Potential Solution to the "Sumerian Problem"

[u/rosscogames]

I'm not sure how plausible this sounds, but, I've been doing hobbyist research into Sumerian/Mesopotamian/Bronze Age history recently. I read that there seems to be a mismatch between common Sumerian words for city names, basic job occupation words and jargon that seem pretty foundational to their culture, yet don't appear Sumerian in origin linguistically. For what little it's worth, I think it's much more likely that those words could have been appropriated as "vernacular" from various different nomadic groups that would've been roaming around during the Ubaid and Uruk culture periods, and eventually written down as such once writing was invented. There are numerous words in various European languages of Romani or Sinti origin, American English words of African American vernacular origin, etc. Especially since it looks like these are basic blue collar words like farmer, or plow, it seems like it adds up. City names too, Istanbul gets its name from the Medieval Greek phrase "to the city". Thebes in Egypt gets its name in a similar way. Certainly that's much more plausible than the Sumerians coming from some far away land, supplanting the Ubaid people. Instead, the Sumerians are the Ubaid people's direct descendants in this hypothesis. Thoughts?

[u/teakettling]

Great thinking -- yes, there's a consensus that inhabitants of the region benefitted from a rich history of being an interconnected trade network, meaning there were lots of cultural contact.

"South Mesopotamia has never been a self-contained unit. Almost from the time of the first permanent settlements in the Ubaid period there is evidence for contacts with the outside world. Some of the earliest of these demonstrate contacts southwards down the Gulf, where Ubaid 2/3 pottery occurs, thus predating Ubaid dealings with north Mesopotamia which belong to the later Ubaid 3/4 period (Carter 2010). Ubaid 3/4 pottery has been found over much of north Mesopotamia and southeast Anatolia, while at Degirmentepe there appears to be an Ubaid village (Yener 2000: 30). There are also stylistic similarities with the pottery of southwest Iran. The nature of the relationship between the southern plain and these adjacent areas is far from clear. It certainly differed from region to region and the desire for foreign goods may not have been the sole motivation. Indeed, there is little evidence from southern Ubaid sites such as Ouelli for the use of imported materials." (Crawford (2013), Trade in the Sumerian World: 449)

There are some old Sumerian words that are shockingly close to Semitic noun formations, suggesting early language contact between the two families in particular. One small example of this is the word merchant, damgar (Sumerian) and tamkarum (Akkadian). We can imagine a scenario where someone who spoke Sumerian asked the fellow selling goods who they were and getting the response back, "tamkar". The earliest mention of this word dates to En-metena (~2400 BCE) -- so Sumerian, not Akkadian -- but tamkarum is a perfectly good Semitic nominal formation of the verb makārum, to do business (i.e., a business person).

The hard part is making a convincing argument that the merchants we know living around 2400 BCE had some sort of cultural, linguistic, ethnic, or genetic connection to the communities that lived there three millennia earlier (and if that mattered to anyone). People have always moved around a lot, carrying and exchanging all sorts of goods, languages live, change, and die. 3000 years is a lot of ground to cover and, if we looked the other way to 400 CE, living communities of the area seem to have maintained certain traditions and surely changed others as well.

[u/rosscogames → u/teakettling]

I feel like we wouldn't need to know, nor could we anyway, have any knowledge of the specific languages beyond the footprint they left behind in the Sumerian language? I'm not even suggesting that some of these non-Sumerian words could be from a language or language family that we know about, that example you gave of a Semitic origin word was interesting. But I was imagining more of, at least, people groups who were contemporaries with the Ubaid people, left behind their legacy in Sumerian with what little of their language was eventually recorded, and either died out, left the region, or intermarried into the gene pool before anything concrete could be identified or traced back to them. Kinda like what happened with the Neolithic Farming groups in Europe that got replaced by Indo Europeans? We don't know much if anything about their language, but we can tell they left a legacy of loanwords in Indo European languages.

[u/WanderersAnon → u/rosscogames]

We don't have aDNA from Sumer, but fossil DNA from just north seems to indicate that the people were a mix of Anatolian farmers (the group that went to Europe), Iranian Neolithic (a Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer group), and Levantine people (almost definitely speaking Semitic). The languages spoken by the first two groups are largely unknown; Sumerian may well be a mix. That is a bit more parsimonious than positing still more groups for which we have neither linguistic nor genetic evidence. And, yes, continuity from Ubaid through Uruk to Early Dynastic is again the more parsimonious explanation. No evidence of a large-scale movement has been found during the transitions.

[u/aszahala]

The problem with any linguistic solution is that we know next to nothing about the linguistic landscape of ancient Near East in the fourth millennium BCE or so. Therefore even if we suggest that some of the Sumerian words are of non-Sumerian origin (which is hard already), we have to be lucky to find plausible cognates for these words from any other languages. Even if we do, it's hard to speculate whether this was an ancient Wanderwort, Kulturwort, a result of more direct borrowing or a chance resemblance. Like Sum. naĝar "carpenter" ~ Egypt. nḏr "to work wood"; Sum. zabar "bronze" ~ Elam. zappan etc. (Akkadian has both words too but they are non-Semitic).

Thus, there are some tantalizing lexical similarities between Sumerian and many known languages, including reconstructed ones like Proto-Indo-European (Sum. a-gar₃ "meadow" ~ PIE *h₂éǵros "field" among many others) and even Proto-Uralic (Sum. zalag ~ PU *ćala- "bright"; Sum. šarag ~ PU *ćara- "dry"), but unfortunately they tell us very little about the Sumerian origins.

To me it seems convincing that Sumerian is typologically Transeurasian (if we look at Martine Robbeet's features), but that does not make us much wiser, since it only tells us that the phylum Sumerian once belong to was possibly affected by this large linguistic area in the past.