elman Service have hypothesised the rise of an elite of inherited chieftains, perhaps heads of kin groups (a sheikdom?) linked in some way to the administration of the temple shrines and their granaries, were responsible for mediating intra-group conflict and maintaining social order. It would seem that various collective methods, perhaps through what Thorkild Jacobsen called primitive democracy, in which disputes were previously resolved through a council of one's peers, were no longer sufficient to the needs of the local community. The Ubaid culture was clearly intrusive into southern Iraq, though it has clear connection to earlier cultures in the region of middle Iraq. The appearance of the Ubaid folk, has sometimes been linked to the so-called Sumerian problem, related to the origins of Sumerian civilisation. Whatever the ethnic origins of this group, we here see for the first time a clear tripartitie social division between intensive subsistence peasant farmers, with crops and animals coming from the north, tent-dwelling nomadic pastoralists dependent upon their herds, and hunter-fisher folk of the Arabian littoral, living in reed huts. MapImage:Ssumer2.jpg Cultural influences on Ubaid culture: Samarran Farmers from the North, trans-Arabian bifacial indigenous hunter-gatherers, and circum Arabian nomadic pastoral complex
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