Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Sumerian roots of the Bible (video)

Neal Sendlak (Gnostic Informant, 6/17/23); Sheldon S., CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly



Shocking Sumerian roots of the Bible | (documentary)
(Gnostic Informant) Most historians have suggested that Sumer (home of the Sumerians and possibly the location of the Vedas' and Buddhism's Mt. Sumeru) was first permanently settled between circa 5500–3300 BCE by a West Asian people who spoke the Sumerian language.

Billy explains Sumerian history, clearer than Bible

Don't say "God is all in our head." Gods exist.
(Scholars can point to the names of cities, rivers, basic occupations, and so on as evidence). Sumerian is a non-Semitic and non-Indo-European agglutinative language isolate.

The Blau Monuments combine proto-cuneiform characters and illustrations of early Sumerians, Jemdet Nasr period, 3100–2700 BCE (British Museum).

Others have suggested that the Sumerians were a North African people who migrated from the once Green Sahara into the Middle East and were responsible for the spread of farming in the Middle East.

However, with evidence strongly suggesting the first farmers originated in the Fertile Crescent, this suggestion is often discarded.

Although not specifically discussing Sumerians, Lazaridis et al. 2016 have suggested a partial North African origin for some pre-Semitic cultures of the Middle East, particularly Natufians, after testing the genomes of Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture-bearers.

Alternatively, a 2013 genetic analysis of four ancient Mesopotamian skeletal DNA samples suggests an association of the Sumerians with Indus Valley Civilization, possibly as a result of ancient Indus–Mesopotamia relations.

According to some data, the Sumerians are associated with the Hurrians and Urartians, and the area of the Caucasus Mountains is considered their homeland.

A prehistoric people who lived in the region before the Sumerians have been termed the "Proto-Euphrateans" or "Ubaidians" and are theorized to have evolved from the Samarra culture of northern Mesopotamia.

The Ubaidians, though never mentioned by the Sumerians themselves, are assumed by modern-day scholars to have been the first civilizing force in Sumer.

They drained the marshes to make way for agriculture, developed trade, and established industries, including weaving, leatherwork, metalwork, masonry, and pottery.

Enthroned Sumerian king of Ur, possibly Ur-Pabilsag, with attendants. Standard of Ur, c. 2600 BC.

Some scholars contest the idea of a Proto-Euphratean language or one substrate language; they think the Sumerian language may originally have been that of the hunting and fishing peoples who lived in the marshland and the Eastern Arabia littoral region and were part of the Arabian bifacial culture.

Reliable historical records begin much later; there are none in Sumer of any kind that have been dated before Enmebaragesi (Early Dynastic I).

Juris Zarins believes the Sumerians lived along the coast of Eastern Arabia, today's Persian Gulf region, before it was flooded at the end of the Ice Age.

Sumerian civilization took form in the Uruk period (4th millennium BCE), continuing into the Jemdet Nasr and Early Dynastic periods.

The Sumerians progressively lost control to Semitic states from the northwest. Sumer was conquered by the Semitic-speaking kings of the Akkadian Empire around 2270 BCE (short chronology), but Sumerian continued as a sacred language (like liturgical Sanskrit or Latin).

Native Sumerian rule re-emerged for about a century in the Third Dynasty of Ur at approximately 2100–2000 BCE, but the Akkadian language also remained in use for some time.

The Sumerian city of Eridu, on the coast of the Persian Gulf, is considered to have been one of the oldest cities, where three separate cultures may have fused: that of peasant Ubaidian farmers, living in mud-brick huts and practicing irrigation, that of mobile nomadic Semitic pastoralists living in black tents and following herds of sheep and goats, and that of fisher folk, living in reed huts in the marshlands, who may have been the ancestors of the Sumerians.

Epic of Gilgamesh, ancient Mesopotamian odyssey recorded in the Akkadian language about Gilgamesh, the king of the Mesopotamian city-state Uruk (Erech).

The fullest extant text of the Gilgamesh epic is on 12 incomplete Akkadian-language tablets found in the mid-19th century by the Turkish Assyriologist Hormuzd Rassam at Nineveh in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (reigned 668–627 BCE).

The gaps that occur in the tablets have been partly filled by various fragments found elsewhere in Mesopotamia and Anatolia [home of Gobekli Tepe and even older temple ruins recently uncovered in the same area].

In addition, five short poems in the Sumerian language are known from tablets that were written during the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE; the poems have been entitled
  1. “Gilgamesh and Huwawa,”
  2. “Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven,”
  3. “Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish,”
  4. “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,” and
  5. “The Death of Gilgamesh.”

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