Pestvidéki Ásványbánya Vállalat

After World War II, mainly during the 1970s, the discussion of this possible relationship reached its peak. In face of the deluge of works by amateurs, works of some professional linguists were also published. Attempts to evaluate linguistic affinities also included the so-called polygonal method, while others tried a statistical method, first used by Dell Hymes (1960) in his Lexicostatistics so far (Current Anthropology, 1/1, 3-44), with a logarithmic formula. It was used by some in the form of the widely criticized glottochronology, e.g. András (Andrew) Zakar (1971), who succeeded in publishing a paper in the journal Current Anthropology 12 (2), Chicago, entitled Sumerian Ural-Altaic Affinities, submitting it for debate. Twelve well-recognized Western linguists made comments and criticisms on Zakar’s introductory assertions, and Zakar also provided a summary at the end of his book. In another essay in 1972, entitled On the Sumerian Language (published in Hungarian Past 1 (2-3), Sydney), Zakar applied the Hyden-Swadech 100 basic word glossary (applying the controversial glottochronology, rejected by most linguists) to compare Sumerian with Hungarian root words; only those morphemes were used that had the same meanings as the items of the basic vocabulary. In professional linguistic science this essay proved a hopeless attempt on the part of Zakar.

This hypothetical linguistic (but not ethnic) relationship between Sumerian and Hungarian has been criticized or condemned by many linguistic scholars such as: G. Bárczi (1974), G. Komoróczy (1976), P. Hajdú (1966, 1972) (”relationship with Sumerian is a myth”), L. Papp (1970) (condemns “ancient historical illusions”), M. Zsirai (in L. Ligeti ed., 1943) (relationship with Sumerian is a “curiosity”), A. Róna-Tas (1978), A. Schedel (1966), I. Fodor (1974), while J. Lotz (1952) condemned the quite extensive work of Ida Bobula (1951) A Plea for Reconsideration (168 pp.) (some aspects of which were praised by Gallus, 1969). However, there are scholars who approach the question of a possible relationship either from a broadly cultural-historical, Turkological, or philosophical point of view, or by studying archaic forms of languages: these include the excellent, broadly conceived work by S. Gallus (1969): Possibility of a Relationship of the Magyar and Sumerian Languages (in Hungarian), and also works by D. Sinor (1966); I. Kiszely (1983); G. Györffy (1958); G. Németh (1930); D. Osetzky (1977); S. Vajay (1968); F. Badiny Jós, L Götz (1994); A. Bodor, S. Csőke; A. Orbán; L. Pass; A. Schedel, and I. Szőcs. B: 1020, 1068, 1816, 1871, 7456, T: 7669, 7456.→Sumerians; Sumerian Pictorial and Cuneiform Writing; Sumerology; Sumerian–Hungarian Relations; Varga, Zsigmond; Zakar, András.
Sumerian Pictorial and Cuneiform Writing – According to the present viewpoint of science, the Sumerians were the first people to create conceptual writing with pictographs, representing objects, enabling them to record their thoughts in an uninterrupted manner. Four stages can be identified: (1) Creation of picture signs, similar to the objects (pictographs). (2) Creation of picture signs (ideograms) to express verbs, sentiments and abstract concepts. (3) Syllable signs, consisting of pictographs to express suffixes and affixes, (the Sumerian language as the Hungarian, was an agglutinative language). (4) Creation of distinguishing signs. Cuneiform writing developed from this writing. During the course of development, signs simplified from the ideograms of the most important words served as the symbol for the appropriate word’s initial sound.

The Hungarian runic script and the Sumerian cueniform writing show some resemblence, as can be seen on the Tatárlaka discs (Tartarian Tablets), found in Tatárlaka, Transylvania by Zsófia (Sophia) Torma in the 19th century which date to around 5300 BC, pre-dating the Sumerian findings. – B: 1020, T: 7669.→Ancient Hungarian Runic Writing; Sumerians; Sumerian-Hungarian Language Connection; Sumerology; Torma, Zsófia.

Where the original homeland of the Sumerians was located is still uncertain. According to the noted American Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer (The Sumerians – Their History, Culture and Character, 1963), they may have come from the neighborhood of the ancient city-state of Arratta, situated in the region of the Caspian Sea, probably in the mountainous northwestern part of Iran (Persia). Other theories have also been advanced; but the issue has never reached a consensus. The one thing historians agree on is that the Sumerians came from a mountainous region.

Systematic excavations were begun in Northern Mesopotamia, the ancient Assyria, in 1842, by Paul Emil Botta (1802-1870), the French consul in Mosul, and have continued with numerous interruptions well into the 20th century.

