Posted on 10/23/2022 12:01:21 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
You got game! :^)
https://i.redd.it/e6nr8timuxg31.png
https://www.cjconroy.net/bib/treaties-ane.htm#three
Ebla and Lagash: Environmental Contrast
https://ixtheo.de/Record/1588616479
Ancient civilizations interest me to the extreme. I’ve studied these (and others) all my life.
It’s a good hobby to have.
My understanding is that what sank the sumerians was that their fields became too salty after two milleniums of farming. A lot of desert in southern iraq was once farmed. The sumerians were not a semetic people. But they were the people of abraham’s father.
By their own account, the Sumerians came from the sea, presumably from further SE down the Gulf, or perhaps the Indus. They picked up the place names (rivers and cities) from whomever had already lived there, so they may have been culturally dominant rather than that a numerical majority.
Their language is/was agglutinative, which Semitic languages are not. They weren't the people of Abraham's father. Sumerians don't appear in the Bible, while the Elamites do (the Elamite king ruled a number of city-states and also expected tribute from the Cities of the Plain in the OT).
There's no evidence that the Sumerians destroyed their own ability to farm via irrigation (that's one of those gaslighting narratives). They were organized in city-states, and overall control was probably ambiguous, with most authority remaining local. Once in a while (as with Lagash) one town would pulverize another, ending its existence and absorbing its territory and perhaps its population.
They seem to have been prosperous, and their cuneiform writing system was widely adapted throughout the Middle East and Egypt, and remained in use about 3000 years, with the last known surviving inscription having been made around 400 AD.
The Assyrians, one of many Semitic groups, had an earlier phase called Akkadian, and by the time they started to run things as a central authority, they used cuneiform for both languages, such that Sumerian continued in use for a good while. It's possible that spoken Sumerian could still be heard for a few centuries of the Akkadian Empire. The last fossil use of written Sumerian dates to 1st c AD.
The whole Mesopotamian craphouse went up in flames with the arrival of the Kassites, or maybe they just took advantage during the fire. The Assyrians reemerged, the Kassites vanished (or were assimilated), and written Sumerian was probably all that remained of their milieu.
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