The case for black Mesopotamians

[8man]

Oct 19, 2010 15:06:56 GMT -5 Tukuler al~Takruri said:

It's breakthroughs like this that make it all worthwhile. Thanks Bill.

You're welcome and thank you...

It just bothered the hell out of me no end because there is smugness around the idea that they couldn't possibly have been black at all as if they knew. How do they know? But it was all by accident--I discovered how to use the PDA online Sumerian dictionary when I stumbled upon this Sumerian scholar and critic of Zecharia Sitchin's astronomy and Sitchen's use of the word "shem" for rocket.

He showed people how to use the dictionary to double check his criticism of Sitchin's translations rather than take his word for it, so fed up with wikipedia I looked up the words--for years I was taking people’s word that it meant “black-headed”, though I felt it meant blacks still the phrase always bothered me because it never made any logical sense to me and lo and behold it doesn’t mean what people assume it means which is hair--at least that's my opinion, like I said I'm no Sumerian scholar, so it is up to them to defend the status quo or prove it wrong.

But it seems to me it is the same blinders that makes people look at really old Egyptian sculpture, and even later variations, and deny that they are seeing blacks, Africans, mixed with whites or with “negroid” features or ancestry. You can see where you have two types of sculpture sometimes, an older version and newer version which shows maybe a generational change or some attempt at idealization.

Exploring India's racism might explain things back then, for it seems they had some early version of color racism. Have you all discussed the possiblity of an ancient race war involving the Ancient Indians? India is very strange and involved in all these questions raised by these forums.

The Arrata material by the way reads almost like an African folktale and mythological story. If you haven’t read it, check it out. Even the translated name Lugalbanda sounds African but that's just a speculation, the translatons were influence by German accents on words or pronunciation, so I've read.

You've all got to get this fascinating, and rich material into a well argued book of some sort. I've learned things I've never known before by coming here.

Thanks

Bill Games

[8man]

Hi, everyone,

Perhaps Professor Winters doesn't have the time to discuss it here, but I'm not sure I can get these notes of Rawlinson, though I'll do a search in a minute, perhaps they are online, but does anyone have C.B. Rawlinson's "Notes on the early history of Babylon" and would like to post it here, at least the most important points relating to this quote below:

[we have to look at the history of scholarship surrounding the rise of Sumero-Akkadian studies. The study of the Sumerians, Akkadians. Assyrians and Elamites began with the decipherment of the cuneiform script by Henry Rawlinson. Henry Rawlinson had spent most of his career in the Orient. This appears to have gave him an open mind in regards to history. He recognized the Ancient Model of History, the idea that civilization was founded by the Kushite or Hamitic people of the Bible.]

Perhaps someone would like to, rather than quote it, articulate how Rawlinson proved this or argued it convincingly to their satisfaction--why did it convince you.

Thanks. If I find it online I'll post an excerpt here. Also, let me add, does anyone know any challenges to this and would care to discuss those claims and proofs and compare the two to see which is stronger? By "this" I meant the over all thesis of "The case for black Mesopotamians".

Bill

[8man]

When we use a citation by an authority to justify or explain what we generally presume is reasonable and what we agree with it only seems to convince us, I want people to come here and be convinced by what they read not so much that such and such a learned man in the past said such and such—if I’m going to convince someone else I need to articulate why and how the authority’s scholarship is convincing to me. It isn’t enough to just cite an authority, then the opposing viewpoint will childishly say my authority who is better than yours, after all he has his scarecrow degree and you don't, he says different--so whatever the authority, pro or con, we must examine in meticulous detail how well they defended and argued their points—I want to start with Rawlinson since he is at the top of the list regarding a white scholar's thinking on this at an early period. It may be time consuming to do this but it’s the only way to avoid belief in authorities. Nor is accumulative or consensus authority enough if the aim is to convince by reason.

I’ve come to like the idea of checking it for your self rather than taking someone else's word for it simply out of trust or faith in the messenger. In some respects it’s this type of trust that has led to all sorts of faulty thinking, for example the professor on the Arrata folklore not providing proof for why he believed “black-headed” referred to black headed sheep, still I suppose in the region, and that's proof, I guess because the sheep is there; also he’s of a religious bent, he refers to Lugalbanda in saintly terms rather than in more folkloric terms. Now a white student reading this might think yes that explains the oddness in this phrase, "head" means black hair and thus the metaphor with sheep but where is the evidence for this conclusion in other texts and in the PDA's dictionary definition of the component words? Ah, don’t worry about it, maybe one day new tablets will turn up, and we’ll get the answers then right now I'm right and I know best.

