In fact, the closest ancient cognate languages to Sumerian are DRAVIDIAN, and the closest modern languages to Sumerian are Sa'ami (which have a large input of words from another non-Indo European language group in North Asia).
Their "beliefs" were a tad different than the standard Indo-European "god set", and were decidedly different than anything developed by the neighboring Semites.
What you have to do is go back another millenia and things will become much more familiar. Otherwise we'd have to believe that the Dravidians who penetrated Mesopotamia 7 to 10 thousand years ago managed to cast off all their own cultural baggage to embrace beliefs which would not be invented for another 4000 or so years.
There's been a lot of back and forth movement from Punjab to Helsinki over the ages. The Aryans who acquired domesticated horses used them to track back to where local stories indicated they kept the good stuff.