Mark O:
>The Sumerians say they 'came from the water' or something like that,
>don't they.
That's the creation myth you're thinking of, me suspects. Pretty
much the entire Middle-East ended up believing that they "came from
the (primordial) water". Nothing uniquely Sumerian there. It could
just as well be Egyptian, Greek or Cretan.
>My own feeling is the ancestors of the Sumerians really did come from
>the water, refugees from sea-level rising, from further down in now
>indudated portions the Persian Gulf.
This should be in the List Archives: John Croft mentioned Sumerian
legend (Dilmun) and its connection to this very idea of a southern
origin of these people. I had resisted the thought for the longest
time but I've turned around and can accept it with some provisions.
I used to think that the Sumerians came from further north (the
whole Halaf-Ubaid thing) but now I've come to a peaceful conclusion
that this cultural spread should be associated with a concurrent
linguistic spread of Caucasic speaking peoples (HurroUrartian-ish)
which must have heavily affected Sumerian to give it a strange and
un-Nostratic looking character, thereby making it difficult for
longrangers to agree on a proper placement of the language within
the Nostratic tree.
Despite Sumerian's cloak of mystery, I continue to feel that it's
probably most closely related to ElamoDravidian languages, and hence
would have been once part of a chain of languages stretching from
Saudi Arabia (Proto-Sumerian) to the South Caspian (ElamoDravidian, Early
Steppe). So...
If you're right, Mark, the question is could Sumerian,
by moving from Saudi Arabia, have replaced a related and
autochthonous "Eurasiatic" language in the process and by what
date might this northward movement have taken place exactly?
Hmmm.
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