BISI Webinar: Dr Paul Collins on ‘Discovering the Sumerians’ 

Beautiful lecture, thank you very much and please do keep making these very informative talks

Thank you for your presentation. I hope that when I die, I get to see all of the history we look at now. What a great thing that would be!

Thank You so much for a wonderful and informative lecture!

Truly breathtaking.

I'm 100% Sumerian. If you have any questions, just ask me!

Interesting... the cow with the trifold embellishments was carried over to the Egyptian's art... so cool...

i went to the archeology museum in istanbul,and spent hours just studying the tablets...like as if describing today...the topics...

1:04:50...As I understand recovering Flood story through present form of Tamil is that the poet had written to pass the intelligence to protect from floods ( not just one) and to use the floods for cultivation... I also recommend that reading Sumerian literature would help us to get better details than rejecting my thesis or postulate as Early Sumerian spoke Tamil fluently and wrote in Tamil..

i could add a LOT to this. you guys are missing something so important.

Great, good work... Kramer says research on Sumerian is incomplete..there are scope for future research... We few native Tamil speakers say myself & Loganathan of Malaysia think, as between Iraq- Mesopotamia-India there are cultural continuity.. The business community in Tamilnadu, nagarathaar are just like Sumerian, temple centered, infact, whole of India that might be true, we have a proverb don't live in a village if there is no temple koil illatha ooril (Ur+il) kudi iruukka vendaam... See Sumerian syllables, Tamil sir ( Sumerian poem) ur, e, am in the Tamil sentance.. I propose Early Sumerian could have come from the rims of Lemuria continent believed by us sunken under Indian Ocean..

Good luck

If two peoples, the Sumerians and Akkadians, speak radically different languages, isn’t it reasonable to conclude those peoples are unrelated to each other? After all, we take the fact that Basque is a non-Indo-European language as evidence that Basque ancestors have quite different origins to most other Europeans; and, conversely, that if languages are related, such as Polynesian languages and indigenous Taiwanese, that the speakers have a common origin.

My thesis or postulate as one may wish to take: Early Sumerian spoke Tamil fluently and wrote in Tamil. 14.23..The sign ki, sound value key, meaning earth in Tamil in full modern form is kidai, kidakkai, Kai as well..to denote place, left right..

Collins's summary of racist theory pretty neatly also summarises current racist theory, masquerading as progressiveness. In the current Newspeak "progressive" means (in Oldspeak), "regressive" or even "reactionary".

Energy and dealing with it in sunshine-latitudes, where Sumer and other Mesopotamian cities located, and how that formed social consciousness - should be given a fair gravity in research, from now on. We now understand that, traumatised, out of the last ice age, the European mind has dealt with finite fossil fuel reserves - like no tomorrow - to total depletion in just 300 years. Would the attitude be different if sunshine-latitudes were in charge of Civilisation today - knowing those people are who have originally coined the concept of "Seven years of great plenty... Then there will come seven years of hunger and famine" and Gilgamesh's great loss of eternity? Can one articulate why it is sunshine-latitudes who again have become first in coining today that: "In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. Time taken in stocking energy to build an energy system, adding to it the time taken in building the system will always be longer than the entire useful lifetime of the system. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future" (2017).

Sumer and Indus wally civilisations were in simillar time frame and there was trade among them. Was there more than trade?

21:37... Yes, great works of Western scholars.. with out that, we or I would not have known from languages angle, the Sumerians spoke Tamil..

Advance Merry Christmas to All and zagumukku new year to all Iraqis ( and ourselves Pongal new year)..

My works mostly based on ePSD & ETCSL, research on secondary data, so recommend other scholars, Dravidian languages & African even European to test my thesis afresh.. note Greek numbers 1 & 9, how they are counted or said, have Sumerian-Tamil links..as number+aa & number+niaa

31:03 the need for construction of ziggurat initially could have been to protect from flooding..and as we constructed temples to reach sky god or getting connected..as I understand from Flood story..

32:28...uruk..urukku melting, city where that was happening.. eridu..aeri lakes, ponds ... place of them... Even Sumeri..could mean aeri soozhnda...the place covered by lakes.. we also have this word summa, that gives many meanings..one is just like that.. The early Akkadian & Sumerian might have got well mixed when there were thin population, with little competitions..on resources..

puabu=baba in turkish

1:11:22 may be it is an error, particularly, if we look into Kramer on Sumerian, the appendix...the early forms are definitely Tamil as we could relate pictogram, meaning, sound value..I recommend scholars to work on this early forms of Sumerian to recover better sense of Sumerian literature..

23:24 I tell our friends in Tamilnadu, see you have clay tablets written in Tamil and as recovered by Western scholars.. don't just regret that we have lost what were written on palm leaves..burnt or left in rivers or decayed..

31:03.. I am mostly traversing on linguistic.. UR, ur, oor is well known in Tamil as city or village or town...even I go back, the etymological link to creatures those move like snakes, worms or in simple sense move..migrate, as oorvana, again a test of agglutinative languages.. construction.. The ziggurat is seen by me in Tamil as sikil..ratham as sigaram, as peak, sikil as peacock.. Even Iraqi name sigaam might have come from sikil..

32:47 these huts look very similar to the Thoda tribes temples of Tamil Nadu..

15:49... The Sumerian part could be taken ie lugal ki.en.gi ki uri : aalugal kaiengi kidai oori...so to say the ruler, kaiengi of the City place ( Ur)!

47:45.. shulgi...I take in Tamil as sool+Kai or sool+gi... respectively meaning person of fertility + hand & person of fertility..

19:19.. Gudea...kudigalin ayya...father or grandfather of the people, citizens Girisu..sooran kirukku... the expert scribe or the place where they are seen..

The Sumerian relics were already there for millenia. Just ask the local guides who guided the British Archeologists. It's been centuries since the end of the British Empire, but the arrogance still shows unfortunately. "Discovery" is stretching it.

1:05:57 I suspect that superstitious or mystic appearances including hiding true identity could be reasons ... further, we have to investigate how shaving technology was in those period...

33:26 sid or zid the dates and it's sweetsness are related to spiritual experiences of God, as the sweet one can taste than see..

Excellent presentation: I had a question, those men of the day that did much of the translations, were they translating sag.gi.ga “black headed” via a racial prism? I ask because today many linguists in Assyriology view it as “peoples” rather than the literal interpretations. Thanks in advance.

Turkic