9.5 Hassuna

One of the earliest notable Cultures was the Hassuna, centred at Tell Hassuna, located just south of Mosul, which is 200 miles north of Baghdad. It was an advanced village culture, active around 6,500 BC to 5,500 BC. Its location in the northernmost Mesopotamian foothills meant it had just sufficient rainfall for agriculture in the more favourable areas.

Map of ancient Mesopotamian cities -
source Atlastours.net

Generally the people lived in small villages of a few acres supporting a few hundred people, so even the largest was smaller than Jericho had been 1,000 years earlier, and much smaller than Catal Huyuk. They had domestic animals including cattle. The excavation of Tell Hassuna revealed domed ovens for baking bread and relatively sophisticated two-chambered kilns for pottery. They used large pottery vessels sunk into the ground for storing grain. In the very earliest level, relatively crude straw-tempered pottery was found, although it included burnished bowls and large oval dishes corrugated or pitted on the inner surface, probably used as cereal husking trays. Such dishes were found from Eridu in Sumer to the Syrian Coast. This early ware was replaced by fine painted “Hassuna” style pottery that had a cream slip with linear designs in reddish paint. This design was followed by incised/engraved wares around 6,000 BC, then both painted and incised ones.

Some items had applied eyes and ears. There were also female, probably ritual, figures.

Female figure 6^th-5^th
millennium BC - source National
Museum of Iraq, Baghdad

Fine Hassuna pottery was almost certainly made by specialist craftsmen, meaning their agriculture produced a surplus so that some did not have to work the fields. Burials were carried out in large pottery jars with food for the afterlife.

Large Hassuna incised jar 6,000-5,800 BC -
source National Museum of Iraq, Baghdad

Around 6,000 BC they built some larger central buildings, possibly for storage. Inside one of these, archaeologists found 2,400 fired clay sling balls and 100 larger fired clay balls – possibly for hunting, but could have been for defence. They too made stamp seals to press images onto clay. These would have been impressed in blobs of moist clay pressed onto, for example, pottery jars as stoppers, knots for binding, the edges of lids and doors to stop tampering, similar to our use of sealing wax. Seals had the same function as key locks, often reinforced by the idea that breaking them would bring misfortune. It is also thought that Hassunan’s smelted copper and lead. All these developments show an increase in the social order, accumulation of goods and institutional and private property – generally increasing social complexity.