Sumerian Fallout
Though relatively little is known as yet regarding the Indus valley civilization, we do know that they, too, venerated the number twelve as the supreme divine number; that they depicted their gods as human-looking beings wearing horned headdresses; and that they revered the symbol of the cross --the sign of the Twelfth Planet.
If these two civilizations{of Egypt and the Indus}were of Sumerian origin, why are their written languages different? The scientific answer is that the languages are not different. This was recognized as early as 1852, when the Reverend Charles Foster (The One Primeval Language) ably demonstrated that all the ancient languages then deciphered, including early Chinese and other Far Eastern languages, stemmed from one primeval source --thereafter shown to be Sumerian.
Similar pictographs had not only similar meanings, which could be a logical coincidence, but also the same multiple meanings and even the same phonetic sounds -which suggests a common origin. More recently, scholars have shown that the very first Egyptian inscriptions employed a language that was indicative of a prior written development; the only place where a written language had a prior development was Sumer.
So we have a single written language that for some reason was differentiated into three tongues: Mesopotamian, Egyptian / Hamitic, and Indo-European. Such a differentiation could have occurred by itself over time, distance, and geographical separation. Yet the Sumerian texts claim that it occurred as the result of a deliberate decision of the gods, once again initiated by Enlil. Sumerian stories on the subject are paralleled by the well-known biblical story of the Tower of Babel, in which we are told “that the whole Earth was of one language and of the same words.” But after the people settled in Sumer, learned the art of brickmaking, built cities, and raised high towers (ziggurats), they planned to make for themselves a shem and a tower to launch it. Therefore “did the Lord mingle the Earth’s tongue.”
The deliberate raising of Egypt from under the muddy waters, the linguistic evidence, and the Sumerian and biblical texts support our conclusion that the two satellite civilizations did not develop by chance. On the contrary, they were planned and brought about by the deliberate decision of the Nefilim.
Sitchin, Zecharia, The 12th Planet, Avon Books, NY, USA, 1978, p. 418-420.
Close Ties with the Sumerian Language
The Sumerians were thought to be descendants from a distant homeland to the north. In searching for a linguistic affinity with modern dialects, Henry Creswicke Rawlinson reckoned that their particular use of pronouns was more like the languages of Mongolia and Manchu than any other type of Asian family. One of his most respected colleagues pointed out what he believed were close ties with Turkish, Finnish, and Hungarian.
In the Sumerian language most of the root words are monosyllabic. However, those having to do with agriculture and crafts are polysyllabic, such as the words for farmer, herdsman, fisherman, plow, furrow, metalworker, blacksmith, carpenter, basketmaker, weaver, leatherworker, potter, mason, and even merchant. These may have indeed been brought to Mesopotamia from the Black Sea melting pot on the journey south and later passed from the Ubaids to their Sumerian successors.
Ryan, William & Walter Pitman; Noah’s Flood – The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event that Changed History; Simon & Schuster, NY, 2000, p. 198-200.
The Oldest Culture in the World
One fact is beyond doubt: the Sumerians, a non-Semitic, dark -haired people --black-headed is the term for them in the inscriptions-- were the last to enter the great delta of the Tigris and Euphrates. Before their arrival the land had been settled by two, probably different, Semitic tribes. But the Sumerians brought with them a superior culture, some of its basic elements already developed to their final form, which they imposed upon the barbaric Semites...The Sumerian language is somewhat similar to the ancient Turkish, or Turanian. That is all that is known about them, and everything else is pure hypothesis. People who habitually represented their gods as standing on mountains, who prayed to them from high places, and who for this purpose even built artificial hills, or ziggurats, on the plains of their adopted land, could not, it seems, have come from flat country. Could they have stemmed, perhaps, from the Iranian highlands, or from the Asiatic mountain country even farther to the east and north? This possibility is supported by the fact that the earliest Sumerian buildings excavated to date in Mesopotamia are constructed according to the principles of a wood architecture, which normally would develop only in heavily forested highlands.
... Leonard Woolley, speaking of Sumerians, states that “their civilization, lighting up a world still plunged in primitive barbarism, was in the nature of a first cause. We have outgrown the phase when all the arts were traced to Greece, and Greece was thought to have sprung, like Pallas, full-grown from the brain of the Olympian Zeus; we have learnt how that flower of genius drew its sap from Lydians and Hittites, from Phoenicia and Crete, from Babylon and Egypt. But the roots go farther back; behind all these lies Sumer.”
Ceram, C. W.; Gods, Graves, and Scholars, Bantam Books, USA, 1980, p. 354-361.
