Where did the Sumerians come from?
The Sumerian civilization flourished in the 4th millennium BC in the region known as the Fertile Crescent, located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Numerous inventions of fundamental importance for the development of civilization are attributed to the Sumerians: among these are writing, laws and the calendar. However, it is still not clear where they came from: although scholars agree that the Sumerians were not originally from Mesopotamia, their place of origin is still unknown.
So, since this place is unknown… we have to find it! Of course, we don't have maps, but as we will see, the analysis of myths and "immaterial" artifacts (language and toponymy) will help us …
Index
- The mystery of the Sumerian language
- Sumerian toponymy
- northern Europe
- India
- Some considerations
The mystery of the Sumerian language
The place of origin of the Sumerians is not the only mysterious aspect of this civilization: their language, in fact, has also unknown origins. It is an isolated language, not related to the other languages spoken in that area: this indicates that the Sumerians were not originally from the Middle East.
Although the question is still controversial (certainly not summarized in these few lines), some scholars have found possible "links" between the Sumerian language and other languages.
Let's see some examples.
- It has been pointed out that Sumerian grammar is very similar to Hungarian grammar (http://www.hunmagyar.org/tor/controve.htm#III.%20THE%20SUMERIAN%20QUESTION). Kálmán Gosztony, professor of Sumerian philology at the Sorbonne, demonstrated that among the 53 characteristics of Sumerian grammar, 51 are also typical of Hungarian grammar; therefore Hungarian would be the closest language to that spoken by the Sumerians.
- Simo Parpola, a Finnish Assyriologist, published a few years ago an etymological dictionary (https://www.eisenbrauns.org/books/titles/978-952-10-9492-7.html) of the Sumerian language in which he claims its kinship with the Uralic languages (which include, for example, Hungarian and Finnish).
- Andis Kaulins, an independent researcher, has collected at http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi37.htm a long list of words that would seem to suggest a link between Sumerian and Latvian.
It is a common opinion among scholars that Sumerians originated in a location north of Mesopotamia, perhaps in the Zagros Mountains, near the border with present-day Turkey. But if the researchers quoted above are right, we would have to move much further north, between Russia and the Baltic countries.
Sumerian toponymy
We had already dealt with toponymy in other articles, where we had tried to trace the original location of two Italic peoples: the Venetians and the Ligurians. So why not try a similar approach with the Sumerians as well?
Well, this is what I did. Result? I have found two other similar "Mesopotamias" civilzations, where numerous toponyms of the Fertile Crescent are reproduced: these are Northern Europe and India.
NORTHERN EUROPE
In northern Europe (particularly along the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea) there is a prodigious amount of toponyms that recall the Sumerian world. Here we will list some of the most significant ones.
Let's start from Estonia where (moving from east to west) we find Ereda (Eridu), Unukse (Unug, another name of Uruk), Uuri (Ur), Suurupi (Shuruppak) and Kiisa (Kish). On the island of Saaremaa, however, we find the locality of Üru (Ur). Further south, in Latvia, we find in the capital, Riga, Lake Bābelītis, reminiscent of Babylon.
In Finland there are many other assonant toponyms with Mesopotamian ones, for example Kissuo (Kish), Uro (Ur), Suuruspää (Shuruppak), Sipari and Sipparinkorpi (Sippar), Nipuri (Nippur), Laakasuo (Lagash), Läräkekorpi (Larak), Laarsniittu (Larsa) and finally Kaldea, reminiscent of the Chaldeans. In Russia, on the other hand, near the Lake Ladoga there is the town of Sumeria.
Other localities recall the gods of the Sumerian pantheon: in Russia, in the northern part of Karelia, we find Lake Enki (Enkijärvi); in southern Finland we find instead the locality of Enkismusa. In Estonia we find Maardu (Marduk) and, in the island of Hiiumaa, Utu, while in Latvia we have Tūmuži (Dumuzi). Finally, the location of Gilga, in Lithuania, is reminiscent of Gilgamesh.
INDIA
Another "twin" Mesopotamia's location is India: even here, in fact, there are several places whose names recall the Sumerian cities. Let's see some of them.
In the State of Orissa, overlooking the Bay of Bengal, we meet Erida (Eridu), Surupa (Shuruppak), Urukula (Uruk), Bautibereni (Bad-Tibira), Nipur (Nippur) and Sipari (Sippar). Further north, in Jharkhand, we find Uru (Ur) and Nini (Ninive). Moving even further north, in Bihar, we find instead Larsa, Sipara (Sippar) and Sumera.
The presence of these toponyms is rather unusual for two reasons:
- they are distributed over a relatively small area if compared to that of the entire Indian subcontinent;
- they are mostly fields and small towns, not important cities (this also applies to Baltic toponyms).
Who was it then who baptized these places? And why did he choose these names?
Some considerations
So we have three places (Mesopotamia, Northern Europe, India) where toponyms referable to the Sumerians are found. But other places in the world also seem linked in some way to the Sumerian civilization: Felice Vinci, in his new book The Mysteries of Megalithic Civilization, cites Sardinia for example (where there is a building extraordinarily similar to a ziggurat, Monte d'Accoddi, whose name recalls the city of Akkad) and Peru/Bolivia, where the – now extinct – Uru people lived, and where in the 1960s a stone vase (the so-called Fuente Magna) was found bearing proto-Sumerian inscriptions.
But then where did the Sumerians really come from? Did they spread around the world from Mesopotamia, or did they come from elsewhere?
In my view, what happened in Mesopotamia is analogous to what happened in ancient Egypt. By the time the Sumerian civilization flourished, the Fertile Crescent had already been inhabited for hundreds of thousands of years; probably the Sumerians, like the Egyptians, did nothing but integrate into this very ancient civilization. And, again like the Egyptians, they too probably came from Northern Europe.
The Nordic origin of the Sumerians, as we have seen, is suggested both by some linguistic convergences and by toponymy. But there is also another clue, coming from mythology. Indeed, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is said that the homonymous hero lost in the Underworld the "pukku" and the "mekku", two symbols of royal power sometimes translated respectively as "drum" and "rods". Yet, as noted in this article, the puukko is the typical Finnish hunting knife, and again in Finland, miekka (a word very similar to mekku) means "sword"! In fact, the knife and sword are much more suited to represent power than the drum and drumsticks ...
If this reconstruction is correct, then, the early Sumerian civilization flourished on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea; later the Sumerians descended, perhaps by river, in the Caucasus; from there a part of the population would have arrived in Mesopotamia, another in India and yet another in Sardinia. The presence in South America of objects with cuneiform inscriptions could be due to a subsequent migration, or due to trade. Clearly it is still too early to reach a conclusion; what is certain is that our story is much more full of twists and turns than we had imagined.
Note
This article is an english translation of the italian article "Da Dove Venivano i Sumeri?" by Merlo Bianco. You can find the original article here: https://merlobianco.altervista.org/da-dove-venivano-i-sumeri/
