200-year-long drought may have killed Sumerian language

MSNBC ^ | 12-4-2012 | Tia Ghose

[Renfield]

A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says.

Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues. But several pieces of archaeological and geological evidence tie the gradual decline of the Sumerian civilization to a drought.

The findings, which were presented Monday here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, show how vulnerable human society may be to climate change, including human-caused change....

[muawiyah]

The first part of the current ice age had cycles of about 40,000 years of ice followed by an interglacial of 10,000 years of warmth and high ocean levels. The second part of the current ice age had cycles of about 100,000 years of ice followed by an interglacial of 10,000 years of warmth and high ocean levels.

We've had about 20 such cycles!

The climate for 2.5 million years for most of the planet has therefore been ICE AGE ~ GLACIAL. The climate for a couple of million years before that was PRE ICE AGE - NON GLACIAL ~ but the Southern Hemisphere had it's own cycles of expansion and contraction of the Antarctic ice pack.

Several sources say the ice in the Ghost Mountains (2 miles deep ~ covers all the mountains) in Antarctica may well have been there 500 million years! Nobody's been to the bottom yet, so who knows eh!

I suspect the almost permanantly iced up condition of much of Antarctica has a lot to do with advances of glaciers in the Northern hemisphere though, so we should keep our eyes on the place. Currently it's getting colder and producing more ice ~ just freezes it right out of the air too!

[blam]

The cause of the drought:

Disaster That Struck The Ancients

[SunkenCiv]

Drought May Have Killed Sumerian Language
Live Science | 12-5-2012 | Tia Ghose
Posted on December 5, 2012 9:54:00 AM EST by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2965838/posts

[SunkenCiv]

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Thanks Renfield and blam for the topics, and thanks Cronos for the ping. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[SunkenCiv]

BTW, not a chance. :') The Sumerians came from the sea (their words not mine) and referred to themselves as "the black-headed people". Their language is an isolate, and agglutinative, hence probably they came from the Indus or from southern India. They had a superstition that cities could not be founded by humans, only by gods, and took over existing cities, usually leaving even the foreign names. Their words for the great rivers of Mesopotamia were likewise borrowed from an unknown prior people speaking an unknown, otherwise unrecorded language. The Sumerians had the cuneiform writing system, which was widely adapted (notably by the Akkadians, who had no problem founding cities) and remained in wide use -- including in Egypt -- until the early centuries A.D. The Sumerians themselves faded out during a protracted period of internecine city-state warfare, and were absorbed and superseded by the Semitic Akkadians/Assyrians.

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[GeronL]

200 years of parched tongues changed the language?

Lip Balm could have saved it!

[blam]

"The Sumerians came from the sea (their words not mine) and referred to themselves as "the black-headed people"."

Maybe From Sundaland.

Wise men from the east.

[gleeaikin]

I see the date 4,200 years ago. I wonder if this is the same period of the First Intermediate Period in Egypt in which Ipuwer wrote so vividly of terrible environmental calamities in Egypt. I was doing some checking on Meteor strikes around that period, and in addition to the crater in the Iraq marshes which SC first brought to our attention, I also saw some information about several craters in Argentina also from that time period. I think one was 13 miles in diameter. Not big enough for an extinction event, but certainly capable of causing noticeable earth changes.

[Ezekiel]

I think you are on to something.

Don't drink don't smoke, what do ya do?

Obviously the language died out when the Sumerians became so parched that they couldn't even lick those clay tablets enough to write anything down.

[null and void]

Must be something...

[SunkenCiv]

Disaster That Struck The Ancients
BBC | 7-26-2001 | Fekri Hassan
Posted on Sat Dec 8 17:51:43 2001 by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/586511/posts

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/1607979/posts?page=246#246

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2965838/posts