Ancient site · Settlement
Jarmo
Also known as Qal'at Jarmo
A small farming village in the Zagros foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan, among oak and pistachio woods. Robert Braidwood of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute excavated it to find where farming began.
Its people grew early wheat and barley and kept goats and sheep, living in mud-walled houses. Jarmo showed that the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent, not only river valleys, were where agriculture took root.
- Dates
- c. 7090–4950 BCE
- Still standing
- No, or only traces
- Location
- 35.56° N, 44.93° E
How we know
No writing existed; the village is dated by excavations in the 1940s–50s and radiocarbon.
Nearby sites
- Nineveh c. 3000–612 BCE (Assyrian capital from c. 700 BCE)
- Behistun inscription carved c. 520 BCE
- Babylon c. 2300 BCE – c. 1000 CE; first mentioned c. 2200 BCE
- Etemenanki, the ziggurat of Babylon origins perhaps 18th century BCE; rebuilt 7th–6th century BCE; demolished 323 BCE
- Tower of Babel (legend) Legend; no date can be given
- Tell Halaf c. 6100–5400 BCE (Halaf village); later the Aramaean city of Guzana