John, the eternal opposition:
>Glen is doing a little bit of Sumerian Bashing here.
I swear, I'm not a sumerophobe! I mean, hey, I like Sumerians as much as the
next guy... It's just when they come to this country and start takin' our
damn jobs and... boohoo, sob, sob. But I'm not against the Sumerians or
anything. >:)
Seriously, I think that the glorification of Sumerians as the inventors of
everything is a bit over done. More below.
John says:
>They not only invented writing, astrology, civil
>government, the wheel, jurisprudence, surveying, urban living and
>much else besides. True, like all people they built on and developed
>upon the start of other peoples, but their influence was to last for
>centuries, on all peoples around. The very word "Eden" referring to
>a wilderness garden is Sumerian in orgin.
You as well as Janeen seem to be confused between what the Sumerians would
LATER contribute and the earlier inventions that would help to build the
Sumerian civilisation in the first place.
First, there is no need to lump writing in with this. Ever since 1961, when
Professor Nicolae Vlassa of the Cluj University found tablets in Tartaria
dated to 4700 BCE, written in the Vinca script, the true date and time of
the first instance of writing has been revisited, as well as its genuine
inventors. So, we must automatically question whether Sumerians truely
developed writing independantly from the Vinca culture.
The complex astrology as we find with the Sumerians is to be attributed to
themselves, of course, but to emphatically assume that earlier peoples did
not associate divinities with stars is nothing short of a religious belief
in itself. There is little doubt that IE knew of law and justice (Hittite
law concerning IE "wolf-marriage" for example: /Zik-wa URBARRA-as kistat/
"You have become a wolf"; *Dye:us is firmly associated with law and order as
well)... so I'm not sure where you're going with "jurisprudence" here. Urban
living is hardly Sumerian-specific but rather an automatic evolution of
agricultural peoples. Finally, Dilmun is not a proof of anything since the
ultimate source of this and many myths are still a matter of theory,
assumption and heresay, which is in fact the very topic we are discussing!
John:
>Yes, cities quickly depleted the local region [...] This spread
>Sumerian influence far and wide. [...] Sargon spread Sumerian from
>Oman to Anatolia and from Lebanon to Iran.
Sargon is not "pre-Sumerian" and therefore outside of this topic. Keep
focused.
- gLeN
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at
http://www.hotmail.com