Neolithic, Chalcolithic Northern Mesopotamia and Levant

I need to purge my thoughts as they're getting way out of control, now I'm thinking that R1a (the kind of the Karelian HGs, NOT Corded Ware or anything like that which is the earliest culture that was basically certainly I-E) actually did speak Uralic and that the common ancestor of Uralic and Indo-European was spoken in... Iran or Central Asia :/

Help
 
Burial-Mounds(=Kurgans) were already present in the Fertile Crescent since the Pottery Neolithic. An example of burial ground in the Tell Sabi Abyad site:



The existence of the Fertile Crescent cultural attributes within the Kurgans of Maykop and Leyla-Tepe only shows that the origin of Kurgans are within the Fertile Crescent. So again, we should seperate genetics and culture. The Fertile Crescent people brought their culture to the Steppe regions, and the Steppe people took parts of this culture and later formed the Yamnaya which assimilated all other earlier Neolithic cultural attributes in the Steppe.

You didn't understand my point. All Megalithic Western Europe already had Mounds too, as Native Americans. But Leyla-Tepe had the particularity to have as funeral practice Jar Burials. As most of the Transcaucasia at this time. The Leyla-Tepe Kurgans in number of 9 and only at 1 emplacement, they are not a Leyla-Tepe generic trait, they are a very exotic landscape in the generic Middle-Eastern package for the time. Mounds is a generic term, Kurgan is not, Leyla-Tepe somewhat looks like Steppic ones, but not really neither.
 
Well Afanasievo, likely Repin-derived, had no kurgans afaik so a Maykop introduction to the Steppe is likely.

Wich is unrelated because Afanasievo would be way younger than the hypothetic trade of this cultural trait to the whole steppe. So in both hypothesis they should have kurgans, wich means the reason they dont have kurgans is because of cultural change post-context.
 

Unfortunately I can't access the article in its entirety. By the way, I also noticed it dates from 1884, when historical linguistics was in its very beginning and with a much more incipient methodology and a smaller corpus of scientific knowledge and evidences than in the later 20th century and particularly nowadays. Do you know if there are any current linguists working on a Turkic-Sumerian connection?
 
You didn't understand my point. All Megalithic Western Europe already had Mounds too, as Native Americans. But Leyla-Tepe had the particularity to have as funeral practice Jar Burials. As most of the Transcaucasia at this time. The Leyla-Tepe Kurgans in number of 9 and only at 1 emplacement, they are not a Leyla-Tepe generic trait, they are a very exotic landscape in the generic Middle-Eastern package for the time. Mounds is a generic term, Kurgan is not, Leyla-Tepe somewhat looks like Steppic ones, but not really neither.

The Megalithic Western Europe was also introduced by the first farmers of the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia. Before the arrival of the first farmers, there were the native hunter gatherers of Europe with different cultures and genetics, they mixed with the first farmers causing for the changing of cultures on both sides, forming a new type of culture.
The Leyla-Tepe kurgans having West Asian cultural attributes shows that this culture is formed by the Ubaid / Halaf population, showing the direction of cultural migration from West Asia into the Steppe regions.
"Kurgan", "Burial Mound", "Tumulus", these are all synonyms which have the same meaning, only being used with different words. Meaning all the same, these types of burials is used by a limited amount of Neolithic/Chalcolithic groups in Western Eurasia. It is the archaeological, anthropological and genetic material within the burials that show the differences and the source of the Kurgan culture being in the Fertile Crescent.
The burials of the Steppe tend to have the person laying extended on their back, but the people of the Fertile Crescent tend to have the person laying flexed crouched. The oldest Kurgans are from the Fertile Crescent.
 
Do you know if there are any current linguists working on a Turkic-Sumerian connection?

See the following article:

LiveScience: How similar are Akkadian and Sumerian to languages still in use today?


Rubio: Akkadian is a Semitic language, so it is very similar in grammar and structure to Arabic and Hebrew.

Sumerian is quite different. In terms of structure, Sumerian is much closer to American Indian languages, for instance, than it is to Akkadian. Modern languages that structurally resemble Sumerian – though they are not related at all and have no cognates in common – include Japanese, Turkish, Finnish and Hungarian.