That’s not acceptable scholarship, it’s worse because there is a pre-existing racial basis, that sense of entitlement that sees white, or blinders that excludes even the possibility that the Sumerians could’ve been like the Dravidians, nearby blacks of some sort.

[8man]

What we need to do is draft and revise a reasonable defense of the thesis in a organized fashion and then contrast it and attack it with the opponents best available evidence or defense of the status quo—since we are excluded from their discussions and they are not addressing this challenge we’ll simply have to contrast their arguments against the thesis--the reason for the thesis, the neccesity for it is based on the idea that humanity's origins is found in Africa and yet so much of racist history in the past and maybe today still excludes African blacks from contributing to early world civilizations. Humanity originated in Africa and some how left it in the dust?

It’s true that Africa is rich enough and complex enough to show that blacks contributed much and did much in Africa but the point is there was and may still be a racialist outlook that sees whiteness everywhere in the ancient world outside of Africa. How much of this racism demeaned and damaged and still damages honest scholarship?

[8man]

I''ll still try to find the Rawlinson notes, but here is the Eurocentric status quo currently on the race of the Sumerians, from the 2004:

[THE LITERATURE OF ANCIENT SUMER Translated and Introduced by jeremy black graham Cunningham eleanor robson and gábor zólyomi]

For the views on their purported race expressed in the above titled book, see the excerpt below, but it is rather a convenient situation at present to want to ignore "race"—if “black-headed” is a mistranslation, which it is until white scholars explain what they mean in their translation, and the evidence is right there in the name they gave for themselves, they were a black skinned peoples of some sort, ignoring it and the racist baggage of previous scholarship on the region is again rather convenient—so semities couldn't find semites, Turks couldn't find Turks--I’m not arguing for the science of race as trying to find out what the Sumerians looked like physically, and I'm not supporting any racism or cultural superiority--it's not their race I'm after as much as their origins as its relates to blacks and early humans.

Yet whites are previleged to change the subject, how convenient as the church lady would say, when it is convenient, so when it appears the Sumerians were in fact blacks, the subject of race is off the table and everyone is left to assume wrongly that "black-headed" means hair.


[A contested race
In the first half of the twentieth century, when western culture was much preoccupied with ideas of racial difference, research questions centred on the origins of the Sumerian people, the date of their apparent migration into Iraq, and their first contact with the Semitic Akkadians with whom, it was supposed, they had vied for political and cultural control of southern Iraq.

All sorts of evidence for racial typing came into play, from cranial measurements to the fashions in clothes and hair on early Mesopotamian statues.

Semites supposedly had long hair and beards; Sumerians wore their heads and faces shaved. (Interestingly, the attributes of female attire were not part of the debate, although images of women were known.) The Semites, it was generally agreed, had made their homeland in the area just south of modern day
Baghdad, the Sumerians nearer the Gulf coast around modern-day Nasiriya.

Which racial group entered the region first and from what direction was hotly disputed. Did the prehistoric pottery show that Sumerians had been in Iraq from at least the early fifth millennium or only from the very early third millennium? And were they more closely related to the Turkic peoples of central Asia or the inhabitants of the Harappan cities of the Indus Valley? Maybe there was also a third population group to consider, neither Semitic nor Sumerian, whose linguistic remains could be detected in the written record too. As the results of the staggeringly large-scale excavations of the inter-war years began to be published and assimilated, the question got more and more confusing.

By 1939 Ephraim Speiser, one of the
major protagonists in the debate, had to admit:

To identify the individual ethnic elements which cooperated in producing the civilization of preliterate Mesopotamia is a more hopeless task today than it ever appeared to be. It did not seem nearly as difficult before we found out that the culture of each
period was a composite fabric. Furthermore, physical anthropology held out the hope that racial strains might be disentangled. But this promise has not been fulfilled. In fact,
the available anthropometric evidence is less conclusive in this regard than the circumstantial evidence from material remains.

