We last spoke of the archeological materials of Iraq on page 130, where I described the village-farming community of Hassunan type. The Hassunan type villages appear in the hilly-flanks zone and in the rolling land adjacent to the Tigris in northern Iraq. It is probable that even before the Hassuna pattern of culture lived its course, a new assemblage had been established in northern Iraq and Syria. This assemblage is called Halaf, after a site high on a tributary of the Euphrates, on the Syro-Turkish border. [Illustration: SKETCH OF SELECTED ITEMS OF HALAFIAN ASSEMBLAGE BEADS AND PENDANTS POTTERY MOTIFS POTTERY] The Halafian assemblage is incompletely known. The culture it represents included a remarkably handsome painted pottery. Archeologists have tended to be so fascinated with this pottery that they have bothered little with the rest of the Halafian assemblage. We do know that strange stone-founded houses, with plans like those of the popular notion of an Eskimo igloo, were built. Like the pottery of the Samarran style, which appears as part of the Hassunan assemblage (see p. 131), the Halafian painted pottery implies great concentration and excellence of draftsmanship on the part of the people who painted it. We must mention two very interesting sites adjacent to the mud-flats of the rivers, half way down from northern Iraq to the classic alluvial Mesopotamian area. One is Baghouz on the Euphrates; the other is Samarra on the Tigris (see map, p. 125). Both these sites yield the handsome painted pottery of the style called Samarran: in fact it is Samarra which gives its name to the pottery. Neither Baghouz nor Samarra have completely Hassunan types of assemblages, and at Samarra there are a few pots of proper Halafian style. I suppose that Samarra and Baghouz give us glimpses of those early farmers who had begun to finger their way down the mud-flats of the river banks toward the fertile but yet untilled southland. CLASSIC SOUTHERN MESOPOTAMIA FIRST OCCUPIED Our next step is into the southland proper. Here, deep in the core of the mound which later became the holy Sumerian city of Eridu, Iraqi archeologists uncovered a handsome painted pottery. Pottery of the same type had been noticed earlier by German archeologists on the surface of a small mound, awash in the spring floods, near the remains of the Biblical city of Erich (Sumerian = Uruk; Arabic = Warka). This “Eridu” pottery, which is about all we have of the assemblage of the people who once produced it, may be seen as a blend of the Samarran and Halafian painted pottery styles. This may over-simplify the case, but as yet we do not have much evidence to go on. The idea does at least fit with my interpretation of the meaning of Baghouz and Samarra as way-points on the mud-flats of the rivers half way down from the north.