Biography of Gonzalo Rubio:
Dr. Rubio is an Assyriologist whose work focuses on the languages and literatures of Ancient Mesopotamia (Sumerian and Akkadian). His research and publications deal with Sumerian grammar and literature, early Semitic languages (particularly Eblaite), comparative Semitic linguistics, the cuneiform writing system, Mesopotamian history, and various aspects of language and cultural contact in the Ancient Near East. His edition of the Sumerian literary corpus from the Ur III period will be published soon. He is currently working on a project on Early Dynastic literary texts from Ebla and Mesopotamia, for which he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2012-13). He is also finishing a volume on Sumerian grammar, as well as coordinating and editing a large handbook of Ancient Mesopotamian studies to be published by De Gruyter. Dr. Rubio is a Senior Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at New York University. He is also the editor-in-chief of the monograph series Languages of the Ancient Near East (published by Eisenbrauns) and Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records (published by De Gruyter).

The above languages that resemble the Sumerian language actually confirms the migration route that the Fertile Crescent people made into the Steppe(as seen in the genetic study of Maykop).
The populations of the the Fertile Crescent, after the Late Neolithic maybe spoke two languages, Sumerian and Akkadian. Maybe the Sumerian language(Turkish) in that period was spoken by people with G, J, L, T, and the Akkadian language was spoken by people with E? And maybe these people with G, J, L, T started to make the first migrations into the Southern Caucasus. And then they moved into the Northern Caucasus meeting the people(speaking Indo European language together with Finnish, Hungarian and Native American types of languages) of the Steppe/Siberia(with C, N, Q, R)? And then mixing in linguistics and genetics happened in the two groups?
 
See the following article:



Biography of Gonzalo Rubio:


The above languages that resemble the Sumerian language actually confirms the migration route that the Fertile Crescent people made into the Steppe(as seen in the genetic study of Maykop).
The populations of the the Fertile Crescent, after the Late Neolithic maybe spoke two languages, Sumerian and Akkadian. Maybe the Sumerian language(Turkish) in that period was spoken by people with G, J, L, T, and the Akkadian language was spoken by people with E? And maybe these people with G, J, L, T started to make the first migrations into the Southern Caucasus. And then they moved into the Northern Caucasus meeting the people(speaking Indo European language together with Finnish, Hungarian and Native American types of languages) of the Steppe/Siberia(with C, N, Q, R)? And then mixing in linguistics and genetics happened in the two groups?

Well, the article you linked says that according to this Assyriologist specialized in Sumerian: Sumerian is quite different. In terms of structure, Sumerian is much closer to American Indian languages, for instance, than it is to Akkadian. Modern languages that structurally resemble Sumerianthough they are not related at all and have no cognates in common – include Japanese, Turkish, Finnish and Hungarian.

"Structurally resemble Sumerian" clearly refers to the fact those are also agglutinative languages that form their syntactic and morphological structure around mostly unchanged affixes that are tied together. That kind of structure is pretty common across the entire world and is one of the basic ways a language can function (fusional languages like IE ones seem to be a later development of agglutinative languages). Sumerians or whoever their ancestors were did not "invent" the agglutinative structure of human languages, it's really "basic" in fact. A broad structural similarity is really too little evidence to assert any evidence of common origin. It's extremely unlikely, for instance, that the Japanese got their language from West Eurasian people of the Fertile Crescent, let alone Native American peoples. The archaeological and genetic evidence says nothing that could lead to that hypothesis. Also, if all these linguistic developments and assimilation of Fertile Crescent languages by other peolpes in North Eurasia had happened, as you imply, after the Neolithic expansion, their common origin would still be "easily" traceable, which is not the case at all (Afro-Asiatic, for instance, is certainly older than 10,000 or even 15,000 years, and it's still - though barely so - identifiable via scientific methods of historical reconstruction; Indo-European probably dates to even before the Sumerian civilization, about 6000 years).
 
though they are not related at all and have no cognates in common
I refer you to the work of Prof. Dr. Osman Nedim Tuna, from the University of Pennsylvania, found hundreds of cognates between Turkish and Sumerian languages and his work during his life was approved by the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues.
 
I recently read the presentation of a lecture about the archaeological chronology of Neolithic Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. It shows good examples of the transition of cultures in periods of time. It also explains on how the migrations from Upper Mesopotamia into the Levant happened since the PPNB period, confirming the conclusions in the genetic study of Chalcolithic Peqi'in(Harney et al 2018).
 

This thread has been viewed 21029 times.

Back
Top