The process of racial levelling is immeasurably older than that of cultural blending.¹¹ In the same year—in fact, in the very same journal—Thorkild Jacobsen used third-millennium historical evidence to argue that the ancient inhabitants of southern Iraq did not view themselves along racial or ethnic lines, and that all recorded conflicts were between city-based political entities and
not between different ‘peoples’ of the Land. Race, in other words, was neither part of the early Mesopotamian conceptual framework nor a fruitful subject for modern inquiry.

The debate eventually petered out as the notion of ‘race’ became discredited at the same time that archaeological theory began to recognize that developments in material culture did not necessarily imply population shifts too. By the mid-1960s the so-called ‘Sumerian problem’ was a dead issue for Georges Roux, author of the influential history book Ancient Iraq (1964):
From the point of view of the modern historian the line of demarcation between [the ethnic] components of the first historical population of Mesopotamia is neither
political nor cultural but linguistic. All of them had the same institutions; all of them shared the same way of life, the techniques, the artistic traditions, the religious beliefs,
in a word the civilization which had originated in the extreme south and is rightly attributed to the Sumerians . . . The appellation ‘Sumerians’ should be taken as meaning

‘Sumerian-speaking people’ and nothing else. . . . Another point should be made quite clear: there is no such thing as a Sumerian ‘race’ neither in the scientific nor in the
ordinary sense of the term. . . . One is even tempted to wonder whether there is any problem at all. The Sumerians were, as we all are, a mixture of races and probably of peoples; their civilization, like ours, was a blend of foreign and indigenous elements . . . they may have ‘always’ been in Iraq, and this is all we can say.¹²

Modern textbooks rarely mention the topic at all.]

[8man]

"Sumerians wore their heads and faces shaved." If this was the belief and is in fact true, it supports their being black skinned rather than dark haired. Again, we're not interested in race as we are in an honest anti-racist account of who they were.

[clydewin98]

I am glad to see your interest in the Sumerians. My research indicates that the Sumerians were Kushites. Below are some of my papers and videos that explain this relationship.





They belonged to the Proto-Saharan civilization.

olmec98.net/proto2.htm




olmec98.net/rel2.htm

The Sumerians originated in the highlands of the Sahara.

www.clydeaw.org/fertile1.pdf

olmec98.net/Fertile1.pdf

Below are videos I produced and wrote that discuss the African origin of the Dravidians enjoy:























Enjoy

[thought]

thought writes:

The fact still remains - the Sumerians were Asian and not African people. Some southern Europeans, such as Greeks have closer genetic affinity to Africans than do Bronze Age Sumerians, though many Sumerians had phenetic characteristics that show affinity with tropical Africans. This affinity is likely the result of trait retention versus recent comon geneology.

[clydewin98]

May 16, 2010 17:30:38 GMT -5 egyptianplanet said:

Again we know that ancient Near Eastern people were dark skinned until the mixture of lighter skinned people came into the Near East and Northern Africa however they were a uniquely Asian civilization. Get out of this color mindset, it's what sets us back time and time again.

This is your opinion. Please tell me when scientists examined Sumerian DNA which identified the Sumerians as non-Africans.

Although we don't have mtDNA or Y-chromosome evidence for the Sumerians, we do know that the Sumerian language is genetically related to the Dravidian and Niger-Congo languages. we also have textual evidence they came from Africa I discussed above. This shows a family relationship. And a African origin.

Because your mind is controlled by Eurocentric dogma and you have failed to read the research of Scholars like DuBois, Diop and etc. you continue to parrot the illiterate and racist ideas of Europeans who have " whited out" the Africans who founded the Sumerian civilization.

I have presented my evidence that they were African. Now I invite you to prove they were not.

Your opinion is worth nothing. Give us your facts.

[clydewin98]

May 16, 2010 17:30:38 GMT -5 egyptianplanet said:

Get out of this color mindset, it's what sets us back time and time again.

I love African people. How low in self-esteem you are to believe that expressing the ethnic identity of the Sumerians demeans the race.

You poor sad negro. Europeans have no shame in broadcasting their Western civilization. Yet you feel ashame when scholars say this or that civilization was created by Blacks

[thought]

Oct 23, 2010 19:23:49 GMT -5 clydewin98 said:

May 16, 2010 17:30:38 GMT -5 egyptianplanet said:

Again we know that ancient Near Eastern people were dark skinned until the mixture of lighter skinned people came into the Near East and Northern Africa however they were a uniquely Asian civilization. Get out of this color mindset, it's what sets us back time and time again.