Shirking the Sumerians
Until barely a century ago, according to Kramer, “nothing was known even of the existence of the Sumerians. The archeologists and scholars who, some hundred years ago, began excavating in that part of the Middle east known as Meso-potamia were looking not for Sumerians but for Assyrians and Babylonians.
Indeed, they had no inkling of Sumer and the Sumerians. It is a perplexing fact of history then, that there was no recognizable trace either of the land or of its people in the entire literature available to the modern scholar. The very name of Sumer had been erased from the mind and memory of man for more than two thousand years.”
Emerson, DeAnna; Mars/Earth Enigma, Galde Press, USA, 1996, p. 51.
Covering Up the Facts
By the time of Jesus, all the information related to the Sumerians had disappeared alongside the cuneiform and in the subsequent centuries, even the name “Sumer” was erased from memory.
Whereas the Bible and classical sources documented the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian history and tradition in abundance, anything hinting at the Sumerian existence did not exist in any of the resources outside Mesopotamia, let alone an assessment of their important role in the history of early civilizations.
Part of “Rediscovery” article from Encyclopaedia Britannica (1973), vol. 21, p. 411, quoted by Melih Erçin in the footnotes of his paper “Göktürk-Sekel-Fenike Yazıları Üzerine Üç Saptama Bildirisi”; Harf Devrimi'nin 50. Yılı Sempozyumu, TTK, Ankara, 1981, p. 207
About the Word “Sumer”
Scientists came across the word “Sumer” for the first time while studying the cuneiform tablets from the period of Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal. Therein the monarch’s clerk wrote about “the secret Sumerian documents”. Later on, during the excavations made in the lower Euphrates basin a civilization preceding even the Assyrian-Babylonian one was unearthed and it was tagged the “Sumerian civilization”. But those people named Sumerian called themselves otherwise as Sag-gig, meaning “the black-headed”.
In ancient times, many people could not propagate their real name, and in the annals of history, they are celebrated under names given them by foreigners. Now, even in our own age of science, some people carry several names, i.e. Deutsch people being known as German, Nemes or Allemand; Han people Khitay, Chinese or Sinoans. Nayriers are called Armenians, Suomis Finns, and Hungarians (Ungarn) Vengers {or Magyars}.
Sumerian term had several pronunciations in ancient Semitic: In the middle of BC 3000, Akkadians used to call the northern Mesopotamia provinces as Suber, or Suber-t (-t is the feminin suffix). In the BC l000, a small Sumer state is encountered in Northern Mesopotamia. At that time, the term Suber was used as the poetical synonym for Assyria. There is also some information about a nomadic group of Subaru or Shubaru, living under the Mesopotamian sun by the downstream Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In the Assyrian chronicles (annals), the accent in pronouncing the word Sumer passes onto the second syllable as a rule.
Documents about these peoples indicate only their names and the direction of their migrations without any additional information. In this case, there is no need in pinning one’s hopes on etymology. Only an analysis of the names can prove in which language these peoples spoke, provided the names are not the ones given them by others but the peoples’ own expressions. Linguists have by now arrived at the possible conclusion that the word Sumer (Suber) could not have been of neither Semitic nor Saggig origin.
Süleyman, Olcas, Az i Ya, çev. N. Seferoğlu, Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları Vakfı, İst. 1992, s. 243.
The Sumerians were Turks
Many people find it difficult to accept that even the Akkad or Sumerians were Turkish. The Akkads (Sumerians) were Phoenicians, known also as Kads, Khatti, etc. Originally, they were a Turkish (Kur, Tur, Tul, Tol, etc.) people from what our Bible calls Eden, the Akkadian word for the Steppes (Central Asia). Before the Great Flood, the Steppes or Eden was regarded as an earthly paradise.
Gene D. Matlock; “Who Brought The Mayans To Mexico? or Were the ancient Turks, Akkads (Sumerians) and Dravidians (Tamils) the parents of Mexico and Meso-America?”; Viewzone Magazine —http://www.mondovista.com/ancientturks.html
Beyond ‘Similarity’ and ‘Coherence’ ...
In a comparison of this type, the first thought put forward is whether the similarities are coincidental or not. Such a query requires the calculation of what is or might be the mathematical limit of chances. For this reason, in the world’s languages which are totally unrelated to each other, the random coherence of words is next to a miracle and the examples at large do not exceed “the number of fingers on one hand”.
In studies conducted on this issue, the minimum number of similar pairs that should suffice to prove a history-bound relationship between two languages was determined. {According to Cowan, Greenberg and Bender’s arguments}, only two to seven pairs, depending on the weight of the conditions that define the boundaries of similarities, would prove a historical relationship. Therefore, to ascribe ‘coincidental similarities’ to the 165 {Sumerian-Turkish} pairs which I have presented {in this study} is mathematically impossible. Moreover, I have to point out that the remarks of ‘similarity’ and ‘coherence’ used in the majority of words here do appear very circumstantial against the factual situation.
