Re: A China-Sumer connection

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 03/04/05 

Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 14:48:32 GMT

phippsmartin@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > Neither I nor Martyn
> > "flamed you first" or at all.
> >
> > Unless you consider requests for evidence to back you statements
> > "flaming."
>
> When they have already provided the evidence you are asking for in
> parallel posts, yes, that is flaming, especially when you are calling
> them "kooks" and "loons". It was immature of Comm to reply with the
> "arrogant bastards" and "too White" comments, but understandable. It
> was presumptuous of PKM to dismiss everything in that Indo-European
> Journal as "tainted" but a reasonable reaction by someone who's ideas
> are being dismissed by people on this group.

He still hasn't come up with a single "tainted" article. Or paragraph.

> Let's recap. I came on here asking if there was any reason to suppose
> that China and Sumer, two civilizations that developed in parallel,

This seems to have been before you-all started crossposting to sci.lang.
First assumption: that China and Sumer "developed in parallel." Why name
those two in particular? Is there anything about them that makes them a
natural class, such that the same development isn't seen anywhere else?
(That, of course, is what Toynbee was getting at with his "21
civilizations," and if he had no information about African ones, that's
too bad, but African ones would fit his schema just as well.)

> might have had contact that resulted in their simultaneous and similar

simultaneous? what's your evidence for simultaneous?

> advances. Coom and PKM both said "Yes", at first with Comm arguing for
> a Turkish link by land and PKM arguing for a Malay link by sea. Comm

What's the evidence for "Turks" at that point in time? or "Malays"?

> and PKM quickly found common ground and for that they were labelled as
> "kooks" and "loons" and accused of not providing any evidence, even as
> they provided plenty in the form of quotations of old Sumerian myths
> about sea faring "fishmen". Comm also provided a weblink that pointed

Neither of them ever quoted a single Sumerian text (myth or otherwise).
They quoted multiple recopyings of Greek texts supposedly relying on a
Babylonian original written nearly 2000 years after there were no more
Sumerians.

> to the "silk road" being in operation before the Roman era and I,
> myself, was able to find a link that claimed that the Sumerians had
> contact with the Turks by land and the Indians by sea. It really does

"Claims of links" are not persuasive. The fact that some Indus seals
have been excavated in Mesopotamia shows that there was some sort of
contact between the Indus Valley and the Euphrates Valley in Sumerian
times, but it does not show that there was direct contact; the tiny,
valuable objects could have passed from hand to hand to hand just as
easily, and more plausibly, than been carried by single merchants making
the entire trip across the Iranian Plateau.

> seem to me that 5000-6000 years ago there was plenty of contact between
> the Turks, the Sumers, the Indians, the Malays and the Chinese, perhaps

Once again, what is the _evidence_ for contact? What peoples are you
talking about? You cannot put modern names to them; the best you can do
is identify archeological horizons that might be associated with the
ancestors of this or that group.

> even enough to satisfy sceptics into believing that there was enough
> knowledged shared amongst everybody in the "region" that the parallel
> growth of civilizations in those areas at that time was no coincidence.
> So what's the problem? As I said before, we're not talking about
> aliens or Atlanteans or Gods or Demons but men learning from each other
> over great distances over large periods of time. Why is any serious
> discussion of ancient civilizations east of the Euphrates river
> automatically going to be labelled this way?

Why do you automatically assume that all those Asians weren't smart
enough to come up with things themselves, but had to be "sharing" among
each other? How is that different, basically, from postulating aliens or
Atlanteans or gods or demons? 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net
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