This is your opinion. Please tell me when scientists examined Sumerian DNA which identified the Sumerians as non-Africans.

thought writes: these sorts of fantastical and imaginary propositions harm the credibility of legitimate African history.

Please tell me when scientists examined proto-Niger-Congo DNA which identified the earliest Niger-Congo people as Africans.

Oct 23, 2010 19:23:49 GMT -5 clydewin98 said:

May 16, 2010 17:30:38 GMT -5 egyptianplanet said:

Although we don't have mtDNA or Y-chromosome evidence for the Sumerians, we do know that the Sumerian language is genetically related to the Dravidian and Niger-Congo languages.

thought writes: this is not accepted by mainstream linguists. I would expect from any serious anthropologist a multi-disciplinary set of evidence to support such a radical theory.

Oct 23, 2010 19:23:49 GMT -5 clydewin98 said:

May 16, 2010 17:30:38 GMT -5 egyptianplanet said:

Because your mind is controlled by Eurocentric dogma and you have failed to read the research of Scholars like DuBois, Diop and etc. .

thought writes: the "old school" you're an Uncle Tom tactic.

Again, psuedo-science is harming legitimate African histroy.

[imhotep06]

Linguist Dr. GJK-Campbell-Dunn has systematically examined the Sumerian and Niger-Congo languages and concluded that Sumerians were 1) Africans and two 2) Niger-Congo speakers. Not only that, he hypothesizes that based on the linguistic data, the Sumerians came from the Kongo itself shortly before 3000 BCE.

He has written two books on the subject Sumerian Comparative Grammar and Sumerian Dictionary both released in 2010. Campbell-Dunn and Winters are not the only ones to connect Sumerian and Niger-Congo. There is also the book: Comparative lexical study of Sumerian and Ntu ("Bantu")
Sumerian, the "Sanscrit" of the African Ntu languages.
Published 1935 by W. Kohlhammer

It is clear, the languages say the Sumerians are Africans: period.

Oct 23, 2010 20:25:41 GMT -5 clydewin98 said:

May 16, 2010 17:30:38 GMT -5 egyptianplanet said:

Get out of this color mindset, it's what sets us back time and time again.

I love African people. How low in self-esteem you are to believe that expressing the ethnic identity of the Sumerians demeans the race.

. Europeans have no shame in broadcasting their Western civilization. Yet you feel ashame when scholars say this or that civilization was created by Blacks.



. Study and discover your real history.

[clydewin98]

author=thought board=hist thread=99 post=4237 time=1287937804thought writes: this is not accepted by mainstream linguists. I would expect from any serious anthropologist a multi-disciplinary set of evidence to support such a radical theory.


thought writes: the "old school"

Again, psuedo-science is harming legitimate African histroy.

You don't even know that the speakers of the Niger-Congo languages originated in Africa.

The linguistic evidence is supported by the genetic evidence. See:

govst.academia.edu/documents/0174/1497/Fulani.pdf

It's people like you who harm African research. like you are so beated down by white supremacy you can't believe Black people have a ancient history. But as you can see from my paper above some of us do authentic research , while you hide in the shadows waiting for Europeans to lead you out of darkness.

[clydewin98]

Oct 24, 2010 14:00:46 GMT -5 imhotep06 said:

Linguist Dr. GJK-Campbell-Dunn has systematically examined the Sumerian and Niger-Congo languages and concluded that Sumerians were 1) Africans and two 2) Niger-Congo speakers. Not only that, he hypothesizes that based on the linguistic data, the Sumerians came from the Kongo itself shortly before 3000 BCE.

He has written two books on the subject Sumerian Comparative Grammar and Sumerian Dictionary both released in 2010. Campbell-Dunn and Winters are not the only ones to connect Sumerian and Niger-Congo. There is also the book: Comparative lexical study of Sumerian and Ntu ("Bantu")
Sumerian, the "Sanscrit" of the African Ntu languages.
Published 1935 by W. Kohlhammer

It is clear, the languages say the Sumerians are Africans: period.

This is why people who don't have a clue about historical events
should just remain silent.

[Charlie Bass]

You guys need to keep it clean in this thread and avoid personal attacks.