The area between the Tigris and Euphrates is one of the places that can rightfully be called the cradle of humanity. It was here that the mighty civilizations of antiquity were born and flourished, which shaped the development paths for many subsequent nations and states. One of the very first and, perhaps, the most mysterious was the Sumerian civilization. Despite the many years of work of scientists, there are still more questions than answers in the history of the Sumerians. The search for these answers sometimes leads to the most paradoxical results. But the truth remains hidden.
In the middle of the 4th millennium BC, unusual people appeared in the south of Mesopotamia. They called themselves "blackheads" and brought with them amazing knowledge that no one had ever mastered before. Gradually, they took possession of almost the entire valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, created many city-states there and remained the masters of these lands for many centuries. They called their country Sumer and it was under this name that they went down in history. The Sumerians, who lived 5 thousand years ago, were excellent mathematicians, astronomers, builders and scientists. They created the first writing system, conquered the processing of metals, perfectly knew the structure of the human body and mastered advanced medicine. At the same time, it is still completely unclear - who were they, in fact, and where did they come from?
Cuneiform key
The problem of the origin of the Sumerians has occupied the minds of scientists since the middle of the 19th century. Compared to other ancient civilizations, they did not leave much behind. Many traces of Sumerian culture were absorbed by the peoples of Mesopotamia, who came to replace them, among whom they dissolved. But what survived is enough in abundance to impress anyone.
First of all, it is the famous cuneiform script, one of the most ancient writing systems created by mankind. The Sumerians wrote down their myths and legends (which demonstrate the incredible richness of their culture and spiritual world), economic documents, neatly kept lists of kings, and, in general, one might say, created the first bureaucratic system in history, with cunning icons squeezed out on raw clay.
Great success has been achieved by the "blackheads" in handling numbers. The sixagesimal number system they used is not easy to understand, but it is surprisingly suitable for fairly complex calculations. It is on numbers that are multiples of 60 that some of our modern reference systems are built. Suffice it to recall that our circle consists of 360 faduses, and an hour consists of 60 minutes (each of which includes 60 seconds).
That is, the Sumerian number system is much more suitable, say, for determining coordinates or observing the starry sky than for counting cows in a herd or sacks of barley in a barn. Moreover, scientists managed to find out that once the Sumerians used a much more practical and common fivefold system (according to the number of fingers on the hand). Why, in the end, they chose the much more cumbersome sixties over her is a mystery. There are several versions, but they all have their weak points.
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Many are sure that the answer lies in the answer to the question of where the mysterious people came from. But we cannot find out in any way. In Sumerian legends, a certain blessed land of Dilmun, the ancestral home of all mankind, is repeatedly mentioned. It is believed that this mythical country was actually located on an island in the Persian Gulf. But many facts are also not connected with this.
Almost all of their buildings were erected by the Sumerians on artificial embankments so that they could be seen from afar. This indicates quite clearly that they are used to living among the mountains. This is also evidenced by the fact that in the Sumerian language the words "mountain" and "country" are spelled the same. But on the famous islands of Bahrain and Kuwait, there are no mountains. Therefore, where the mysterious Dilmun was located remains unclear.
Brothers to no one
The language of the Sumerians is the main tool through which scientists are trying to unravel the secrets of the ancient people. It has many very mysterious properties. For example, it is not included in any of the known language families, as if it arose by itself, in a finished form, and did not develop evolutionarily.
However, it does not look artificial or ridiculous - on the contrary, it is quite comfortable and practical. It was not without reason that he was the language-mediator for all the peoples of southern Mesopotamia. People of different nationalities - Akkadians, Babylonians, representatives of various Semitic tribes - spoke and wrote fluently in it. By about 2000 BC, the Sumerian language finally ceased to be spoken and gave way to Akkadian. But even after that, it remained the written language of administration, religion and science - a kind of Latin of ancient Mesopotamia.
Linguists and archaeologists have been searching for connections of the Sumerian language with at least some of the already known dialects since the middle of the 19th century. And they did it very hard. After all, any clue could shed light on where these strange "blackheads" came from. The Sumerian language was consistently declared to belong to different families: Semitic, Uralic, Altai, Sino-Tibetan, Kartvelian and even Polynesian or Chukchi! But no matter how coherent the next theory seemed, there were always arguments that destroyed it completely.
An interesting feature is that Sumerian has a lot of homonyms - words that are spelled the same, but mean completely different things. According to one version, their differences were manifested in pronunciation. Probably, the Sumerian language had tones - that is, the height of the pronunciation of the sound influenced the meaning. The phenomenon is not very rare. This, for example, is the case in modern Chinese and in many other languages. However, it is still difficult to understand the pronunciation of Sumerian words, since we have only cuneiform inscriptions at our disposal.
Deciphering the language of the "blackheads" began in the middle of the 19th century and continues to this day. About 5.5 thousand words are known, but it is still far from compiling a complete dictionary.
In the depths of charm
Of course, the people, surrounded by so many secrets, could not fail to attract attention from amateurs of pseudoscientific theories that amaze the imagination. One of the first was Platon Lukashevich, an ethnographer and amateur linguist, and at the same time a classmate of Nikolai Gogol. True, he did not distinguish too much between the peoples inhabiting Mesopotamia (and there were still few data during his life), so he talked about both Akkadians and Assyrians, taking the Sumerian monuments under the hot hand.
