Glen wrote
> So be it. Tomatoe/Toe-mah-tah. Regardless, my viewpoint remains
that
the
> native Sumerians cannot be seen as the originators of this
> cosmo-mythological belief system.
I don't see why not. Inanna is the only one of the Sumerian
divinities that does not have a good Sumerian etymology. Sumerians
talk about their kingship as beginning at Eridu, the Sumerian city of
cities, a fact confirmed by archaeology of settlement patterns in the
Middle East. Sumerians speak of the world beginning at Dilmun, where
freah and salt water mingled. Dilmun is assumed to be Bahrein, a
name
which refers in Arabic to the fact that salt and fresh waters mingle
off its shores. All the planets have Sumerian (not proto-Euphratean)
names with the exception again of Inanna (although the Sumerian names
for morning and evening star are good and solid).
Glen, why your attempt to prove that the Sumerians (who invented
writing, historical record keeping, temple building, the wheel,
irrigation etc etc) could not have invented their own cosmology? Why
do you continue to see Sumerian culture as derivative from the
Semitic
when Akkadian and West Semite languages prove that the derivation all
went the other way?
I think it is a case of a person hanging on to a faulty theory in
spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Perhaps one could ask
what
is your nul hypothesis Glen. How could your theories be disproven?
If they cannot be disproven then it is a theological or metaphysical
argument here, not a scientific one.
Regards
John