Ubaid period pottery

Let us now move to a different part of the drawer. A large part of the NINO’s object collection consists of pottery sherds (over 200 of them!). Of those 200 or so, around 60 are from the Neolithic period, and can be classified as so-called Ubaid pottery. They usually have very nice geometric decorations made in black paint on a light surface, as you can see here. They date back to around the 4th millennium BCE.

Other pottery sherds in the collection date from a variety of other time periods. For example, Böhl had also collected a fair amount of Islamic period sherds. In the 1930s, when Böhl collected his artifacts, archaeological excavations were carried out a lot more ‘casually’ than nowadays, and sherds were found by the thousands. As a result, Böhl has recorded on several occasions that he was gifted some sherds by the director of an excavation when he visited them on his travels. How times change…

The boomerang-shaped object above the sherds is a clay sickle. Böhl had four of them in his collection. These sickles were used to harvest crops. In its current condition, it surely does not look sharp enough for that task, but it really is (or at least, it used to be)!