Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits by Gordon White

Author:Gordon White [White, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Scarlet Imprint / Bibliothèque Rouge
Published: 2016-10-27T22:00:00+00:00

SUMERIA

There is no question that the Sumerians, and specifically their origin, are downright weird. None other than Carl Sagan himself said that if any ancient culture had had contact with extraterrestrials, it would have been the Sumerians.

Around 3,500 BCE they appear fully formed in the archaeological record, speaking a language entirely unrelated to those around it, building great cities and ziggurats, irrigating the desert and writing, writing, writing as if the entire civilisation had some form of OCD dementia.

Mainstream academia’s refusal to close the Sumerian story’s gaping holes has unfortunately led to a lot of people parking their flying saucers in them. In the otherwise excellent The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of The Flood, Dr Irving Finkel moves straight from acknowledging we have no idea where Sumerian language came from to describing the language itself and how the reader may interpret Sumerian texts. We should expect better.

Returning to the evening of Dr Finkel’s book launch, I asked him about the fact that the earliest version of the Flood myth, based on his own translation, has animals put into the ark that are all predomesticated, that is wild animals, from a time before farming. My question was whether he thought that meant the entire Flood myth had its origins in a cultural memory of the end of the Ice Age, i.e. a time prior to animal domestication. He described my question as ‘huge’ and probably warranted a whole separate conference to ‘really thrash that out.’ This is academic speak for ‘yes, obviously, but I don’t want to be the one to say it. (In his defence, I probably wouldn’t risk a dream job at the British Museum, either.) In what has become the definitive undergraduate textbook on the subject, A History of the Ancient Near East, Marc Van De Mieroop writes:

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