French Orientalist Jules Oppert (1825-1905), in a lecture delivered before the Ethnographic and Historical Section of the French Society of Numismatics and Archeology in 1869, declared that these people and their language should be called “Sumerian” or “Shumerian”, basing his conclusions on the title “King of Sumer and Akkad” found in the inscriptions of some of the early Akkadian rulers. The name Akkad applied to the Semitic people of Assyria and Babylonia, while the name Sumer referred to the non-Semitic inhabitants. What the Sumerians called themselves is not clear. They called their land, however, ki-en-gar, “Land of the True God”, and referred to themselves as the “black-headed people”.

Early Sumerian civilization was predominantly agricultural with a well-developed irrigation system comprised of a network of canals. However, by 3000 B.C. it evolved into a flourishing urban civilization with mud-brick buildings, Ziggurats, or step-Pyramids, and walled cities. They were the first in recorded history to develop communal life. Their economy was based on agriculture, stockbreeding, fruitgrowing, fishing, industry and commerce. Their products were exported all over the Middle East and beyond.

The Sumerians lived in a number of loosely confederated city-states, like Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Nippur, Eridu, Erech, Larsa, Isin, Adab, Kullab and Kish, one usually dominating the others. The last Sumerian king before the Akkadian takeover was Lugalzaggesi, who styled himself as “king of Erech and the king of the land”, which extended “from the Lower Sea [Persian Gulf] along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to the Upper Sea [Caspian]”. But in the last quarter of the 3rd millennium B.C., he was conquered by the Semite Sargon (Sharrukê = legitimate king), the founder of the powerful dynasty of Akkad, which began the Semitization of Sumer. However, the Akkadians were invaded by the Gutians around 2200 B.C., who came “from the mountains”. They laid waste to the land, destroyed Nippur, and defeated the king, Naram-Sin. Afterwards, there was a brief Sumerian “Renaissance” with the kings of the III. Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2113 B.C.), such as Ur-Nammu and Sulgi, and a new Sumerian empire was established. (This period coincided with the Danubian III. period with copper technology in the Carpathian Basin.) This dynasty however collapsed under the attacks of the kings of Elam and Isin in 2004 B.C., and brought the end of the independence of Sumer. Most of the Sumerian cities were destroyed and the population fled in all directions of the compass. Then, around 1750 B.C., the Semite Hammurabi, after conquering Larsa, Elam, Mari and Eshnuna, became the ruler of a united kingdom reaching from the Persian Gulf to northern Mesopotamia. With Hammurabi, the history of Sumer came to an end and the history of Babylon, a Semitic state built on a Sumerian foundation, began. The last mention of the Sumerians as a people occurred around 1740 B.C.

Language – The thousands of cuneiform documents, first unearthed in the northern region of Iraq, were written in Semitic Akkadian. It was not until 1852 that Henry C. Rawlinson (1810-1895) noticed that the tablets excavated at Kuyunjik near ancient Niniveh, were bilingual, and that the words corresponding to the Semitic were in a hitherto unknown language he considered “Scythian or Turanian.”

The Sumerian is an agglutinative language. Its roots are invariable and are mostly monosyllabic, although there is a considerable number of polysyllabic among them, especially of the later period. The vowels are frequently modified in accordance with the law of vowel harmony. The nouns have no grammatical gender and are divided into animate and inanimate. Persons belong to the animate, objects and animals to the inanimate group. In addition to the main Sumerian dialect, the Emergir (“princely tongue”), there were several others. One of them, the Emesal, was used primarily in speeches by female deities, women and eunuchs. (Interestingly, in Hungarian some female animals are called “emse”.)

The first linguist to take notice of the similarities between the Sumerian and modern agglutinative languages was Edward Hincks (1792-1866), who pointed out that “…all Turanian [Ural-Altaic] languages were descendants if not from the Akkadian, from its parent”, i.e., from a common predecessor. ” Oppert went as far as to say that their language was an agglutinative one not inflected like the Semitic or Indo-European and that it had close affinities with Turkish, Finnish and Hungarian. In a Report on his scientific expedition to Mesopotamia (1851-54), he even provided syllabaries of Sumerian-Hungarian words, such as:

