Sumerian

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by sifreak21, Nov 16, 2009.

  1. sifreak21 Valued Senior Member

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    i probably misspelled it but im a horrible speller.. my question is well i jsut say the 4th kind and the sumarian culture REALLY interesnts me because of some of the things i have read up about the hyroglyphs they left and language.. is it true that we dont have the whole language deciphered? is the background of the culture depectind in "the fourth kind" true?
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Sumerian is the oldest known written language, with the oldest records dating from 3500BCE. According to Wikipedia, it has been exhaustively studied. We have considerable knowledge of its vocabulary, grammar and syntax.

    Sumer is the oldest known civilization, dating to around 5000BCE. The definition of "civilization" is a little vague. Literally it means "the building of cities" and there are a few cities older than 7000 years. The oldest ruins in Jericho, for example, go back to 9000BCE. But it is not easy to decide when a village becomes a city. The literal definition of "civilization" is not adhered to and I think many people insist that a "civilization" must consist of more than one city. But by any definition, Mesopotamia qualifies as "the cradle of civilization." Our entire Western civilization was built up from Greco-Roman civilization, which was based on the civilization of the Phoenicians, a Canaanite people who were part of the Mesopotamian sphere of influence.

    No one knows where the Sumerians came from. Both their DNA and their language show that they were not Semitic like so many of the tribes in Mesopotamia. Since the unique Sumerian cities ruled Mesopotamia for a while, their language was the dominant one in the region. Eventually Akkadian became dominant, but Sumerian was spoken for at least three thousand years, and probably longer since the Sumerians existed as a Neolithic (agricultural) people before they built their cities.

    But the language was forgotten (by Western scholars, anyway) until the 19th century, when inscriptions in a clearly non-Semitic language were either rediscovered gathering dust, or dug up from archeological sites. Eventually Sumerian-Akkadian dictionaries were discovered and it was all downhill from there.

    The Sumerian writing system is called cuneiform, Latin for "wedge-shaped," because the symbols are composites of little wedges, which are easy to carve in clay tablets. Just as in our era, ancient technology tended to develop to fulfill the needs of commerce, and cuneiform symbols were used for numbers and other bookkeeping symbols. Eventually it expanded to represent speech, and cuneiform is the oldest writing system we have discovered. At various times in its development, the symbols represented both sounds and (phonetic writing) and entire words (logograms).

    Hieroglyphs is the word for writing symbols that were derived from pictures, rather than from the tally marks of bookkeepers like cuneiform. The word is most famously used for the writing system of the ancient Egyptians, who spoke an Afro-Asiatic language related to the Semitic family. But the writing system of the Olmecs and Mayas is also hieroglyphic. To use the term precisely, Chinese han zi are also hieroglyphic, although today they are usually called simply characters, more academically logograms, or else by the Japanese pronunciation of their name, kanji.

    I haven't seen the movie and frankly I hadn't even heard of it.

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  5. one_raven God is a Chinese Whisper Valued Senior Member

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    Didn't the genome projects shed some light on this?
     
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  7. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I don't know about the Sumerians specifically. There are quite a few more-or-less distinct populations of humans and I don't think we've analyzed all of their DNA yet. The last report I saw (see the "Out of Africa" thread in Human Science) made some very large discoveries:
    • Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa in two waves, about 10,000 years apart. The first was during an ice age when there was a famine in Africa, sea levels were low, and they hiked all the way to Australia (and boated across the then-narrow straits between islands) where capricious weather patterns presented a bounty of food. The second wave is the ancestors of all the rest of us non-Africans. The same tribe was the source of both migrant groups: the San or "Bushmen" whose descendants still live in Africa, only much further south.
    • All of the sub-Arctic indigenous people in the Americas are descended from a single tribe still living in Siberia. On a TV special they showed a photo of one of them to a group of Navajos--a people with a proud legend of their creation in their current location. One of them said, "That guy looks just like Uncle Ernie." The chief composed himself, looked straight into the camera and said, "I guess what you people have been trying to tell the world is true then: we really are all brothers."
    I think it will be a while before we unlock all the secrets of every population's DNA. The sheer volume of work to be done is rather great.
     
  8. sifreak21 Valued Senior Member

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    what have we concluded to the hyroglyphs of humans with some sort of mask on there face and the pictures of rockets?

    very insightful and thank you for the info i suggest you go check out the 4th kind, if you believe in other live besides us in the univers it will really make you think. i thought it was a very good movie
     
  9. SkinWalker Archaeology / Anthropology Moderator

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    To that we can conclude that people easily suffer from pareidolia and anthropomorphic tendencies that project modern culture on ancient ones without good reason to do so. There are no "hyroglyphs of humans with" "rockets" in Sumerian pictographs. And there probably aren't any depicted with "masks."
     
  10. mugaliens Registered Member

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    Like this?

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    PS: I took it near King Ur-Namu's tomb in 2006, in SW Iraw.
     
  11. SkinWalker Archaeology / Anthropology Moderator

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    Cuneiforum script always represented spoken words. The first writing in the region, during the Jemdat Nasar period, consisted mainly of bookkeeping since it arose out of necessity through bullae and clay envelopes. Traders put tokens representing stock inside hollow balls of clay (a individual ball is a bulla) and on the outside they inscribed symbols or just pressed the tokens on them. In this way, they could entrust their stock to a third party until it reached its destination where the buyer could compare the tokens inside the bulla with the symbols on the outside then to the stock traded. If he had the right number of goats, ingots, bushels of wheat, etc, perhaps the tradesman lived to trade again.

    The writing system evolved from pictographs to wedges over time and from bullae to clay envelopes and then, finally, to clay tablets. By the dynastic Sumerian periods, we have examples of all sorts of writing in cuneiform script. A large portion of it is accounting and lists (lists of stock & trade, kings lists, etc.) but some of it is out-right poetry, prayers and historical accounts.

    Just to clarify, hieroglyphs in evolved into cuneiform in Mesopotamia. There is a clear evolution of hieroglyph-to-script in the archaeological record.

    The photo is a bit small, but this looks very much like proto-cuneiform pictographs consistent with the Jemdat Nasor period or, more likely, just following. But I can't make out the glyphs. It might be early cuneiform too since there appear to be some wedge shapes. I'd be very interested in seeing a larger photo of this.
     

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