The Collapse of Sumerian Civilization

[nocodeyv]

Greetings Enenuru,

Recently, while on Reddit, I encountered a user who claimed that the presence of Semitic immigrants (such as the Akkadians) didn't contribute in any meaningful way to the decline of Sumerian civilization. Instead, the user claimed that it was erosion of the soil and pollution of the water table that ended the Sumerian civilization, and made the land inhospitable for subsequent cultures. In addition, the user claimed that the Akkadian and Assyrian civilizations pre-date the Sumerians. Finally, this user made some comments that Enenuru harbors racists and "pop-paganism" of various kinds.

So, rather than go off on this user and possibly walk myself into a trap, I figured I'd come here, to Enenuru, and post the questions and claims directly:

1. Are the Akkadians and Assyrians proper an older civilization than the Sumerians?

2. What factors lead to the collapse of Sumerian civilization and culture?

3. Any thoughts on what this user meant about Enenuru being a haven for racists and pop-paganism? Thus far I've only seen well-thought-out responses on this forum.


Edit to add: in the day since creating this post I've done some internet sleuthing of my own, and found that this Reddit user acts as "CEO" of an online organization that purports to teach members how to perform magick (of the "k" variety), and offers an extensive, multi-year course in pretty much every religious philosophy from both the East and West, all for a required yearly fee at threat of expulsion from the organization.

From reading through the extensive "mission statement," FAQ, and prerequisites to join their organization, I am quite convinced that they have absolutely no authority to speak on the state of Mesopotamian academia, and certainly can't hold a candle up to the studiousness of this board.

None-the-less, I'm still interested in answers to questions 1 and 2 above, especially the second.

[hukkana]

Aug 4, 2017 19:01:59 GMT -5 nocodeyv said:

In addition, the user claimed that the Akkadian and Assyrian civilizations pre-date the Sumerians.

Finally, this user made some comments that Enenuru harbors racists and "pop-paganism" of various kinds.

First of all, even I with my very limited knowledge can tell you that they are talking out of their ass.

And as for the second point, what the actual hell ? Like, where, how, why ?

To answer one of your questions, the Assyrians are an Akkadian ish people whose earliest debated point of emergence seems to follow 800 years after the earliest texts from Uruk so yeah, even with my very limited knowledge of these topics (I may be the only person younger than 30 who knows the word "Ida-Maras" and anything about it but even I profess to being a woefully inept amateur when compared to people on the forum here, not to mention people like Franz Wiggerman) I can say this person is a moron and you should just ignore him/her.

[nocodeyv]

Thanks for the reply, Hukkana.

I didn't bother responding to the user (and have no intention of doing so).

My own timeline, which I'm fairly confident reflects the agreed upon archaeological one, posits that the Sumerian civilization is older than the Akkadian, and that the Assyrians and Babylonians are both descended from the Akkadians, to grossly oversimplify things. Even feeling secure in my knowledge though, I didn't want to be blindsided if, for example, a recent discovery had overturned my current knowledge. I thought this would be the best place to come and ask.

In regards to the second point, I had the same immediate reaction. I've only been on Enenuru for a short while, but everyone has been friendly, even when we've disagreed. I haven't seen any evidence of racism, or "pop-paganism" (folks like Simon, Sitchin, and Ford perhaps?) being held up as a gold-standard around here. I inherited moderator duties for Reddit's Sumerian Reconstructionism board a short while ago, and have always championed Enenuru as a resource to newcomers.

[hukkana]

Aug 5, 2017 16:34:58 GMT -5 nocodeyv said:

I inherited moderator duties for Reddit's Sumerian Reconstructionism board a short while ago, and have always championed Enenuru as a resource to newcomers.

Maybe that was the reason for the claim about pop-paganism ?

Hope he/she doesn't equate us to someone like Varg.

[us4-he2-gal2]

Hello Nocodeyv:



Yes, my google searches for the word 'enenuru' bring up your positive comments for the board, which I appreciate. I will give some extensive feedback to your questions above here shortly. First, I was wondering if you could link the relevant reddit page, I'm wondering if I might recognize this poster who implies racism is apparent at enenuru.

[us4-he2-gal2]

On with the answers then...







1. Are the Akkadians and Assyrians proper an older civilization than the Sumerians?





The simple answer here is, no. Or, not insofar as anyone can tell. We don’t really know the age of Sumerian or of Akkadian, for that matter, as spoken languages – of course, we can only observe these languages from the time they were first written down.

The following draws from Rebecca Hasselbach’s 2004 dissertation “A Historical and Comparative Study of Sargonic Akkadian”. Akkadian takes its name from Akkad (or Agade), the capital city which Sargon I established around 2350 BC, and which has never been uncovered. This is not the beginning of the Semites in Mesopotamia, it's likely that Northern Mesopotamia always had a strong Semitic presence: the first dynasty of Kish, as it appears in the Sumerian King List, features Kishite kings with Semitic sounding names. In nearby Abu Salabikh, scribes with Semitic names wrote Sumerian texts in 2600 BC, the Early Dynastic period (also known as the ‘Pre-Sargonic’ period). Such a situation is suggestive of a mixed ethnic, bilingual community (Woods 2006, 101). Many years ago, I.J. Gelb described what he understood to be the ‘Kishite Civilization’ which was a ‘Northern Political Unity’ spanning a radius that included Kish, Ebla, Mari, Abu Salabikh and possibly others. Gelb doesn’t assign an specific ethno-linguistic designation to the area, but it nonetheless seems to have had a strong or majority Semitic speaking people, all speaking some similar form of East Semitic that pre-dated Akkadian. No doubt it was the forerunner to Akkadian, the question is how direct a forerunner this Semitic was.