Sumerian Magyar

pe (ear) fül

si (eyes) szem

kat (two) két, kettő

ha (fish & may, if) hal, ha

nap (day) nap

This “unrelated” theory may have its roots in that the Sumerian-Turanian (Ural-Altaic) connection was vigorously attacked by some Semitic linguists led by Joseph Halévy, the noted Hebraist of the Sorbonne, in the 1870s. Halévy, throughout his long and distinguished career, denied the mere existence of a non-Semitic people in the land of Babylon, and threw a lot of confusion into the ranks of the linguists with far-reaching consequences. He declared the Sumerian language to have been the secret language of the Assyrian-Babylonian, i.e. Semitic priests, but never a living tongue. A. H. Sayce published the following retort: “For centuries Hebrew was supposed to have been the language of Paradise, and the old belief, which made the Semitic Adam the first civilized man, still unconsciously affected the Semitic scholars of the 19th century.” Also: “Babylonian culture owed its origins to a race whose type of language was that of the Finn, of the Magyar or the Japanese” (The Archeology of Cuneiform Inscriptions, London, 1908). Sayce traced the pronunciation of several Sumerian phonemes to the Magyar, Mongolian, Turkic or Finnish sounds by deriving the existence of the “ö” and “ü”, and even considered the existence of the Hungarian “gy” (dj) (Accadian Phonology, 1877).

The polemic carried well into the 20th century. The Hungarians entered the debate right from the start, in the 1850s. The notable exponents of the Sumero-Hungarian “relationship” were Dr. Ferenc (Francis) Ribáry (1827-1880); Ágoston (Austin) Halász (1863-1925) Roman Catholic Bishop of Kassa (now Košice, Slovakia); Sándor (Alexander) Giesswein (1856-1923); and Zsófia (Sophia) Torma (1840-1899), a distinguished archeologist and researcher, who excavated Sumerian-type potsherds and clay disks containing pictographs in the Transylvanian village of Tordos (now in Romania). Then in 1961, additional early Sumerian-type finds were excavated at Alsótatárlaka (Tartaria, Romania) near the Tordos-site, by Romanian archeologist, N. Vlassa. Judging by these finds, some archeologists and historians concluded that the sites must have been Sumerian mining colonies founded in the gold, silver and copper-rich mountains of the region. Others opined that the Sumerians may have originated in the Carpathian Basin, from where they migrated to Mesopotamia.

The first truly scholarly work in Hungary was published by Gyula Ferenczy (1861-1931), a bona fide Sumerologist and author of the first book on the Sumerian-Ural-Altaic-Magyar relationship, Sumer és Akkád (Sumer and Akkad, 1897). The other notable work was authored by Dr. Zsigmond (Sigismund) Varga (1886-1956), professor of Oriental languages at the University of Debrecen, entitled Ötezer év távolából (From a Distance of Five Thousand Years, 422 pp. 1942). This was a follow-up to an earlier work, A Sumir kérdés jelen állása (The present status of the Sumerian question, 1920), for which he was awarded the Fáy-Prize by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

By this time, however, the Finno-Ugric linguistic and ethnic origin of the Hungarians, implanted in the middle of the 19th century by Pál (Paul) Hunfalvy (Hunsdorfer, 1810-1891) and German linguist Joseph Budenz, had firmly taken root in Hungarian scientific and linguistic circles, On their recommendation, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences adopted the Finno-Ugric origins as the official theory, according to which the Hungarian people and their language originated in the Ural Mountains of Siberia by the river Ob, among the primitive Ob-Ugric Vogul and Ostiak tribes. Consequently, a southern, Mesopotamian connection became ipso facto irreconcilable with the Finno-Ugric theory.

After World War II, all pro-Sumerian research was banned by Communist Hungary, and ridiculed and attacked by Finno-Ugric linguists. Research was pursued only by Hungarian émigrés in various parts of the West. Notable among them were Dr. Ferenc (Francis) Badiny Jós, professor of Sumerology at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina; Dr. Viktor Padányi in Australia; Dr. András Zakar in the US – former secretary to Cardinal József Mindszenty – who got as far as a professional debate with well-known linguists and scholars in the journal Current Anthropology (1971). (It was refuted by Hungarian linguist Péter Hajdú in a later issue of the journal.) There were also Dr. Ida Bobula in the US, who published her findings also in English; Dr. Miklós (Nicholas) Érdy in the U.S.; and Dr. László (Ladislas) Götz with his scholarly 2-volume work, Keleten kél a nap (The Sun Rises in the East, Budapest, 1994). However, leading linguists and historians in Hungary refused to accept any of their findings and either ignored them or rejected them out of hand, among them Géza Komoróczy, Peter Hajdú and István (Stephen) Fodor – although they were never able to satisfactorily and convincingly disprove the Sumerian connection. No one disputes the relationship between the Finno-Ugric languages. What some linguists and historians question is the current theory as to where, when and how it came about.

