Were any depictions of Anu ever uncovered ?

[hukkana]

I've seen it claimed that Anu as the Supreme, but largely "retired" or ancestral deity was not actually physically represented in Mesopotamian art.

I found some pieces a few times claimed to represent Anu, but these usually came from....questionable sites like this one which claims Sumerians and Elamites were Africans.

kemetway.com/Digest/Content/Sumer.html

It's the final line that gets me

In spite of the above images and documentation to the contrary, it is interesting, and no less disturbing, that the school of 'White' researchers and writers of Sumer / Mesopotamian history have organized as a race-biased (racist) group to perpetuate a lie-myth-deceit and other falsehoods to deny the race (i.e. Black / African) of the Sumerian, and of the origin of Sumerian civilization. Somehow they do manage to find Africans among the population when they are conquered or enslaved.

[sheshki]

Here is a quote from G.Leick on An/Anu. You have to scroll down a bit.
enenuru.proboards.com/thread/361/deities-ancient-mesopotamia-overview

[us4-he2-gal2]

Working on an answer to this one, there are lots of issues involved with original webpage.

[us4-he2-gal2]

So to review the claim at: kemetway.com/Digest/Content/Sumer.html






Whoever created this website claims that: a) The civilization of Sumer is African; b) it was created by the same people who founded Nubia-Kush; c) the gods of Sumer are comparable to those of Nubia-Kush (and Enki = Assur); d) that the Sumerians (read: Africans) were destroyed by invasions of Aryans (read: white people) and e) that modern scholarship is "racist" for suppressing these historical "facts". All of this represents a blatantly obvious attempt at highly politicised racial theory.


To begin with, although the website cites some credible scholarship such as Jeremy Black, James Pritchard, etc., there is a very low degree of fact based argumentation here. Understandings of the people and religion of Mesopotamia seem murky at best: the god Enki is not one and the same as the god Aššur. Mari was not in North-Western Sumer and was not populated by Sumerians. The Martu are not one and the same as the Assyrians, etc.


The problem of race and ethnicity in ancient Mesopotamia is ongoing and will probably never be solved. Put simply, we don't know what skin color the Sumerians were, and what ethnic group they may have belonged to. There are good reasons for this problem:

i) The iconographic record of Mesopotamia bears little witness to skin color. Either surviving mediums lack color (such as diorite stele or clay mediums) or once painted items have lost their pigment after thousands of years of wear.

ii) Mesopotamians did not seem to distinguish racial differences. Sumer was always a multilingual region where both Sumerian and Akkadian were spoken. Despite that there were two spoken languages, and there were two regions (Akkad to the North, and Sumer to the south), the textual records attest to similar corresponding terms to designate groups (i.e. 'a Sumerian' or 'an Akkadian') - see Zinab Bahrani 2006 'Race and Ethnicity in Mesopotamian Antiquity, WoAr 28, p. 54. The term 'the Black-headed people' was applied to both persons from Northern and Southern regions, i.e., to Sumerian speakers and Akkadian speakers equally; later, when Mesopotamian empires expanded and incorporated people from other regions, they to were termed 'the black-headed people' - for Bahrani, this indicates that the key distinction between peoples was not racial or ethnic, but a distinction between those civilized and urban versus those nomadic and barbarian. There is an abundance of other evidence to back up this claim.

Tha above image, discussed on the webpage, is from room 132 of the palace of Zimri-lim in Mari. The room in which it was founded is sometimes called the throne room or audience hall. In the top register sits Inanna, in the bottom register sits Nanna (not Enlil). These wall paintings are among the very rare pieces which preserve paint colors from Mesopotamia, and the information they contain about race and ethnicity is important - but it isn't simple. Obviously, the figures represented had brown skin. We don't expect them to have anything other than brown skin (white skin developed as a means to 'maximize vitamin D synthesis' in colder climates with fewer sunlight hours - as the theory goes). Obviously, white skin was an unnecessary development in this part of the world. In any case, that they had brown skin does not make the ancient Mesopotamians ethnically African by default (and again, the people of Mari were not the Sumerians). Further, it does not follow that brown pigment in ancient wall paintings is perfectly indicative of any physical reality: wall paintings at the Assyrian site of Tell Barsip show Assyrian men with white skin - obviously, they were not white, rather, the explanation that the contrast of white body against black outline helped to bring out the shapes when viewed from a distance has been given (see Albenda, Assyrian Wall Paintings, CM 28, p. 135.)



