I wrote:
>>Second, the prehistoric Sumerians are not the originators of >>anything.
>>Let's try to accept this once and for all.
Janeen:
>I'm a bit confused. If the innovations appeared all throughout the >Middle
>East and if the prehistoric Sumerians never came up with >anything new,
>then why did civilization (i.e., the growth of cities) >occur first in
>Sumeria?
Well, I'm a bit confused too. Help me out with this piece of logic... How do
cities grow without agriculture? It was my impression that agriculture must
come first to support high densities of population before a full-blown city
can develop. If so, we automatically have a pre-Sumer state of affairs where
we have a geographical zone of city-less agriculture. Through time, some,
but obviously not all, agricultural areas coagulated into cities.
Why Sumer and not some place else? Well, this might be a moot question but
here goes... Some areas are just more ripe for the development of cities. I
mean, for instance... Compare Winnipeg and Vancouver. We both have the same
level of technology and innovations but where would you rather be?
Would you like to live in a city that spends half of its year in ice-age
conditions and the other half fighting off the persistent blood-sucking
mosquitoes in the scorching summer sun, like in Wonderful Winnipeg? Or would
you rather live in a city where the winters are mild, flowers can bloom all
year and drivers don't run you down for crossing the street, like in Valient
Vancouver? Y'see, no one gives a rat's ass about Winnipeg and most
Americans, even North Dakotans, would never find it on a map nor would they
have a reason to. Vancouver is the Canadian destination hot-spot and so,
more people flock to the larger city which grows larger by the century while
Winnipeg dwindles... well except for last year since we celebrated our first
_increase_ of a couple hundred or so people (Big hooray! I'm feelin' jumpy
for joy already!) We'll see what the statistics hold for this year, what
with the many bankrupted downtown stores, bars and pool halls and a large
eight-story, entirely empty Eaton's building 'n' all. (Eaton's was a
100-year-old Canada-wide department store that declared sudden bankruptcy
leaving a mess in all cities but it would appear that only Winnipeg was
damaged beyond repair).
Anyways, to make a long story kinda shorter, Sumer was probably a
destination hot-spot too. Just because Sumer had agriculture doesn't
necessarily mean that Sumerians were the inventors.
>Or did writing develop all by its lonesome in Sumeria,
Two words: Vinc^a culture. There's been some talk that Sumer might not be
the first centre of writing. There are examples of what would appear to be
full-blown writing, dating a millenium further back. It's a script looking
much like the later Linear A and B scripts on Crete.
>In the Middle East, that spot happened to be
>Sumer. In the Americas, it happened to be Mexico.
No cities started without agriculture first, as far as I know. So... first
agriculture, THEN a city.
>I think it would help if we all defined the time frames we're talking
> >about. By "prehistoric Sumerian," I'm assuming you mean pre-writing. >Is
>that before 4000 BCE?
That's a good a time as any.
>Before the start of the cities, each tribe was probably more or less >equal
>in influence and size. Early IE and early Sumerians (c. 6000 >BCE) were
>most likely *all* peasants digging in the dirt. However, >once the
>Sumerians started cities, they had more influence.
However, regarding proto-IE itself (c.4000), I don't see how Sumerian
civilisation was as yet powerful enough to have affected in any direct way
IE-speaking cultures. If anything, whatever influences existed were very
small and irrelevant from Sumer. The brunt of the innovations would come
from Turkey, itself a product of the innovative general area of the
Middle-East, just like Sumer. To say that Sumerians gave the IE agriculture
or mythology is an assumptive and unmotivated leap of faith.
>The Sumerians' myths and knowledge and starlore (derived from those
>prehistoric Sumerians) spread widely because nobody else had anything >to
>match it, and those became, if not the heart, then at least a part >of many
>other tribes' myths and knowledge, too, even down to today, >when we
>measure time and circles in 60 seconds and 60 minutes, just >as the
>Sumerians did.
The "60 seconds" idea was a very late creation in comparison to the early
timeframe of the IE. Certainly, that idea was Sumerian in origin since the
number system is based on "60". However, IE myth itself could not have come
about in the same fashion through the same contacts. The timeframes,
geographical locations and likely cultural power of both the IE-speaking
population and the pre-Sumerians (at around 4000 BCE) cannot be accounted
for in such a way as to make a convincing arguement that the Sumerians
indeed affected the IEs or vice-versa.
>How do we reconstruct the myths of the IE? What cultures do we draw >from?
>Do we look for similarities in Greek/Roman, Celtic, Norse, >Slavic, and
>Indian myths?
This is the only way I know of. Common deductive reasoning must painfully
sift out the late additions and alterations from these lores to arrive at
the common IE myths. Luckily, there appear to be at least some common IE
characteristics of the prototypical Euro-Anatolian mythos that are unique to
the IE.
>Or do we need to know the very early IE myths? Is it enough to
> >reconstruct the myths of the IEs from a later period? How late?
Well, it is my personal view that one must be aware not only of the myths
that one is reconstructing but the influences that shaped these
reconstructed myths in order to fully understand. (That goes for
reconstructed languages too!) My feeling is that IE myth is a blend of three
sources: Pre-IE Europe, Anatolia & Steppe.
Janeen:
>About the "descent and return to the underworld a la Tammuz" >consider
>this on the difficulties of translation:
Interesting. It makes me think about the Egyptians and their similar
thoughts that the underworld lied beyond the western mountains. However,
they still believed in an UNDERworld through which the sun travelled at
night. It was very much underneath. Afterall, the deceased ruler at the very
least certainly must have travelled _underneath_ like the sun did at night,
being that Egyptian rulers were the reincarnation of the sun. Thus, a
connection between the underworld and death, despite mountains.
With the Sumerians, sure there's that mountain thingie again, but can we be
sure that it wasn't believed that the realm of the dead lied _behind_ and
_below_ the mountains as with the Egyptians? I'm curious: Where did the sun
go if there was no underworld? Each morning, it musta dipped an inch below
the western horizon, snuck around to the east in order to rise again.
Clever, that the sun god is :)
Another thing: In just about any culture, there is an immediate association
between earth and death. The reason is that people tend to fall to the
ground when having a heart attack due to the invention of gravity :) Another
reason arises when a culture buries their dead (cf. Kurgan culture). Even if
cremated however, the dead are turned into ashes, producing yet another
possible symbolic connection between earth and death. These practically
unavoidable earth-death connections, combined with a comparison with
Egyptian mythology, gives me reasonable doubt in re of this idea of a
totally "underworld-less" mythology in Sumer. All this, however, says
nothing about a relationship between foreigners and death which could still
exist with or without an underworld.
- gLeN
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at
http://www.hotmail.com