{"id":314,"date":"2022-04-24T18:20:35","date_gmt":"2022-04-24T17:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/omarmeriwani.com\/history\/?p=314"},"modified":"2023-01-27T18:28:46","modified_gmt":"2023-01-27T18:28:46","slug":"the-sumerian-problem-with-dr-nael-hannon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/omarmeriwani.com\/history\/?p=314","title":{"rendered":"The Sumerian \u201cproblem\u201d with Dr. Nael Hannon"},"content":{"rendered":"

[\u0639\u0631\u0628\u064a<\/a>] When I listened to Nael Hannon<\/a>\u2019s opinion about Sumerians on the Iraqi official channel some time ago, I thought he is just one of those who are illusioned by biblical views about history, or that he was one of those who try to explain ancient history by the written evidence only. Simply, Hannon denies the existence of Sumerians: \u201cwhere did they come from, and what is the evidence that they came from some area outside Mesopotamia?\u201d asks Dr. Hannon, the professor of archeology at the University of Qadisiya in Iraq. For a while, I thought that he was falling into another fallacy, in which he is assuming that we have evidence about everything in the past, but luckily, I found that he has a point about some aspects of his opinion. Is there actually a big question about Sumerians?<\/p>\n

Initially, we didn\u2019t know much about Sumerians despite what we read in history. They are not a group that could be recognized by DNA tests, and as I was always interested in finding any thread of evidence about Sumerians in the DNA, I failed to find anything. The distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroups in Iraq doesn\u2019t include any element that matches the region and the era of the Sumerians’ existence in Iraq. Dr. Hannon says: \u201cthat there\u2019s no evidence in the studies on human skulls\u201d but he doesn\u2019t seem to know much about DNA.<\/p>\n

It’s also worth knowing that the Sumerian language is still unclassified. There are claims from Semites, Indo-Europeans, and even Uralic language speakers that Sumerian belongs to their language family, but none is confirmed. What we know is that there were some people who were technologically more advanced than others, they invented a writing system, then they were invaded by Akkadians (Semitic people) who employed them majorly as clerics and treated them as intellectuals who are worthy to learn from, then we hear that Sumerian language got extinct and the last time it was used was in the last millennium BC. But Hannon\u2019s opinion challenges all that, and I may add more to this article if I read his book \u201cthe fact of the Sumerians\u201d.<\/p>\n

Dr. Hannon claims that assuming the existence of Sumerians rejects all the advancement of civilization that existed in the larger area before the presumed time of Sumerians, while no one can deny the discoveries in areas other than southern Mesopotamia and in times other than the era where Sumerians are known to have existed. There were actually many advanced civilizations who lived in the area in general and that can\u2019t simply only associate with Sumerians but with what Hannon calls \u201cthe peoples of the region\u201d (Hannon never mentioned Semites, but listening to him gives this idea, especially that he uses the term the languages of the region and the sister peoples, which gives an impression that he is talking about Semitic or proto-Semitic peoples). Therefore, Hannon believes that assuming the existence of Sumerians deprives others of the civilization heritage in the region, while they had a long time of advancements in a region that\u2019s larger than the Sumerian region.<\/p>\n

The question to Hannon could be simply: why can\u2019t we see multiple groups? Others might have developed many technologies in a wider area, then the Sumerians came and developed writing. It\u2019s difficult for me to cover all the opinions in this field, but if there were any researchers who prioritize writing as a unique and exceptional development that could indicate the superiority of Sumerians then this is a challenge to these researchers not to the fact that the Sumerian language existed or not.<\/p>\n

Hannon has another suggestion, he asks: where did the Sumerians come from? Is there any evidence that they moved from some area to Mesopotamia? The question may be reversed to him: is classical archeology really interested in tracing the groups back to their older points of origin using genetic evidence? But he adds another point, that one of the shreds of evidence about Sumerians is the naming method, actually, the daughter of Sargon of Akkad had her name written in the Sumerian method. Does that allow us to assume that she was Sumerian?<\/p>\n

