[76]Brunton, _The Badarian Civilization_, 48. The assumption finds strong support in the tradition that Menes, the first king of the First Dynasty, reclaimed all the land from Wasta to Cairo before he founded Memphis at the north end of the strip so reclaimed. Such an enterprise presupposes some established skill in work of that nature. [77]For a criticism of the hypothetical construction of Egyptian prehistory in terms of united Upper and Lower Egyptian kingdoms in conflict with one another, see my _Kingship and the Gods_, Chapter I, 349, n. 6; 350, n. 15; 351, n. 19. [78]The head of the Persian Gulf was perhaps 125 miles to the north of Basra; or this area may have been a lagoon, separated from the Gulf by the “Bar of Basra.” [79]The oldest of these is marked by various kinds of simple pottery wares (Hassuna ware) decorated with incisions or merely burnished to a high gloss. In addition there were sickles with flint “teeth” and underground silos for grain storage. Sheep, goats, oxen, and asses were kept. In a second stage appears fine painted pottery, called Samarran—an offshoot of a ceramic tradition at home in Persia. It was, in its turn, displaced by another type of pottery called Tell Halaf, which is found from the Gulf of Alexandrette to the region east of Mosul. The archaeological material is fully discussed in Ann Louise Perkins, _The Comparative Archaeology of Early Mesopotamia_ (Chicago, 1949). [80]See the article and photographs of Melvin Hall in _Asia_ (New York), February 1939. [81]This stage of their ceramics had been known from a small site near Erech (A. Nöldeke and others, _Neunter Vorläufiger Bericht.... Uruk-Warka_, Berlin, 1938, Plates 36-40), when it was found well represented at Abu Shahrein (Eridu): See _Illustrated London News_, 11 September 1948, p. 305; _Sumer_, IV (Baghdad, 1948), 115 ff. There is nothing against calling this pottery “Eridu ware” as long as its historical connections are not obscured. It is quite gratuitous to claim that “Al Ubaid people” can no longer be called the earliest settlers in southern Mesopotamia, for the Eridu ware is simply an earlier stage of the Al Ubaid ware. If quibbles about names are disregarded, it remains true that the earliest settlers of the plain descended from Persia; the new ware shows an earlier stage of their ceramics than has hitherto been found in the plain but it was already known from the western edge of the Highland, _e.g._ Tepe Khazineh near Susa (J. de Morgan, _Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse_, Paris, 1908). [82]C. Leonard Woolley in _Antiquaries Journal_, X (1930), 335. [83]Fulanain, _The Marsh Arab, Haji Rikkan_ (Philadelphia, 1928), 21.