II.

Early Settlements

From early Paleolithic times people had lived in the land that came to be known as Assyria, a fact confirmed by two adult Neandertal skulls discovered in a cave on the northeastern fringes of the region. Settled agricultural life did not begin there, however, until about 6500 bc. The ethnic composition of the earliest farming communities of Assyria is unknown; the inhabitants may have been a people known in later days as Subarians, who spoke an agglutinative language rather than an inflected one. Later, probably in the 3rd millennium bc, Semitic nomads conquered the region and made their inflected tongue, which was closely related to Babylonian, the prevailing language of the land. The Assyrian script was a slightly modified version of the Babylonian cuneiform.

As early as the 7th millennium bc, the farmers of Assyria cultivated wheat and barley and owned cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. They built their houses, some of which contained as many as four rooms, of compact clay, used round ovens for baking their ground flour, and stored their grain in large, bitumen-covered clay jars. These farming people wove textiles from thread spun with the help of spindle whorls; made knives of obsidian and chert, a flintlike stone; and used celts, ax-shaped implements made of stone, as adzes and hoes. Their pottery was outstanding; much of it was made of skillfully fired clay and painted in attractive patterns. Obsidian and other hard stones were worked into vases, beads, amulets, and stamp seals. Female figurines, for ritual and religious purposes, were modeled of clay. The dead, often buried in a flexed position, with the knees drawn up to the chin, were interred among the houses, rather than in regular cemeteries.