-Caveat Lector-
In a message dated 99-10-14 18:19:09 EDT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>and there is no evidence, as far as I know, that it was ever used as the
>common speech even in *Sumer*! Was it an artificial language, created ex
>nihilo as both Arabic and Hebrew were supposed to have been?
As far as I know, Sumerian WAS used as "common" speech in Sumer, at the
earliest period. In fact, Sumerian had a whole DIALECT specifically for
commoners, just as it had one for women -- sorta like Japanese in that
respect. Of course, "common" here may only mean the lower classes among the
conquering race, since the Sumerians were INVADERS in the Persian Gulf, and
there were indigenous people, and immigrant Amorites, Akkadians, etc.,
aplenty in the same area, each with their own language.
Hebrew and Arabic ex nihilo? No way. Both derive from a "proto-Semitic"
tongue, of which the best example is Akkadian -- which is nearly IDENTICAL to
early Hebrew.
BTW, I never intended to bring Sitchin into the picture here ... I thought
it interesting, though, that the PHOENICIANS were international traders long
before there were any "Israelites," and amusing that the tribe of "Dan"
--sea-farers, with territory BORDERING
Tyre and Sidon-- has somehow been credited with "founding" outposts in places
where the PHOENICIANS already travelled. You know, those swarthy, big-nosed,
dark-haired
people who show up in Canaanite/Phoenician monuments -- hailed as Celtic
"Aryans"! One shouldn't be surprised, though, that blue-eyed blondes
travelled those routes ca. 1500 BC or later, since the "Philistines" of
Canaan were only Mycenaean Greeks who made a living as mercenaries fighting
for the Egyptians and Phoenicians, and as hired hands of the latter, they had
access to the same (originally Phoenician) trails inward into Europe and to
Ireland via "Tarshish" and Spain. But there's STILL the question of where
the Phoenicians got their commercial acumen and navigatory knowledge, which
were not evident in either Egypt or mainland Canaan, the two places usually
suggested
for their origin. I propose SUMERIAN origins for the Phoenicians, for
several reasons:
(1) EARLIER, Sumerians were famed as seafarers (Egyptians hated the sea) AND
as traders, (2) the Sumerians also had a reputation as "builders," with a
distinct "priestly" stone-mason caste (the Egyptian god Ptah of Old Kingdom
times is believed by some to be of SUMERIAN origin), and (3) the Sumerians
DID found "colonies" as far northeast as Anatolia, not far from Canaan ...
Why, then, should "Phoenicia" be an exception?
And back to "Dan" -- in Sumerian, the root-word *di(n) means not just
"judge," but as in Canaanite/Phoenician, and exactly as in HEBREW, it
originally referred to a SPECIFIC
kind of "judgment," related to TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE -- and the Hebrew word for
"knowledge," DA'ath, is a truncated form of an original DAN-ath, root D_N,
just as the Hebrew word for "truth" [which ALSO had a more precise meaning,
being "correctness"
and "accuracy" in measurement, i.e., a "technical" word] is Ameth, a
shortening of the original AmeN-eth, as shown by the survival of the related
adjective "Amen," "true-ly."
(Don't take my word for it -- any good Hebrew etymological text mentions the
latter as the prime example of what scholars call the "vanishing N" in Hebrew
as it developed..)
Even the linguistics here suggests a people "knowledgeable" in a TECHNICAL
way, as befits the "Hermetic" engineers/scientists who designed and built
Solomon's Temple ...
So what's implied here is intriguing enough WITHOUT invoking Sitchin or his
"aliens" ...
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