Tuna, Osman Nedim; Sümer ve Türk Dillerinin Târihî İlgisi ile Türk Dili’nin Yaşı Meselesi, Türk Dil Kurumu # 561, Ankara, 1990, s. 38.
Turkish - Sumerian Connection
The premise that Turkish is the oldest language reposes on Sumerian with regard to history. Today, the “Sumerian Question” that spanned 5500 years have at last been solved, the convincing proofs and supporting documents are declared... All the common features between Sumerian and Turkish have been compared with many other Asian and European languages for the past seventy years without obtaining any consistent results. And the problem of Sumerian origin has not been solved outside Turkish... That Sumerian is Turkish was stated for the first time in 1910 by German Professor Fritz Hommel, after having compared two hundred Sumerian and Turkish words... The presence of the “affluent” Turkish emerges in the oldest (i.e. archaic) words found common in {the languages of} such broad areas extending from East Asia to South America, and attains “the height worthy of its value among the world languages” by the proof that Sumerian, which has the honor of being the first written language, is of Turkish origination.
Hatiboğlu, Prof. Dr. Vecihe; “Dilimize Gerçekçi Bakış”, Cumhuriyet, 27.05.1989.
Facts that cannot be Covered Up
Recently conducted scientific researches have revealed that Turkish, also as a vernacular, is the oldest one amongst the living languages. In this regard, Prof. Dr. Osman Nedim Tuna stated that, “Turkish language is proven to exist as a separate entity with two branches 5500 years ago. If the dissolution rate from its emergence to the age they came into contact with the Sumerians is constant, then the Proto-Turkish and the Mother-Turkish must have lived an undefinable time ago in the past. As I have put forward in my work “The Altaic Language Theory” which I completed in 1978 and published in August 1983, the result of this is 8500 years by the meanest accounts. Because, if we also take into account the time elapsed from the Mother-Turkish to its Eastern and Western branchings, that is from that initial period to our times, to double the above mentioned 5500 years is possible”. And he added that, “Among the world’s living languages today, the one language that has the oldest written documents is Turkish. These are the loan words found in the Sumerian cuneiform tablets”. As a result of his scientific work which revealed the fact that there are nearly 400 Turkish words in the Sumerian tablets (1), the Turkish language is entitled to be considered as “ the oldest living language” today.
For his book “The Historic Relation of the Sumerian and Turkish Languages and the Question on the Age of Turkish Language” Prof. Dr. Osman Nedim Tuna has earned in 1988 The Distinguished Service to the Turkish Language Award given by the Turkish Languages Research Institute of the Istanbul University. (2)
Similarly, Professor Dr. Vecihe Hatiboğlu stated that, “Turkish is superior to other languages because of its antiquity; its being the first written language; its structure and rules being consistent with human logic; its syntactic transparency showing at all ages the actual word in the root and the suffix.” After comparing Turkish and Sumerian, she expressed that “not one of the living languages has been so close and early as Turkish was to Sumerian.” (3)
Today, there is not any language in the world which is the successor or cognate to the Sumerian, nor has contributed any number of its words to the Sumerian vocabulary other than Turkish.
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FOOTNOTES:
(1) Karaörs, M. Metin, Türk Dili Dünyanın En Eski ve En Yaygın Dilidir, Dil ve İnsan, Tömer Kayseri Şubesi yayın organı, Sayı 12, s. 5-7, Mart-Nisan 1998.
(2) Tuna, Osman Nedim, Sümer ve Türk Dillerinin Tarihi ilgisi ve Türkçenin Yaşı Meselesi, TDK yayını, Ankara 1990.
(3) Hatiboğlu, Vecihe, “Dilimize Gerçekçi Bakış”, Cumhuriyet Gazetesi, 27 Mayıs 1989.
Türkçenin Dünya Dillerine Etkisi, Hazırlayan: Günay Karaağaç, Akçağ Yayınları, Ankara 2004, s. 164.
Citations from Turkish works above are compiled and translated into English by Doğan Türker
For further
scholarly reading on this subject, refer to these papers:
► Nies, James B., Ph. D., Ur Dynasty Tablets, with an Appendix by
Prof. D. Dr. Fritz Hommel;
http://www.etana.org/sites/default/files/coretexts/20356.pdf
►
Prof. Dr. Vecihe Hatiboğlu, “Türk Tarihinin
Başlangıcı”;
http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/ dergiler/12/847/ 10723.pdf
