The land of Sumer - southern Mesopotamia - was probably inhabited time out of mind by fisher folk, also hunting the game and waterfowl of the rivers and marshes, eating dates and other wild plants, and living in beautiful huts constructed of reeds. Such huts are depicted in the seals of later Sumerians and must have continued in use.
Farmers, probably moving in from further north, bringing with them the knowledge of irrigation techniques, were cultivating the fertile banks of the Euphrates well before 5000 BC.
Most early settlements in Sumer, however, are deeply buried beneath metres of alluvium or the debris of thousands of years of later occupation, and the glimpses we have of these Ubaid period settlers are few.
Tell al-Ubaid, from which the period takes its name, is one exception. The best-known site is Eridu, which has a long sequence of temples; an Ubaid temple was also found beneath the ziggurat of Anu at Uruk.
Rich in the produce of agriculture, Sumer lacked many other essentials, such as stone, and Ubaid sites have many ingenious objects in baked clay, such as sickles and pestles, that would more usually be made of stone.
Ubaid concern with controlling trade in these important raw materials is shown by the wide distribution of their distinctive finely made pottery, found from the shores of eastern Arabia to settlements in northern Mesopotamia, such as Tell Madhhur and Tepe Gawra, from which, ironically, come our clearest pictures of Ubaid life.
