sumerians.
you come across some strange and happy things!!!
the people we call sumerians lived in what is now Kuwait and iraq. (possibly they were there before the ice melted last ice-age so lived in what is now the gulf as well.) their city-states/ziggurats flourished from the earliest times till Babylon rose to power. and even then their language was kept as a sacerdotal or liturgical language alongside texts in ‘semitic’ Akkadian and Aramaic up until the first century a.d. (its an amazing record)
despite a largish body of cuniform tablets in Sumerian..(. oh..they seem to have developed their own pictographic writing system btw.) and a fairly impressive knowledge of their language by modern scholars, no cognate language is know. they are really a one-off. .they referred to themselves as ‘the black headed people’ I take it to mean that they didn’t go grey but kept their black hair like the yogis. .(stress-free living I imagine.)
their city states were ordered and prosperous. they so stood the test of time.. since the earliest settlements that archaeologists have found till sargon…..then with the increasing influence of semetic language speakers.. Akkadian /babylonian, Amorite Aramaic and then Arabic, they passed into apparent oblivion .. their successors (akkadians and babylonians) were hard-core militarists and imperialists.. culminating in the likes of darius who crossed swords with alexander. .. the sumerians .. no. they seem to have been peaceful farmers with a sophisticated urban culture.
they appeared out of nowhere (autochthonous) with a developed civilization … left a huge impression on the ancient middle east, then seem to have totally lost identity. that is weird. as weird as ancient Egypt. (or weirder as Egyptian is rooted in broad north African/middle-eastern culture whereas the sumerians are unique)
the most well-known Sumerian would have to have been Abraham. the peripatetic patriarch/prophet we know from Aramaic and Arabic legend. tradition has him originating from ur of the chaldeans…a Sumerian city (kaldu). legend portrays his period as being anything but enlightened as he was forced out to wander as a homeless person as a result of his iconoclastic tendencies.. (maybe it reflects the degrading of Sumerian culture with the advent of the 'semetic' assyrians ).. , abraham’s life was full of magical and mysterious happenings. it seems that the awareness of Sumerian magic/adepthood was fairly deep in the consciousness of the people. jinn.. angels.. magicians/wizards.... the unseen world.. it was still very much alive where I grew up as well. though washed out, demythologised, and cheapened. cartoonized.
many of the cuneiform texts relate to ritual and magic. mmm
much of the first book of the Hebrew bible (an influential tome in the dark ages) is evidently based on texts current in Babylon (particularly the so-called priestly source/redaction.) ….babylon was a city built on the very foundations of Sumerian civilization. much of genesis evidently comes from sumer.
I imagine the sumerians found a new life in Babylon and its more recent successor Baghdad.
I wonder how much Persian/(substrate)zoroastrian culture owes to them? the black headed people seem to me to be the lowest/subtlest common cultural denominators of the entire region.. It wouldn’t be surprising if they were soon to get another lease on life. just a thought..
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