Uruk period in the context of "Jemdet Nasr"

The Kish tablet is a limestone tablet found at the site of the ancient Sumerian city of Kish in modern Tell al-Uhaymir, Babylon Governorate, Iraq. A plaster cast of the tablet is in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, while the original is housed at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. It should not be confused with the Scheil dynastic tablet, which contains part of the Sumerian King List and is also sometimes called the Kish tablet.

The signs on the Kish tablet, possibly related to proto-cuneiform, are purely pictographic, and have not been deciphered or demonstrated to correspond to any currently known human language. It has been dated to the Late Uruk period (c. 3200–3000 BC).

Uruk, the archeological site known today as Warka, was an ancient city in the Near East or West Asia, located east of the current bed of the Euphrates River, on an ancient, now-dried channel of the river in Muthanna Governorate, Iraq. The site lies 93 kilometers (58 miles) northwest of ancient Ur, 108 kilometers (67 miles) southeast of ancient Nippur, and 24 kilometers (15 miles) northwest of ancient Larsa. It is 30 km (19 mi) east of modern Samawah.

Uruk is the type site for the Uruk period. Uruk played a leading role in the early urbanization of Sumer in the mid-4th millennium BC.By the final phase of the Uruk period around 3100 BC, the city may have had 40,000 residents, with 80,000–90,000 people living in its environs, making it the largest urban area in the world at the time. Gilgamesh, according to the chronology presented in the Sumerian King List (SKL), ruled Uruk in the 27th century BC. After the end of the Early Dynastic period, with the rise of the Akkadian Empire, the city lost its prime importance. It had periods of florescence during the Isin-Larsa period, Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods and throughout the Achaemenid (550–330 BC), Seleucid (312–63 BC) and Parthian (227 BC to AD 224) periods, until it was finally abandoned shortly before or after the Islamic conquest of 633–638.

The Ubaid period (c. 5500–3700 BC) is a prehistoric period of Mesopotamia. The name derives from Tell al-'Ubaid where the earliest large excavation of Ubaid period material was conducted initially in 1919 by Henry Hall, Leonard Woolley in 1922–1923, and later by Pinhas Delougaz in 1937. Excavations continue into the present day.

In Southern Mesopotamia, this period marks the earliest known human settlements on the alluvial plain, although it is likely earlier periods exist that are obscured under the alluvium. In the south it has a very long duration between about 5500 and 3800 BC when it is replaced by the Uruk period.

The Uruk Trough is an important Sumerian sculpture found at the site of Uruk, Iraq. It has been part of the British Museum's collection since 1928. Along with the Uruk Vase, the trough is considered to be one of the earliest surviving works of narrative relief sculpture from the Middle East, dating to 3300–3000 BC, during the Uruk period. Simple relief sculpture is known from much earlier periods, from the site of Göbekli Tepe, dating to circa 9000 BC.

It is thought to have served as some sort of cult image in the temple of the goddess Inanna. The carving depicts a procession of sheep, but the meaning of this scene is unclear.

The proto-cuneiform script was a system of proto-writing that emerged in Mesopotamia ca. 3350-3200 BC (during the Uruk period), eventually developing into the early cuneiform script used in the region's Early Dynastic I period.

It arose from the token-based system that had already been in use across the region in preceding millennia. Other precursors of this system include clay bullae containing tokens, and numerical tablets using only numeral signs. Those devices were used in the institutions of Mesopotamia and western Iran during the 4th millennium BC, in order to record administrative operations. The proto-cuneiform subsequently appeared in southern Mesopotamia, during the 34th century BC. This system is documented by around 5,000 clay tablets coming from various sites, dating from ca. 3350 BC to 3000 BC.

Nippur (Sumerian: Nibru, often logographically recorded as 𒂗𒆤𒆠, EN.LÍL, "Enlil City;" Akkadian: Nibbur) was an ancient Sumerian city. It was the special seat of the worship of the Sumerian god Enlil, the "Lord Wind", ruler of the cosmos, subject to An alone. Nippur was located in modern Nuffar 8 kilometers north of modern Afak, Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate, Iraq. It is roughly 200 km south of modern Baghdad and about 100 km southeast of the ancient city of Babylon. Occupation at the site extended back to the Ubaid period (Ubaid 2 – Hajji Muhammed), the Uruk period, and the Jemdet Nasr period. The origin of the ancient name is unknown but different proposals have been made.

Naqada II refers to the second Pre-dynastic archaeological stage centered around the Naqada region of Upper Egypt. It was formerly also called Gerzeh culture, after discoveries at Gerzeh (also Girza or Jirzah), a small prehistoric Egyptian cemetery located along the west bank of the Nile but much farther north, where Flinders Petrie first characterized this period in the 19th century. Gerzeh is situated only several miles due east of the oasis of Faiyum, but was only peripheral to the Naqada culture. Depending on the sources, the Naqada II period is dated from c. 3,500 BC to c. 3,325 BC, from c. 3,650 BC to c. 3,300 BC, or from 3,500 to 3,200 BC. Naqada II had many types of potteries, which were categorized chronologically by Petrie from SD ("Sequence Date") 38 to 62. It is coeval with the Uruk period in Mesopotamia.

Naqada II is the second of three phases of the prehistoric Naqada cultures, and was preceded by Naqada I (also known as the "Amratian culture"), and followed by Naqada III (also known as the "protodynastic" or "Semainian culture").

A cylinder seal is a small round cylinder, typically about one inch (2 to 3 cm) in width, engraved with written characters or figurative scenes or both, used in ancient times to roll an impression onto a two-dimensional surface, generally wet clay. According to some sources, cylinder seals were invented around 3500 BC in the Near East, at the contemporary sites of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia and slightly later at Susa in south-western Iran during the Proto-Elamite period, and they follow the development of stamp seals in the Halaf culture or slightly earlier. They are linked to the invention of the latter's cuneiform writing on clay tablets. Other sources, however, date the earliest cylinder seals to a much earlier time, to the Late Neolithic period (7600-6000 BC) in Syria, hundreds of years before the invention of writing.

Cylinder seals are a form of impression seal, a category which includes the stamp seal and finger ring seal. They survive in fairly large numbers and are important as art, especially in the Babylonian and earlier Assyrian periods. Impressions into a soft material can be taken without risk of damage to the seal, and they are often displayed in museums together with a modern impression on a small strip.