The Unexplained Mystery of the Sumerians: Where Did They Come From—and Where Did They Go?

#documentary #sumerians #mesopotamia
A century and a half ago, a Parisian orientalist seriously argued that an entire people had never existed, and that their language had been invented by priests to hide sacred texts from prying eyes. Scholars argued with him for a whole generation, and in the end it was the shovel that won. But the people who returned to history turned out to be an orphan: their language resembles no other on the planet. Where did these people come from? Some look for the answer in words older than the people themselves, others at the bottom of a gulf that the sea once flooded. And their disappearance is stranger still. No one exterminated them or drove them out. The fields slowly turned white with salt, nomads pressed in from the west, and one day the grandchildren simply started speaking a foreign language. Yet the language itself lived on for almost 2000 more years, without a single living native speaker. We look at what is actually known about all this, and along the way check where the tale of visitors from a twelfth planet came from.