Hannon mentions that Sumerian was never mentioned in the tablets as a reference to people or an ethnic group, but only as a form of writing, \u201cthe Sumerian is the writer who practices writing on tablets\u201d Dr. Hannon says. The fallacy actually that Sumerians as a name of people has come from Samuel Kramer, who added his personal opinion and started translating tablets while adding \u201cthe Sumerian peasant\u201d or \u201cthe Sumerian physician\u201d, while there\u2019s no such reference actually in the tablets. Kramer was translating the word \u201chomeland\u201d to \u201cSumerian homelands\u201d for example. While Sumer as a place was never mentioned independently, but always as \u201cSumer and Akkad\u201d like many cities or regions today such as Budapest (which also originally has two parts), he adds that Sumer Akkad had always been mentioned in the Akkadian spelling.<\/p>\n

Hannon also describes the form of writing in Sumerian which doesn\u2019t reflect the form of any natural language, for example, each lexeme itself could be a noun, a verb, or an adjective at the same time. The sentence is written by sequencing these lexemes and then adding all the other prepositions or the pronouns in the end and in an opposing sequence. The consonants and vowels are also written in a strange sequence after that to start a new syllable. This could be a piece of very strong evidence that Sumerian language existed, then it has nothing to do with the way it\u2019s written, but we may also ask Dr. Hannon: what about the semantics of the language? What about the phonemes and the totally different words? If Sumerian was only a form of writing, then why does it have its own terms [1]<\/a> as we know about its later development in writing? Dr. Hannon uses the Hobbit\u2019s language from Lord of the Rings as an example of a language similar to Sumerian.<\/p>\n

The other take on Hannon is that he never mentioned DNA tests, he could have found supporting evidence for his hypothesis but he could change all his views according to the same evidence. Simply, there were no one or two groups, but many groups, and they could be older than Indo-European, Semitic, and proto-Semitic groups. Each haplogroup has its own story, and these stories don\u2019t match the language families’ narrative, which is quite new when compared to the DNA evidence. The picture would just become more complex from the DNA point of view.<\/p>\n

Dr. Hannon mentions \u201cthe Sumerian problem\u201d as a problem that is covered by many other researchers but viewing the existing literature clearly shows that the Sumerian problem is merely about the origin of Sumerians, and it doesn\u2019t cover all his opinions [2]<\/a> [3]<\/a>. Going back to the DNA evidence, we wouldn\u2019t assume there\u2019s any \u201cproblem\u201d, how many problems would we have if we tried to connect the many groups with DNA evidence but no linguistic evidence? Would that be a problem too?<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, while we can speculate what DNA evidence can support, and how it could refute some theories, we still don\u2019t know much about DNA evidence. Sometimes it\u2019s difficult and expensive to cover a single thread of information about a single person\u2019s origins, not to mention how expensive it would be \u2013 if possible, at all \u2013 to cover a period of history or to draw the borders of an extinct group.<\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

<\/a>[1]<\/a> Cooper, Jerrold S. “Sumerian and Akkadian in Sumer and Akkad.” Orientalia 42 (1973): 239-246.<\/span>
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>[2]<\/a> So\u00b3tysiak, Arkadiusz. “Physical anthropology and the \u201cSumerian problem\u201d.” Studies in Historical Anthropology 4.2004 (2006): 145-158.<\/span>
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>[3]<\/a> Ziskind, Jonathan R. “The Sumerian Problem.” History Teacher (1972): 34-41.<\/span>
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

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[\u0639\u0631\u0628\u064a] When I listened to Nael Hannon\u2019s opinion about Sumerians on the Iraqi official channel some time ago, I thought he is just one of those who are illusioned by biblical views about history, or that he was one of those who try to explain ancient history by the written evidence only. Simply, Hannon denies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,13,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-34","category-13","category-33"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omarmeriwani.com\/history\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omarmeriwani.com\/history\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omarmeriwani.com\/history\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omarmeriwani.com\/history\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omarmeriwani.com\/history\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/omarmeriwani.com\/history\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319,"href":"https:\/\/omarmeriwani.com\/history\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions\/319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omarmeriwani.com\/history\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omarmeriwani.com\/history\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omarmeriwani.com\/history\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}