A Ceramic Tale of Three Oikumenai from the Qara Dagh Area (Iraqi Kurdistan)

About a decade ago, by paraphrasing Charles Dickens, G. Stein and R. Özbal wrote a very inspiring article – “A tale of two oikumenai” – about Ubaid and Uruk origins and expansions. Later, a third main “oikumene” in Ancient Near Eastern history is represented by the emergence of the first empires. Since 2015, the French archaeological mission in the Qara Dagh area (Sulaymaniyah Province, Iraqi Kurdistan), directed by Régis Vallet, offers new and unsuspected information about these three dynamics of contact between southern and northern Mesopotamia. The first “oikumene”, consisting in the diffusion of the Ubaid horizon, can be documented as a very early (during the first half of the 6th millennium BC) process of acculturation gradually fashioning a new material way of life by intertwining southern and northern traditions. On the one hand, Halaf and Ubaid appear as entities that cannot be essentialized as mere cultural packages, while on the other hand they both have close ties with other entities (as the Samarra). The Uruk “oikumene” is documented in the Qara Dagh three centuries earlier than previously thought. Since the beginning of the 4th millennium BC, it is attested by a stone ramp leading to a citadel, by a monumental building, a village with domestic structures and by large craft areas. But, from a ceramic point of view, the supposed inconsistency between northern Late Chalcolithic and southern Uruk productions does not appear as an obvious reality, but rather as an ongoing evolution due to complex relationships between two traditions emerging from a widely shared post-Ubaid substrate. Eventually, the appearance of the Akkadian and Ur III empires can be observed from the unique perspective of a sequence of huge ceramic workshop all along the second half of the 3rd millennium BC. Since the Early Dynastic III phase, both the spatial organization of the production units and the technical features of the assemblage reveal a progressive change in scale, intensity and organization of a more and more centralized and homogeneous production, intended for a regional-based distribution. The ceramic analysis suggests a reassessment of the emergence of these three global phenomena picturing (at least concerning the area east of the Tigris river) a multifaceted image of relations between the North and the South as far as mobility of things and people, respective technical identities as well as modalities of their cultural and economic contacts. The analysis of the ceramic chaînes opératoires in their spatial contexts allowed us to encompass the stylistic approach in a more comprehensive procedure aiming at recognizing distinct technical traditions and, therefore, the underlying groups of producers, with their specificities and reciprocal relations. Obviously, each “oikumene” constitutes an historical process characterized by its own dynamics. And, at this level, the technical-spatial analysis of the ceramic traditions offers new insights on specific mechanisms. But, more in general, simplistic dichotomies between northern and southern people or “cultures” appear to be misleading and ineffective to describe intricate realities that, since the very beginning of the proto-urban phase, never evolve in a separate way. In this sense, compared to the better known western portion of the Mesopotamian alluvium (the Euphrates basin), the region east of the Tigris river seems to question the traditional schematic division between North and South.