In a book published in 1846 "Charomutie or the sacred language of magicians, magi and priests" Lukashevich put forward a grandiose theory that a long time ago all people spoke the same language, which he called true. Of course, according to his logic, the Slavic language was the closest to the source language. And all languages have retained its roots. Then came the time of charm (chara - speech, stir up - mix), and all languages turned into a mess. But it is still possible to single out the true roots, which Lukashevich did, with complete contempt for real linguistics or philology. So, for example, Babylon, in his opinion, meant "the alluring bosom", and the name Nebuchadnezzar was translated as "Dawn of the Western sky."
The famous predecessor of the so-called "new chronology" Nikolai Morozov, who in 1931 announced that there were no Sumerians at all, acted even more radically. As, however, and Akkadians and Assyrians. Cuneiform tablets were created in Byzantium, approximately in the 8th century, and were the secret writing of fighters against veneration of icons, who did not want to write in the alphabet used by the "sinful" church. Accordingly, all the Sumerian and Babylonian kings turned out to be either Roman emperors, starting with Diocletian, or mythological characters. Especially from Morozov went to the famous ruler of Babylon Hammurabi. He turned out to be both the biblical patriarch - Abraham and the prophet Moses, and his name was translated as Ammon Rahab …
Anunnaki with Nibiru
But most of all, an American writer and amateur orientalist named Zachariya Sitchin roamed about Sumerian material. At the end of the XX century, he burst into a whole series of books with the most sensational information. Deciding that it was too shallow to look for an answer within our own planet, Sitchin stated that the Sumerians received all their knowledge from aliens from outer space. The writer invented a rather beautiful fantastic theory about the planet Nibiru (this word, translated as "crossing", in Sumerian mythology is called a complex concept associated with the god Marduk and based, perhaps, on observations of the movements of the planet Jupiter in the sky), which every 3600 years flies through the solar system between Mars and Jupiter.
According to Sitchin, Nibiru was inhabited by powerful creatures, the Anunnaki, who actually created the entire human race. They needed people to extract gold in the mines. The Sumerians were the people closest to the newcomers, and therefore adopted various wisdom from them. In addition, in Akkadian-Sumerian mythology, Sitchin believed, various plots of interaction between people and Anunnaki are reflected. Later, these plots migrated into the Bible (which indeed contains a number of motifs related to Sumerian mythology).
Sitchin's ideas offended and shocked representatives of several scientific specialties. Linguists began to point out numerous errors and misinterpretations in the translations of the Sumerian texts to which Sitchin referred. Historians - to explain that gold until the middle of the 2nd millennium BC in Mesopotamia was not considered a precious metal at all and was not mined in large quantities. Specialists in mythology pointed out that the Sumerians really had characters called anunnaki. However, they very rarely associated with the sky and, as a rule, were described as younger, not very influential gods. They are not even called by name.
Finally, astronomers have demonstrated using a mathematical model that no planet is capable of orbit enough to fly between Mars and Jupiter once every 3600 years. In addition, Sitchin for some reason constantly claims that the Sumerians knew 12 planets, although only five are mentioned in a huge number of calendars and tablets with astronomical texts. In short, not a single Sitchin statement was confirmed when viewed from the side. That, however, did not prevent him from publishing book after book.
However, everyone who survives will have the opportunity to verify the reality or unreality of Nibiru personally - according to Sitchin's calculations, she should once again fly into the solar system in 2085.
Who was first?
With what countries and territories the Sumerians were not associated! They were declared aliens from China, from India, from Asia and, of course, from the mythical and never existed Atlantis. Experts had to spend a lot of time and effort to refute these speculations, and the real solution to the Sumerian secrets did not get any closer in the meantime. Moreover, the more attentively the scientists looked at the Sumerian civilization, the more clearly they understood that it was even more complicated than it seemed before.
Before the Sumerians came from nowhere to Mesopotamia, there already existed a kind of pracivilization, which is usually called Ubeid (according to the place where one of the monuments on the territory of Iraq was found - Tell-el-Ubeid). Its first traces were discovered in 1918-1919, and the systemic view was formed in the middle of the 20th century.
At first it seemed that this was just a strange type of pottery found in southern Mesopotamia. But then it became clear that these are traces of the activities of people who not only lived here before the Sumerians, but also created "preparations" for many things, which later glorified the "blackheads" as unsurpassed sages. For example, many scholars believe that it was the Ubeids who created the first written signs, which developed into cuneiform among the Sumerians.
There is very little data on the killers, so it is extremely difficult to study them. Some tablets with proto-Sumerian records have survived - but no one can read them yet. It is well established that the names of many Sumerian cities - Uruk, Nippur - have no meaning in the Sumerian language. Apparently, they were founded and named by their predecessors. So the Sumerians still did not bring all their wisdom with them. They borrowed much from the mysterious Ubeid culture, dissolving it in themselves, as they themselves later dissolved in the Akkadians and Assyrians. Once upon a time, the Romans learned from the Etruscans.
What other surprises will the study of Ubeid culture bring? Will it slightly open the veil of secrecy over the past of the Sumerian civilization? Or, on the contrary, will it only add riddles? The next generations of Mesopotamian explorers will have to learn this.
Magazine: Mysteries of History No. 29, Viktor Banev