4,000-year-old Sumerian port found in southern Iraq

Daily Sabah ^ | March 20, 2018 | DPA

[SunkenCiv]

Sumerians settled in Mesopotamia, an area of modern Iraq known as the cradle of civilization, more than 6,000 years ago, where they invented writing, the wheel, the plough, irrigation, the 24-hour day and the first city-states.

Mission co-leaders Licia Romano and Franco D'Agostino of Rome's Sapienza University said Tuesday they discovered one of their ancient ports in Abu Tbeirah, a desert site about 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) south of the town of Nasiriyah.

The port's basin, measuring 130 meters (142 yards) in length and 40 meters (44 yards) wide, with a capacity equal to nine Olympics-sized pools, may have also served as a giant reservoir and as a tank to contain river flooding.

Its discovery suggests that Sumerian city-states remained connected to the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers until much later than previously thought, D'Agostino told DPA by phone.

It could also help archaeologists shed light on the great climate change shock of around 2200 BC that is presumed to have caused a huge drought in Mesopotamia, bringing about the end of the Sumerian civilization.

[tet68]

Sooo, it’s pretty obvious that it isn’t the
combustion engine, it’s the WHEELs themselves!

Stop pollution, take the wheels off your car!
An added bonus is how much money you will save
using this one simple trick!

Be sure to keep them in a covered garage so they
don’t sneak out and kill a pedestrian.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***If only people had to walk everywhere and carry all of there burdens themselves, the world would be such a better place. ***

The Mayan Indians also invented the wheel and used it only for kid’s toys. I guess they felt, as my old boss used to say, “Walking ain’t out of Style!”
https://uncoveredhistory.com/mesoamerica/wheeled-toys/

[tarheelswamprat]

SunkenCiv -“Sumerians settled in Mesopotamia, an area of modern Iraq known as the cradle of civilization, more than 6,000 years ago, where they invented writing, the wheel, the plough, irrigation, the 24-hour day and the first city-states.”

thsr: you forgot the most important one - beer!

PIF: The fable for small children continues ...

BenLurkin: If that is a fable, then what is the truth?

According to the Sumerians' own writings, they didn't invent the things listed above - the knowledge was given to them by beings that came down from the sky, whom they called annunaki.

[BenLurkin]

You don’t buy into the Annunaki nonsense, surely.

[SunkenCiv]

Sumerian Brewing Co.
http://sumerianbrewingco.com/

[jmacusa]

The Sumerians probably invented the vacation too.

[SunkenCiv]

The Sumerians regarded the Annunaki in various ways over the years, and the Akkadians/Assyrians and later the Babylonians did the same. Anything that came from Sitchin is hogwash, but regardless, I'm not aware of any texts that attribute much of anything to the Annunaki, other than internal struggles (like the theomachy found in Greek myths), right up to the 7th c BC.

[Pontiac]

The Mayan Indians also invented the wheel and used it only for kid’s toys. I guess they felt, as my old boss used to say, “Walking ain’t out of Style!”

Actually, inventing the wheel was easy and many civilizations invented it but never made use of it.

The hard part is the axle. A wheel without an axle is useless. A proper axle transfers the load to the wheel while permitting the wheel to turn. It also must permit the wheel to turn with little friction. And add the major complication of front and rear wheel alignment if you go from a two to four-wheel cart.

A toy axle and wheel can do these things with little trouble because the load and friction are tiny and their time in use are negligible.

[tarheelswamprat]

Sumerian Brewing Co. http://sumerianbrewingco.com/

***************************

Thanks for the link! It's a pity, however, since I can no longer drink, due to some really serious health issues. I'm just trying to hang on long enough to see if Mr.Trump can survive and give my beloved country and fellow citizens at least a fighting chance to stay free.

[ApplegateRanch]

You don’t buy into the Annunaki nonsense, surely.

Only if they piloted vimanas.

[tarheelswamprat]

You don’t buy into the Annunaki nonsense, surely.

I'm agnostic on the matter. Granted, some of proponents of this theory can be a bit "out there", but to cavalierly and derisively dismiss them, as e.g. another poster said "anything that came from Sitchen is hogwash" is simply wrong.

