Some Obscurish facts
#1373
Sumeria – Are we missing something or are our historians looking at our earliest civilisations through a strange and distorted lens? Like Egypt and the Indus Valley, the biblical ‘Land of Shinar’ – the birthplace of Abraham – was a brutally hot, largely barren, empty desert with a mighty river cutting a swath through it. Does this sound like the magnet that would attract late Stone Age tribes to hunker down and pull wonders out of a hat? In fact, historians thought Shinar was a piece of biblical fiction until the mid-19th century, but now they know everything about it with complete certitude that we, the unwashed masses, dare not question. Nonetheless, we encourage readers to maintain an attitude of healthy skepticism and dare to question ‘official history’. As is the case with the culture that built the cities of the Indus Valley, no one knows who the ancient Sumerians were or where they came from. They called themselves ‘the black-headed ones’ and spoke a strange language that was unrelated to the languages of the Semitic tribes in the region. Some linguists note a similarity between the Sumerian language and that of the Basques, another anomalous culture. We find it curious that any primitive peoples would choose the rigours of a hostile desert environment to settle in and build a civilisation. Why not a gentle river in a forested mountain valley? Especially in light of the fact that Sumeria contained very few resources, no forests, no minerals, not even the rocks that were plentiful in Egypt. How are we to explain the fact this mysterious culture managed to invent all of the core components of civilisation under such restrictive conditions? It occurs to us that a culture would need minerals like copper, gold, silver and tin immediately available to experiment with over the course of generations in order to create process metallurgy. There is nothing simple or accidental about making the connection between raw ores, the metals they contain, and how to reduce them out of their native state using high heat. Nevertheless, the Sumerians not only figured out geology, how to obtained the ore, knew the levels of heat needed and how to build kilns to achieve it, they also took very different metals and created the first alloy, bronze. As metal-smiths were performing these feats, other citizens were apparently creating the wheel, building cities, ziggurats, inventing writing, movable type, the ox-drawn plow, cereal crop agriculture, and advanced mathematics, to mention the most notable of their innovations. Something is wrong with this picture. Most human beings were counting using their fingers, if at all, hunting animals and gathering plants for their meals. Yet, we find the Sumerians in classrooms learning the principles of the sexigesimal math system. Yes, the very same 60-base system we use today to keep track of hours, minutes and seconds. This advanced system was the first to reveal that a circle has 360 degrees and can be subdivided using 60, 30, 15, 12, etc., all fractions of the root number.
Sumeria – Are we missing something or are our historians looking at our earliest civilisations through a strange and distorted lens? Like Egypt and the Indus Valley, the biblical ‘Land of Shinar’ – the birthplace of Abraham – was a brutally hot, largely barren, empty desert with a mighty river cutting a swath through it. Does this sound like the magnet that would attract late Stone Age tribes to hunker down and pull wonders out of a hat? In fact, historians thought Shinar was a piece of biblical fiction until the mid-19th century, but now they know everything about it with complete certitude that we, the unwashed masses, dare not question. Nonetheless, we encourage readers to maintain an attitude of healthy skepticism and dare to question ‘official history’. As is the case with the culture that built the cities of the Indus Valley, no one knows who the ancient Sumerians were or where they came from. They called themselves ‘the black-headed ones’ and spoke a strange language that was unrelated to the languages of the Semitic tribes in the region. Some linguists note a similarity between the Sumerian language and that of the Basques, another anomalous culture. We find it curious that any primitive peoples would choose the rigours of a hostile desert environment to settle in and build a civilisation. Why not a gentle river in a forested mountain valley? Especially in light of the fact that Sumeria contained very few resources, no forests, no minerals, not even the rocks that were plentiful in Egypt. How are we to explain the fact this mysterious culture managed to invent all of the core components of civilisation under such restrictive conditions? It occurs to us that a culture would need minerals like copper, gold, silver and tin immediately available to experiment with over the course of generations in order to create process metallurgy. There is nothing simple or accidental about making the connection between raw ores, the metals they contain, and how to reduce them out of their native state using high heat. Nevertheless, the Sumerians not only figured out geology, how to obtained the ore, knew the levels of heat needed and how to build kilns to achieve it, they also took very different metals and created the first alloy, bronze. As metal-smiths were performing these feats, other citizens were apparently creating the wheel, building cities, ziggurats, inventing writing, movable type, the ox-drawn plow, cereal crop agriculture, and advanced mathematics, to mention the most notable of their innovations. Something is wrong with this picture. Most human beings were counting using their fingers, if at all, hunting animals and gathering plants for their meals. Yet, we find the Sumerians in classrooms learning the principles of the sexigesimal math system. Yes, the very same 60-base system we use today to keep track of hours, minutes and seconds. This advanced system was the first to reveal that a circle has 360 degrees and can be subdivided using 60, 30, 15, 12, etc., all fractions of the root number.