The Sumero-Hungarian relationship theory didn’t find favor with later Western linguists either, partly for political, partly for cultural and prestige reasons. Especially some Indo-European linguists and historians were up in arms, who couldn’t reconcile themselves to the fact that it was not the “superior” Aryan race that established the first civilization, but the “barbarian Turanian”. The only work to receive any notice is a 1975 publication by Dr. Kálmán (Coloman) Gosztonyi, one-time professor at the Collège Saint-Michel, St.-Etienne (Loire) and a student of the École Practique des Hautes Études Sciences Philologiques (Sumérien), Paris (Sorbonne). In his Sumerian grammar book, Comparative Sumerian Grammar (Dictionnaire d’Étymologie Summerienne et Grammaire Comparée, published with the support of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris 1975), Gosztonyi compares the grammatical structures of Finno-Ugric, Caucasian, ancient Mesopotamian, as well as various African and native American languages, and demonstrates that out of 53 Sumerian grammatical characteristics, 51 are present in the Hungarian, followed by 29 in the various Turkish, 24 in the Caucasian and 21 in the northern Finno-Ugric languages

Writing – In 1850 E. Hincks read a paper before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in which he outlined his suspicions that the cuneiform system of writing was invented by a non-Semitic people who had preceded the Semites in Mesopotamia. The oldest extant written document of mankind, a clay tablet inscribed with pictographs, now in the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford, was found in the ancient Sumerian city of Kish, and dates from ca. 3500 BC. It remains undeciphered to this day. The oldest deciphered cuneiform text that developed directly from pictographs dates from the Jemdat-Nasr-period (ca. 3100 BC.), is now in the British Museum in London. It is a list of agricultural produce.

Cuneiform script began as pictographic writing. Each sign was a picture of one or more objects and represented a word. The signs were impressed into wet clay tablets with a wedge-shaped instrument, hence the name “cuneiform”. The tablets were then fired in an oven, or left in the sun to dry. However, the system was cumbersome to use and the scribes gradually simplified the form of the signs. They also reduced the number of signs by substituting phonetic for ideographic values. Cuneiform writing went through 18 stages of development from 3000 to 600 B.C.

The excavation of ancient Nippur in Iraq was conducted in the early 1900s by the noted German Assyriologist, H. V. Hilprecht. The expedition yielded some 30,000 cuneiform tablets. Those in Sumerian range over more than two millennia, from the second half of the 3rd millennium to the last centuries of the 1st millennium B.C. Clay tablets found in the land of Sumer number several hundred thousand, of which only about 50,000 are deciphered to date. The texts have been translated into several modern languages.

Sumerian ceased to be a spoken language around 1700 B.C. It remained however the sacred and literal language of the Assyro-Babylonian priests and scribes until the emergence of the Phoenician alphabet in the last century B.C.

The Sumerians left an indelible impression on Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism – which is not altogether surprising, since Abraham came from the “land of Ur of the Chaldees“ (Gen. 11:28). They believed that a primeval sea existed prior to creation. According to the Sumerians and the Hebrews, man was fashioned of clay and imbued with the “breath of life”. According to both Sumerian and Biblical writers, the world was created by divine command. There exists almost an identical Sumerian version of the Flood. No doubt, the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel originated in an effort to explain the existence of the Mesopotamian ziggurats (Akkadian ziqquratu, “pinnacle’ or “mountain top”) the tall, stepped pyramid-like temples. To the Hebrews these immense structures must have represented mankind’s lust for power. The idea that “the whole Earth was of one language and of one speech” (Gen. 11:1) is echoed in the Sumerian poem Emerkar and the Lord of Arratta: “The whole universe, the people in unison / To Enlil in one tongue give praise”. Ethics and morals were essentially identical with those of the Hebrews. The Biblical Sheol and the Hades of the Greeks have their concepts in the Sumerian Kur, the dark, dread abode of the dead.

Hymnography became such a sophisticated literary art that it was subdivided into various categories, e.g. “harmony-hymns”, “musical hymns”, “hymns of hero-ship”, etc.

The lamentations are of two kinds: those bewailing the destruction of Sumerian cities and city-states, e.g. the destruction of Ur, and those lamenting the death of the god Dumuzi.

They also produced several lengthy funeral dirges and elegies.

The longest Sumerian historiographic composition is The Curse of Agade. Another revolves about the defeat of the Gutians by Sumer’s “savior”, King Utuhegel.

