Glen wrote
> How so, John? Dillusional again? True the Semitish language and
> SemitoEuropoid belief system entered together into Europe. But why?
Because
> of the spread of agriculture.
What Glen? Agricultural technology, genetics, language and religion
moving together. I thought this was an anathema to you. You are
always preaching to me that they move independently from each other.
It is usually me who writes
> People who move tend to bring language, genetics AND belief systems
> with them.
By this I presume also archaeological artifacts. Good to see you
coming around to my position.
I suppose you would be interested to see then that from Ubaid times
that population densities were highest in Southern Mesopotamia and
declined further the greater the distance one was from this area.
People tended to migrate out from this source, more often than they
migrated into it.
The exception you rightly point out is Akkadian. The Akkadian
migration does not show up archaeologically very clearly though.
This is probably due to the fact that they (like many later Semitic
waves) started out as nomadic herders, perhaps the tent dwellers
mentioned in the story of Enki and Ninhursag. Nevertheless, Akkadian
only began to have any involvement in the Sumerian corpus as the
Sumerian culture area moved north. In the Sumerian kinglist, Semitic
names only appear in the first Dynasty of Kish (after the movement of
hegemony from Eridu to Bad Tibira and then Larak). By then the
essential features of the Sumerian mythos were firmly established.
It would seem that, based on religious forms and etymology the
Akkadians borrowed most heavily from the Sumerians, not the other way
around.
Thus when Glen writes
> Further, eventually we see Akkadian-speaking people migrating into
> Sumerian-speaking territory and putting a new spin on Sumerian
beliefs with
> a SemitoEuropoid flavour. Again, independent of language spread.
It was rather the Sumerians who put a new spin on Akkadian beliefs
(eg. Ishtar changing gender from proto-Semitic male to Akkadian
female, to allow the incorporation of the Sumerian Inanna mythic-
cycle into Sargonic Akkadian. It was Sargon's daughter, Enheduana,
who brought about this complete identification of Ishtar with the
earlier Inanna). This is to be expected when a culture at a less
sophisticated level (eg. nomadic pastoralists) come into contact with
urban citified folks (the Sumerians) whose culture they come to adopt
(at Kish).
Glen, your hypothesis is driving your analysis of te facts, instead
of the facts creating your hypothesis.
Regards
John