The locus of early writing is the Mesopotamian south, not the North, and doubtlessly early Semitic scribes, so many as there were, learned to write in Sumerian. The textual evidence for written Pre-Sargonic Akkadian is therefore scant, some 150 texts in the ED period are in Akkadian, some 50 or so ‘kudurru’ inscriptions (early kudurrus, boundary texts) are in Akkadian. Because the script of these texts borrows the Sumerian writing system, and uses mainly logograms, scholars cannot sufficiently reconstruct the Semitic elements of the texts in order to tell if it is the direct ancestor of the Akkadian spoken by Sargon in Akkad/Agade. Sargon was the cup-bearer of a Kishite king initially.

Again, Pre-Sargonic Akkadian in Mesopotamia is not much discussed, and thanks to the limitations of the sources, is little understood. Gelb’s Kishite Civilization is a fascinating topic for sure. All of this is not to say that Akkadian is ‘older’ than Sumerian, if we were to refer to available evidence, the opposite assumption is justified. Sumerian is probably (one is forced to say probably because of the pictographic script) the language of the much earlier Uruk period texts.







2. What factors lead to the collapse of Sumerian civilization and culture?



It probably won’t be a surprise that any answer to this question must contend with a considerable level of complexity. A good comment on this issue is C. Woods “Bilingualism, Scribal Learning, and The Death of Sumerian” (2006), the article is availble in a volume availible online :

www.academia.edu/16493740/Bilingualism_Scribal_Learning_and_the_Death_of_Sumerian_OIS_2

To begin with, Woods paints the general linguistic picture of 3rd Millennium Mesopotamia:

“No one would seriously question the assertion that at some point in the third millennium there lived a people, among others, in the southernmost stretches of Iraq, for whom Sumerian was a first language, that to the north of Sumer, in Akkad, there were those, again among others, who spoke a Semitic language, and that, at some point, Akkadian eclipsed Sumerian and the latter became relegated to the status of a dead, literary language. On these points were all agree: it is the “when” and “how” that are the questions- but questions, given the evidence at hand, that cannot be answered with any degree of certainty.”

On page 92, Woods indicates that the field is split concerning the point in which Sumerian actually ceased as a functional spoken language..the problem is due at least in part to the face that, while we have access to the scribal records and administrative texts (which continued to be in Sumerian in the south), we do not have any good indication of the spoken language. Major scholars including Cooper, Michalowski, Krause, Thomsen, Civil and Rubio have advanced the view, in recent times, that Sumerian has already ceased as a spoken language by the Ur III period – in other words, the Akkadian empire, its consolidation of North and South, its attempts at centralization, might be reckoned to have driven a definite nail in the coffin of Sumerian if this view is accurate.

However, for Woods and a small number of scholars, the evidence suggests instead that Sumerian continued as a spoken functional language through the Ur III period and into the Old Babylonian period even. Rather than the ‘death of Sumerian,’ Woods sees things in terms of a ‘language shift’ from Sumerian to Akkadian. He states that, barring genocide or the like, language shift is the more likely scenario wherein a minority language gives way to a dominant, majority language (p. 94).

In turning to the textual evidence, Woods points out that personal names in the Ur III period continued to be largely Sumerian in the South – not only were older Sumerian names used, but new Sumerian names appear in this period for the first time (unexpected if the language were not active). Among other evidence, he also points to an increased lexicon (the use of more words) in Ur III period texts (one would expect less if the language were dead); and the tendency of sale documents to use unorthographic spellings etc.

Ultimately, Woods argues that Sumerian did not ‘die out’ so much as it entered into an increasingly bilingual relationship with Akkadian, an ‘assymmetrical bilingualism’ that started in the ED period in the frontier regions like Nippur and Abu Salabikh but spread south during the Akkadian period. Like Gaelic under the influence of English today, Sumerian may have held out for hundreds of years only to dwindle at the end. On pages 103-114, Woods makes an argument that it was still a spoken language in the Old Babylonian period.

There are other factors which may have contributed to the fall of the Ur III empire, yes salinity of the soil is a factor first suggested by Jacobsen in the 1950s and which continues to be discussed and debated by scholars; it seems imprecise to say 'pollution of the water table' or perhaps that is another theory altogether. Incursions by the Amorites, Gutians and Elamites are another. But if we were to follow Woods on these matters, these problems may have led to the demise of an empire, but not to the death of Sumerian as a spoken language. That demise would be attributable to the gradual rise of Akkadian as the dominant spoken language in the south. In summary, one should be tentative in discussing the demise of Sumerian. There is no consensus on the matter at present time.








Any thoughts on what this user meant about Enenuru being a haven for racists and pop-paganism? Thus far I've only seen well-thought-out responses on this forum.



I know who that user is - she would not be able to demonstrate racism here on enenuru. And I would hardly care if it was true, this is no SJW forum. It's just factually incorrect.