Perhaps the best-known myth contained in the Gilgamesh Epic is the Story of the Flood, a forerunner of the Biblical version:

“What I had loaded thereon, the whole harvest of life

I caused to embark within the vessel; all my family and my relations,

The beasts of the field, the cattle of the field, the craftsmen, I made them all embark.

I entered the vessel and closed the door…

(…)

Unto Mount Nitsir came the vessel,

Mount Nitsir held the vessel and let it not budge…

When the seventh day came,

I sent forth a dove, I released it;

It went, the dove, it came back…

I sent forth a swallow, I released it.

It went, the swallow, it came back..

I sent forth a crow, I released it;

It went, the crow, and beheld the subsidence of the waters…”

The Hebrews most likely adopted these myths during their Babylonian captivity.

So far, seven catalogues of literary works have been unearthed, dating from the 2nd millennium B.C., listing the titles of over 200 Sumerian compositions. Then, in the 1960s an eighth came to light; but only fragments have been deciphered and translated to date.

The Legacy of Sumer – The Sumerians held sway over the Near East for close to 2000 years, spreading their culture and language far and wide. Their influence reached from the Indus (Mohenjo-Daro finds) to the Mediterranean (Cyprus and Crete); to the Caucasus region; to Central Asia; to the southern Urals in the north and to Ethiopia to the south; to Transylvania and Hungary in the west (see the four-wheeled cart model found in the Danube at Budakalász). They established mining colonies in Afghanistan for lapis lazuli; and in the Caucasus and Transylvania for precious metals.

C. W. Ceram in his book Gods, Graves and Scholars (New York, 1967) lists 27 Sumerian “firsts” in human history, among them: the potter’s wheel, the wheeled vehicle, the sailboat; bronze-casting; the first schools; the first temples; the first arches; the first historians; the first law codes; the first “Farmer’s Almanac”; the first maps of cities; the first irrigation system; the first cosmogony and cosmology; first literary debates; the first library catalogue; the first legal precedent. Hamurabbi’s Code is largely based on an earlier Sumerian legal code. In the field of mathematics they made their major contribution by devising the sexagesimal system for their calculations. They divided the month into 30 days; the days into 24 hours and the hour into 60 minutes; the circle into 360; the solar system into 12 divisions.

The Sumerians had a rich musical culture. Based on the construction of instruments recovered in the royal tombs of Ur – a harp, lyre, lute, drums and pipes – musicologists concluded that the Sumerians were familiar with the pentatonic (5-note) and the heptatonic (7-note) scales. A silver double-pipe found there shows a remarkable reemblance to the Avar double-pipe (8th century A.D.) unearthed at Felgyő in Hungary.

They knew how to use copper, gold and silver for jewelry, weapons and technology. They also excelled in the field of art. In the 16 tombs of kings, queens, princesses and priestesses excavated in 1922 in Ur by Leonard Wooley, rich artifacts came to light. The best known are (1) the beautiful wooden harp with a bull’s head made of solid gold, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, gold and lapis lazuli; beneath the head is a set of shell plaques engraved with scenes of animal life; (2) a card-table decorated with bone, lapis lazuli and shell; (3) cylinder-seals; (4) an alabaster vase decorated with relief, illustrating a religious procession; (5) a female head of white alabaster called the “Woman of Varka”; (6) a 2.4 m. long Sun-symbol, a copper stele from Ur displaying an eagle with lion’s head above two stags, known as the Imdugud bird (also read as Anzu); (7) a solid gold he-goat or ram supporting a tree ; (8) the gold head-dress of Queen Shub-ad; (9) a gold dagger; and (10) perhaps the most famous of them all, the mosaic “Royal Standard of Ur”, dating from the last quarter of the 3rd millennium B.C., representing a veritable “story book” of Sumerian life.

The Sumerians excelled in the manufacture of jewelry and gold objects. The royal graves of Ur yielded beautiful examples of their craftsmanship. In one of them they found the helmet of king Meskalamdug, made of 15-karat gold. According to Woolley, never before in any age and in any country have they manufactured finer gold jewelry then these, dating from 2700 B.C! The Sumerians were the first to produce electron, a fusion of gold and silver.

Following the destruction of Sumer, a large number of the non-Semitic population dispersed and migrated north, northeast and northwest, leaving an indelible mark on the culture and language of the local populations, vestiges of which can be demonstrated to this day. – B: 2068, 7817, T: 7617.→ Sumerian–Hungarian Language Connection; Sumerian Picture and Cuneiform Writing; Sumerology; Some of the persons have their own entry.