Alexander

You raise some interesting points.

> Yes, the Ghassulian culture seems to be a phenomenon of a very high
> importance. I think, if it was tightly connected with the Amuq
> culture, its people must be one of the first who used tin bronze
> (instead of arsenic bronze which was widely spread before).
> And what about their pottery? Did they use the pottery wheel? I'd
> expect it.

Wheel based pottery I understand did not come until the following
Uruq phase, from the south of Iraq. I believe their pottery was
still hand made and of a particularly high quality (though not as
good as Halaf pottery with which it was roughly contemporary).

You continued

> However I strongly doubt that they could be the Proto-Semites or
> the Proto-North-Semites. All the Semitic tribes whose appearance on
> the historical stage was documented by neighbors were semi-nomadic
> herders.

The question about the linguistic nature of Ghassulian is a complex
one, and would resolve around two things.

1. Whether the Amuq or the Minhata cultures was predominantly the
ancestral culture for these people. The reason why is because the
Amuq culture of Byblos seems to have never had a semi-nomadic herder
culture, but the Minhata culture definitely did. The shift two and
fro between sedentary mixed agriculturists --> transhumance
pastoralists --> fully nomadic pastoralists and all the way back
again is one that happened repeatedly for the Semites, I feel.
Mellaart argues that the Minhata culture was Semite, the question is
whether the derivative Ghassulians were also.

2. The second evidence would seem to be concerned with place-names.
From what I have read, it would seem that all the place-names within
the orbit of the Ghassulian culture zone are Semitic in origin.
There does not seem to be any underlying sub-strata that can be
identified. If Ghassulian is non Semitic, I would have thought that
traces of this non Semitic sub-stratum would have survived to
Biblical times at least.

Alexander continued

> In the case when we find the North Semites already as settled
> agriculturalists (Akkad) they demonstrate a typical non-
> Mediterranean type of agriculture - sesame (not olive) for oil and
> beer (not wine) for mass drinking. Naturally, they didn't bring
> sesame to Mesopotamia, they just adopted local traditional forms of
> agriculture. I guess they would never give up planting olive and
> grape if it were their traditional way of life.

Alexander, I see another nomadic pastoral phase that was post-
Ghassulian and pre-Early Bronze I. Evidence of this pastoral phase
is shown by a hiatus in the development of settlements between
Ghassulian and EBI urban development in Palestine that has been taken
to indicate a period of increasing aridity and abandonment of the
more complex "mixed farming system" to smaller pockets around
permanent water and oases. I feel there is evidence on this process
of what has been called "Shasuization" (from the Egyptian term Shasu
meaning "wanderer" or "nomad") in the way in which the expansive Uruk
trading system retreated to Souther Iraq in the succeeding Jemdat
Nasr phase. Equally the pre-Diluvian Sumerian kings, all with
Sumerian names, show a retreat from Sippar to Sharrapak (suggesting a
retreat when confronted with Akkadian tribes). The indigenisation of
these people to Sumerian sesame and beer culture is shown by the fact
that the first post-Diluvian Dynasty of Kish, shows a mixture of
Akkadian and Sumerian names.

You finished

> That's why I don't think that the Ghassulian culture can represent
> early Semites.

And this is why I think they can. But I am not inflexible on the
topic and can be pursuaded otherwise.

Warm regards

John