Ubaid or Ubaid culture — a special phenomenon in the prehistory of Western Asia, an extensive area of interaction of Eneolithic societies of the Near East in the 5th—4th millennium BC, which was characterized by the presence of certain common features in material culture. The area of distribution of the Ubaid phenomenon included Mesopotamia, the Eastern Mediterranean, Susiana, part of the Iranian Plateau, Transcaucasia, the coast and islands of the Persian Gulf. Initially, Ubaid was understood as a special ceramic tradition, named after the site of Tell el-Ubaid in Southern Mesopotamia. Since its discovery to the present day, ideas about the Ubaid phenomenon have undergone significant changes.
Excavations at the end of the 19th — beginning of the 20th century of the cities of Ancient Mesopotamia revealed to humanity the culture, including that of the most ancient Sumerian civilization; however, nothing was known about the prehistory of this civilization at that time. In 1918, R. Campbell Thompson, who led the expedition of the British Museum, examined the ruins of several ancient settlements on the territory of former Sumer, including the cities of Ur and Eridu. During the examination of the latter, he drew attention to a special pottery that differed from the Sumerian proper and seemed older; R. Campbell Thompson attributed this pottery to "prehistoric." In 1919, the British Museum expedition was headed by H. R. Hall, who continued the work of R. Campbell Thompson. H. R. Hall also discovered a small site, Tell el-Ubaid, where the already known "prehistoric" pottery was found in large quantities and had a clear stratigraphic context. Subsequently, scientists from the University of Pennsylvania joined the British mission; the joint expedition under the direction of L. Woolley completed the survey of Tell el-Ubaid, where layers associated with "prehistoric" pottery were clearly established. L. Woolley discovered Ubaid layers (including a cemetery) in Ur; subsequently, layers with this pottery were also discovered in some other Sumerian cities — in Kish, Eridu, Uruk, in the Larsa area (Uwayli), etc.
In the 1930s, German scientists discovered another type of prehistoric pottery in Mesopotamia — Hajji Muhammad, named after the eponymous site near Uruk. In the 1940s, an expedition under the direction of S. Lloyd and F. Safar conducted a thorough survey of the city of Eridu; during the excavations, layers with Ubaid pottery were discovered, below them — with Hajji Muhammad type pottery, and even lower — layers with an unknown type of archaic pottery, which the researchers called "Eridu pottery." In 1960, the work of J. Oates was published, in which this researcher summarized the available material and established that Eridu, Hajji Muhammad, and Ubaid are different phases of a single cultural sequence in Southern Mesopotamia that evolved into what later became known as Sumerian civilization. This entire sequence was designated as "Ubaid," and its phases were numbered (Ubaid 1 = Eridu, Ubaid 2 = Hajji Muhammad, Ubaid 3 = Ubaid proper, or "classic" Ubaid, Ubaid 4 = Late Ubaid, i.e., the late variant of Ubaid-type pottery).
Attempts to establish the absolute chronology of the Ubaid phases have so far been unsuccessful: apparently, the phases often coexisted, and the transition was quite complex. These chronological problems were superimposed on a complex cultural background: Ubaid finds have been discovered in layers of quite different regions, cultures, and probably ethnic groups. All this forced researchers to reconsider the very concept of "Ubaid." At the International Conference held in 2006, the main trend of the presentations was the "deconstruction" of the concept of "Ubaid"; calls were made for a complete rejection of this term or its replacement with more adequate concepts, such as "zone of interactions," "sphere of intercultural exchange," etc. To date, there is no adequate understanding of what Ubaid represented; most researchers are inclined to believe that it was a zone of active interaction of quite different cultures, which resulted in the appearance of certain common, "Ubaid" features in these cultures. However, the nature and mechanisms of these interactions have yet to be investigated.
The most important feature of Ubaid is its pottery — products of buff color with black ornament (English: Black-on-Buff). In reality, the color of the painting could vary from black to brownish, purple, and dark green; depending on the firing, the pottery could acquire both a buff color (buff) and a red-brown or even green-brown shade. The connection of other archaeological finds with Ubaid has local features.
This culture is characterized by monochrome painted, mostly with geometric designs, pottery, handmade, sometimes in the shape of animals; a small amount of copper vessels, stamp seals, sickles with flint inserts, cult figurines, and so on.
The classic southern variant and the northern, later variant are distinguished, in which, along with southern Ubaid features, strong traces of the previous Halaf culture were preserved — bichrome pottery, circular tholos houses, female figurines, more massive than in the South, depicting full women sitting with bent knees; while in the South — slender, elongated figurines of standing women.
The bearers of the El-Ubaid culture were sedentary farmers, had domestic livestock, lived in houses made of mudbrick, forming settlements that were grouped around a central cult sanctuary — a temple.
It is believed that the bearers of the culture were the Subareans — people from the foothills of the Zagros. There is an assumption that they spoke a "banana language," some words of which remained in Sumerian (for example, Zababa, Inanna, Humbaba). The strengthening of the Sumerian community led to the displacement of the Ubaid people to the Upper Tigris and northern regions of the Zagros, where they later assimilated with the Hurrians.
After the discovery of the Leylatepe culture, there were grounds to believe that part of the bearers of the Ubaid culture migrated to the North Caucasus (sites of the Maykop culture) and the South Caucasus (sites of the Leylatepe culture).
4000—3200 BC Maykop culture