He had his problems, but there are kernels of truth in his work.The same is true of the so-called "mainstream" archaeologists and scholars; they too often become so emotionally invested in their own or other colleagues' theories, or the "conventional consensus" of their peers that they will rabidly fight against anyone whose ideas or work challenges that consensus.

Scientists are human, after all, and subject to the same natural instinct to protect their turf. I remain skeptical but open-minded on the subject, but will always remember, from personal experience, that science and academia are far too often just as hidebound, dishonest and corrupt as our government. A good example of this academic/political rot are the rabid advocates of the scientific fraud called "climate change" (formerly global warming), or more specifically, "anthropogenic/man-made climate change".

[PIF]

Truth? Who knows. Unless you imagine that a bunch of herders/nomads suddenly appeared out of nowhere and decided to settle in one spot, magically making them all geniuses who invented a seemingly endless list of things which laid the foundations of civilization. Fables generally speaking involve magical thinking - thus the Sumerian Fable or better yet the lie that became a meme. To get there you have you ignore the early history of India in the Mahabharata (dismissed by westerners as fiction consisting of 1.8 million words), as well as Göbekli Tepe which itself is some 6000 years older (dismissed as an anomaly). Not to mention the huge pyramids in South America which are larger and older than the Old Kingdom ones on Giza. Just ignore the previous two sentences as I'm just making this up because I'm not an Authority. Why ignore all of the above? Because it is easier to propound a stable picture of human history, than a chaotic one. Chaos is bad for business, looks bad on a doctoral thesis, and is totally unacceptable in peer review papers - since the peers have finances and reputations at stake in the status quo being stable. Move along now. Ignore anything someone who is not an authority tells you, no matter the images or the facts - they are just making it up because they are jealous of real academics who only tell the absolute historical and scientific truth, as is well known, since they have all the documents (which you do not and are incapable of understanding if you had them). Do not accuse them of ignoring, dismissing, or hiding anything! Not ever!

[Architect of Avalon]

The Sumerians seem to have originated in what is now called Iran before going into what is now called Iraq.

They may have gotten various things from a culture that preceded them in Iran.

Add centuries, and that culture may have become portrayed as gods in Sumerian literature.

[SunkenCiv]

King Hammurabi is the best known of the early monarchs of ancient times... belonged to the First BabyIonian Dynasty which came to an end, under circumstances shrouded in mystery, some three or four generations after Hammurabi. For the next several centuries, the land was in the domain of a people known as the Kassites. They left few examples of art and hardly any literary works -- theirs was an age comparable to and contemporaneous with that of the Hyksos in Egypt, and various surmises were made as to the identity of the two peoples. A cartouche of the Hyksos king Khyan was even found in Babylonia and another in Anatolia, a possible indication of the extent of the power and influence wielded by the Hyksos. Until a few decades ago, the reign of Hammurabi was dated to around the year 2100 before the present era... At Platanos on Crete, a seal of the Hammurabi type was discovered in a tomb together with Middle Minoan pottery of a kind associated at other sites with objects of the Twelfth Egyptian Dynasty, more exactly, of its earlier part. This is regarded as proof that these two dynasties were contemporaneous... however... At Mari on the central Euphrates, among other rich material, a cuneiform tablet was found which established that Hammurabi of Babylonia and King Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria were contemporaries. An oath was sworn by the life of these two kings in the tenth year of Hammurabi, The finds at Mari "proved conclusively that Hammurabi came to the throne in Babylonia after the accession of Shamshi-Adad I in Assyria"... The Khorsabad list ends in the tenth year of Assur-Nerari V, which is computed to have been -745... the first year of Shamshi-Adad is calculated to have been -1726 and his last year -1694... it reduced the time of Hammurabi from the twenty-first century to the beginning of the seventeenth century... "a puzzling chronological discrepancy", which could only be resolved by making Hammurabi later than Amenemhet I of the Twelfth Dynasty... If Hammurabi reigned at the time allotted to him by the finds at Mari and Khorsabad -- but according to the finds at Platanos was a contemporary of the Egyptian kings of the early Twelfth Dynasty -- then that dynasty must have started at a time when, according to the accepted chronology, it had already come to its end. In conventionally-written history, by -1680 not only the Twelfth Dynasty, but also the Thirteenth, or the last of the Middle Kingdom, had expired.

[Immanuel Velikovsky, Hammurabi and the Revised Chronology]