Samarra Culture: Early Irrigation Farming in Mesopotamia

The Samarra culture was a farming society that flourished in central Mesopotamia, in modern Iraq, from about 6200 to 5700 BC. Its people built mud-brick villages, made some of the finest painted pottery of the prehistoric Near East and dug irrigation canals, among the earliest known anywhere. Their methods allowed farming to move into drier lands and prepared the way for the settlement of southern Mesopotamia.

Discovery

The culture is named after Samarra, a city on the Tigris about 125 kilometres north of Baghdad, better known for its ninth-century Abbasid palaces and mosque. In excavations that began in 1911, shortly before the First World War, the German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld, working on the Abbasid remains, found a prehistoric cemetery whose graves contained vividly painted pottery. He published the finds in 1930.

For decades this pottery was known mainly as a style. Only in the 1960s did excavations reveal the villages of the people who made it, above all at Tell es-Sawwan and Choga Mami.

Date and extent

Most scholars place the Samarra culture between about 6200 and 5700 BC, although some radiocarbon dates and museum labels push its beginnings back towards 6500 BC. It overlapped with the Hassuna culture to the north and was followed in the north by the Halaf culture.

Samarran sites lie mainly in the middle Tigris valley and along the foothills of the Zagros mountains in eastern Iraq. Related material has been found as far west as Baghouz on the Euphrates in Syria and eastwards into western Iran.

Villages and irrigation

Tell es-Sawwan, on a bluff above the Tigris south of Samarra, was excavated by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities from 1964, with Behnam Abu al-Soof among the leading excavators. The village had substantial rectangular and T-shaped mud-brick buildings with many small rooms, possibly used partly for storage. In a later phase it was surrounded by a ditch and a mud-brick wall.

Below the floors of the earliest buildings were more than a hundred burials, many of them infants. Graves held carved alabaster vessels and female figurines of alabaster, some with eyes inlaid with shell and bitumen.

Choga Mami, near Mandali close to the Iranian border, was excavated by the British archaeologist Joan Oates in 1967-68. She found traces of small canals, dated to around 6000 BC, that led water from a stream to nearby fields. Remains of larger-grained barley, wheat and flax, which need more water than local rain could provide, support the view that these were irrigation channels.

Irrigation mattered because Samarran farmers lived in a zone where rainfall was unreliable. By controlling water, they could grow crops beyond the reach of rain-fed farming, a technique later essential in the arid south.

Farming and daily life

Samarran communities lived mainly from mixed farming. They grew emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, lentils and flax, and kept sheep, goats, cattle and pigs, while still hunting wild animals such as gazelle and fishing in the rivers. Flax could be used for linen as well as for its oil-rich seeds.

Their buildings were made of large mud bricks and plastered with mud, and some houses were laid out on regular plans with buttressed walls. Grain was stored in bins and rooms within the houses, and stone tools included sickle blades of flint and obsidian. The obsidian came from eastern Anatolia, hundreds of kilometres away, showing that Samarran villages were linked into long-distance exchange networks.

Pottery and art

Samarran pottery is buff-coloured and painted in dark brown or reddish-black. Potters arranged their designs in bands and around the centre of bowls, combining geometric patterns with lively figures.

The best-known bowls show women with flowing hair, scorpions, birds catching fish, deer and goats arranged in whirling, almost rotating compositions. Some include cross-shaped or swastika-like motifs, a symbol common in many ancient cultures with no connection to its modern associations.

Herzfeld’s original finds are now divided between museums, including the British Museum in London and the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin.

Legacy

The Samarra culture shows that the techniques of the later Mesopotamian civilisations had deep roots. At Choga Mami, pottery transitional between Samarran and early Ubaid styles suggests that Samarran irrigation farmers were among the ancestors of the Ubaid culture, which colonised the southern plain.

Its painted pottery also influenced neighbouring traditions. Samarran motifs appear in Halaf pottery to the north, and archaeologists use the style as one of the key markers for dating early villages in Iraq.

Timeline

• c. 6200 BC: Samarran-style villages appear in central Mesopotamia (some dates are earlier).
• c. 6000 BC: Irrigation canals in use at Choga Mami.
• c. 6000-5800 BC: Tell es-Sawwan surrounded by a ditch and wall.
• c. 5700 BC: Samarran traditions give way to Halaf in the north and early Ubaid in the south.
• 1911-1913: Ernst Herzfeld finds painted prehistoric pottery at Samarra.
• 1964: Iraqi excavations begin at Tell es-Sawwan.
• 1967-1968: Joan Oates excavates Choga Mami.

Why it matters

The Samarra culture is one of the earliest known societies to farm with the help of canals. That innovation, which later sustained Sumer and Babylon, began in these modest villages on the Tigris and its tributaries, alongside an artistic tradition of striking beauty. Together with the Neolithic Revolution that preceded it, it marks a key step towards Mesopotamian civilisation.