On the possible homeland of the Sumerians

Abstract

In formation the Sumerians and their culture several nations took part, including “south-east” and “north-western” or “northern” ones. Analysis of more than 200 matching toponymic trajectories on the basis of Sumerian lexicon and hydronyms of Eurasia that connect Eastern Siberia, Altai, Kazakhstan, Caucasus and Mesopotamia shows a possible migration route of the “northern” proto-Sumerians. The astronomical data of the ancient Sumerian calendar also indicate the presence of the ancestors of a part of the Sumerians in the much more northern part of Eurasia, at the latitude of the northern Black Sea coast, the northern Caspian region, Kazakhstan, the Southern Altai and Siberia. The supposed localization of the initial migration region of the "northern" proto-Sumerians between Altai and Yakutia explains the similarity, revealed by a number of authors, of a number of terms in the Sumerian and Altaic and Uralic languages, the languages of the nominative system, as a consequence of territorial proximity and borrowing, despite the fact that the Sumerian language is not nominative, but the ergative language, as the East Siberian Chukchi-Kamchatka and Eskimo-Aleut languages, as well as the Pamirian - Burushak and Caucasian languages. The contacts of migrated northern proto-Sumerians or a part of them with the agricultural Neolithic peoples of Eastern Europe are possible too, as evidenced by a number of East European hydronyms.