As for whether there are any known depictions of An/Anu, the answer is, no, none that we can be reasonably certain are actually An/Anu. The website gives a cylinder seal depicting a seated deity holding a mace and two stars are visible nearby and labels this deity "Anu". There is no science, I don't think, that would confirm or deny that this is An/Anu. Astral imagery is used in assocation with many gods. See the below ORRAC link wherein it is stated: "There are no certain anthropomorphic representations of An/Anu. His symbol is a horned crown, sometimes shown resting on a throne (see below). His animal is the bull."



oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/an/index.html

[us4-he2-gal2]

Although I don't have time to read it at the moment, a good paper on the ethnicity of the Sumerians may be:


www.academia.edu/16374624/Physical_anthropology_and_the_Sumerian_problem_

uw.academia.edu/ArkadiuszSo%C5%82tysiak

[Lu-uri-ning-tuku]

I always found "the Sumerian problem" silly in that it assumes that different language = different race. Maybe there was somewhat of a genetic difference between Sumerians and Akkadians in prehistoric times, but its hard to imagine that in the time of Shulgi for example after at least a millennium and probably much longer of communal integration that they were in any significant way genetically distinct. Furthermore every artistic depiction I have ever seen of a Sumerian looks like a Middle Eastern person who wouldn't have any trouble passing as a modern Iraqi.

I read Soltysiak's article and its weird to see discussions of skull measurements and their relation to genetic diversity as this was presented to me in school as typifying erroneous racial scholarship of the pre-counter culture era. I remember after finding an old 1920s archaeologist's memoirs in an old book store which extensively discussed phrenology I brought up the topic with Beaulieu, who remarked that the problem of skull measuring is that it is not consistent enough to be reliable metric for determining genetic kinship. Soltysiak's article seems to be saying that skull measuring on its own is not sufficient, but can be useful as one element of a more extensive dataset.

Now with all that said I think there is a legitimate discussion to be had about evidence for an outland origin of the primordial Sumerophones. Soltysiak's article mentions Kramers theory of an origin in the Iranian plateau in the vicinity of the Caspian sea, and despite never having read Kramer discuss this before it basically aligns perfectly with the suspicions I have harbored based on my own interaction with the primary evidence. Kramer apparently based his theory on the early Sumerian mythology surrounding Enmerkar and Lugalbanda which shows a significant cultural interaction with Aratta, known to have been located in the Iranian plateau. To add to this here is some other evidence I have noticed that could be used to support the theory:

1. The word kur means mountain, but is widely used to mean land/area. When talking about all the lands in the world the collective reduplicated kur-kur is often used. To me this suggests a linguistic homeland in a region more mountainous than the flatlands of southern Iraq.

2. The Akkadian gentilic word for Sumerians, "Shumeraya," seems to be related to the Semitic word for north. The word is also likely the origin for the region known to Mesopotamians as Shubria, itself in the northwest of the Iranian plateau.

3. As demonstrated by Gong there are many non-Sumerian and non-Semitic loanwords in Sumerian which bear a striking resemblance to their corresponding meanings in Indo-European languages and their reconstructed Proto-Indo-European(PIE) forms. The speakers of PIE lived either in the Russian steppeland, or in Anatolia, depending on which scholar you ask. Either of these locations would give the speakers direct access to the Caspian sea and thus were very likely in contact with the populations of northern Iran. Of particular interest is the Sumerian word ab, which is used to denote still bodies of water like lakes and seas in contrast to flowing rivers, which is in all regards identical to the PIE word ab/hab meaning a still body of water, like a lake or a sea, used in contrast to flowing rivers. It makes perfect sense that a tribe which primarily lived in the mountains would adopt their word for a sea, such as the Caspian sea, from boatmen they encountered there.

4. (This evidence is weaker but still fun to consider) The Sumerian autonym literally means the black/dark head people. I had always understood this as southern mesopotamians whose main trading partners were northern mesopotamians making note of the fact that their skin was darker than their northern neighbours. Then I considered the name in the context of the Caspian theory. The contrast could have originally been between the fair skinned folk at the north shore of the Caspian sea and the swarthier folk of the south shore. Furthermore its not uncommon to see modern people from Turkey, Russia and Kazakhstan who have brown/light hair, so the name could be referring to black hair.

5. (Also weaker evidence) The Sumerian Ur III empire focused on expanding eastward fighting elamites and the tribal confederations of the Iranian plateau as opposed to the Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian empires which focused more on expanding westward into the Levant. Perhaps it reflects a subconscious mindset of Iranocentrism embedded in Sumerian thought.