Uruk and Yortan

Many years ago Professor J. L. Myres published a very suggestive paper on ‘The Early Pot-Fabrics of Asia Minor’, defining the areas characterized by black or red or white slip ware and endeavouring to correlate them with climatic conditions.Much water, both clear and muddy, has flowed under the bridge since 1903 and we can now form some idea of Anatolian cultures in the third millennium B.C. We can recognize a Troadic area in the west, a group of pre-Hittite sites in the centre, a rather shadowy Cilician culture in the south, an equally vague culture in the Van district, and a very important group of sites in the Upper Euphrates valley and its tributary vales, a country populated in historic times by Subaraeans and other less important peoples.One of the most recent contributions to the prehistory of Anatolia is provided by certain passages in Dr. Frankfort's Archaeology and the Sumerian Question, a most valuable and stimulating book; if I criticize one section of it I trust that it will be realized that I differ from him chiefly on certain emphases and stresses, and admire the treatise in general as much as any of his readers.