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In the deepest archaeological levels of cities in Mesopotamia, and in the lowest levels of ancient temples, such as of that Eridu, archaeologists have uncovered material remains of a culture they've named "Ubaidian," for Tel al'Ubaid, near the city of Ur. Included in these was a distinctive pottery that worked its way around much of ancient Mesopotamia so thoroughly it's often used as an indication of an Ubaid "horizon." The tel was first investigated by H. R Hall around 1920. Later in the decade, when C. Leonard Woolley uncovered the royal graves at Ur, he found some of the greenish-clay pottery Hall had found at the tel, though these pieces were far outshone by the spectacular grave goods from Ur.

The Ubaid culture is generally assigned the time period 5000-4000 BCE. It is not known who the Ubaidians were, nor what language they spoke, as they have left no written record. Woolley thought they may have been a Semitic people and pointed out that in later times, wave after wave of semi-nomadic Semites worked their way into Mesopotamia, either peacefully or by force of arms. Woolley thought they were original Semite settlers, who were then invaded by the Sumerians. The origin of the Sumerians themselves is still unknown, but because their language was an agglutinative one, which Samuel Noah Kramer sees as bearing some resemblance to Ural-Altaic languages, it has been thought that they came from Central Asia, perhaps from around the Caspian Sea.

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