I'm going to have to keep my post short and carefully worded so as to
prevent John from further twisting the original topic into tiny pieces of
irrelevancies as he often does.
Please read every precious word very carefully, John. Honestly, I don't know
what you'd have to say for yourself if you didn't have my words to mangle
and distort. You're harder to shake off than a shadow in midday sun. :P
The original topic:
-------------------
The original topic was the potential contact between IE and Sumerian
languages that Janeen had brought up... and there simply is no such contact
from 4000 BCE or earlier. If you wish to debate this, the onus is on you to
provide clear evidence to the contrary. The only similarities I'm aware of
between the IEs and Sumerians at 4000 BCE are to do with mythology and
agriculture. Agriculture simply doesn't radiate out of Sumer, period.
Mythology doesn't radiate out of Sumer at this prehistoric date either as
can be seen by the spread of Venus figurines. Your crumbs of data concerning
_HISTORICAL_ events such as Sargon, the invention of writing, Hammurabi Law
Codes, etc. are all painfully irrelevant to this prehistoric issue. Throw
them out the window and keep to the topic.
Concerning this topic, we can only conclude that the Sumerians of prehistory
have in no measurable way affected the IE culture, period.
About writing:
--------------
On a seperate issue concerning the invention of writing, it doesn't matter
whether you wish to call the Tartaria tablets writing or proto-writing
because the find is dated earlier than Sumerian. Also, the mere idea of
writing can travel far and wide without a particular script being adopted by
a foreign population, spurring the development of very different scripts.
The Old European Linear scripts and Sumerian cuneiform are certainly
different writing forms but they are the same idea nonetheless. Here's an
instruction manual to create your own neolithic script:
1. press something into clay to make a mark
2. give a meaning to that mark
What's there to argue about here? Because of the date of the Old European
script/proto-writing/whatever you wish to call it, there becomes the
automatic question of whether Sumerian (proto)writing wasn't spurred on by
(proto)writing from the north. That doubt is too significant to allow a
triumphant assertion of "Sumerians invented writing" to go unabated. They
may not have invented writing on their own.
On to other things...
---------------------
Now that we can get past the archaic notion that Sumer is the source of all
that is IE, we can talk seriously about the commonalities between Sumerian
and IE mythology as part of a large prehistoric zone of trade (trade of
ideas, innovation, goods, etc). We might be tempted to call this the region
the Prehistoric EuroAnatolian Economy or "PEE" for short :)
But seriously, Sumerian astrology simply could not have arisen fully formed
as it appears to be in the first instances of Sumerian writing without being
based on some simpler planetary associations that were the seed of its
development. It is these earlier, simpler equations between deity and astral
body that must have been part of the EuroAnatolian myth and that which
brought about the mythologies of the IE, Sumerians, Semitic peoples and
Anatolian peoples. The Venus=girl=fertility equation is certainly at least
as old as 3000 BCE and goddess figurines appear an added three thousand
years beforehand in the MiddleEast.
- gLeN
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