Szittyakürt, 1978 (17. évfolyam, 1-9. szám)
1978-09-01 / 9. szám
Page 2 TIGHTS* SEPTEMBER 1978 On the basis of these considerations. Csőké (1973) provided evidence that the Hurri and Urartu languages can be considered as the bases of the Uralic and Altaic languages and that Sumerian is their archaic form. Another Soviet scholar. A.B. Doleopolski (1973), found similar links between the Hamitic-Kushic, Ural-Altaic, Dravidian, Sumerian, Semitic. Indo-European, Elamian and some Caucasian languages that existed more than 10,000 years ago. Mrs. Hary (1975) reviewed similar statements of Hungarian scholars who were not sufficiently appreciated in their days. «New lines for a correct Sumerian phonetics to conform with the cuneiform scripts» a paper read at the XXIX International Congress of Orientalists in Paris, by Francisco Jos Badiny (1974, p. 74), rose much attention. The author put the questions: «Is it at all possible to use the Sumerian vocabulary left in their transcriptions by Assyro-Babylonian writers, as a spoken language; could the Sumerians use the so-registered homophonic lexical material?». And further: «Is the grammer that we believe to decipher from the scripts, really of the living Sumerian of that time?». Following the opinion of René Labat, Raymond Jestin (1951) declared: «The problems of the Sumerian language can be solved neithei with the aid of Semitic nor with that of Indo-European language». TORDOS Hi 1 II A © * + t i J X * TROJA 1 II g Í 1 1 5 * + 1= i 1 £ X * JEMDET NASR KN0SS0S TARTARIA @ 0 d N p D • • o-H+hb DO 00 6- 4= • 6 * 3 * » X ( In a personal letter (1955), prof. A. Deimel wrote: «1 haven’t the slightest difficulty in accepting the fact that Hungarian and Sumerian are related languages»! According to Badiny: «60% of the monosyllabic Sumerian words are in present day Hungarian, with similar sound and meaning; the present-day Hungarian has the same agglutinative structure as the Sumerian; the same linguistic idiosyncrasies can be found in Sumerian and in Hungarian alike». Therefore, I would strongly advise that the Hungarian language be used to restore the Sumerian language and also, to help clarify problems otherwise posed in the Sumerian (the same can be done with Akkadian and Hebrew). So far, the Sumerian language has been studied in the context of Assvriology. Emphasis has been mostly put on the Akkadian language. The study of Sumerian is of importance because: 1) the Akkadian script is copied from Sumerian «cuneiform»; 2) the Akkadian texts contain a great deal of Sumerian expressions («sumerogramms»), the majority of which are missing in Akkadian, indicating the use of Sumerian sound and meaning-value by the Akkadians. Lehmann (1892) must have come to the same conclusions when he said that «Semitic Babylon uses a great many Sumerian words, the same is true for the Sumerians using Semitic words». Perhaps Kramer made the same considerations when he said: «Sumerian has many similarities with such agglutinative languages as Turkish, Hungarian and some Caucasian languages» (1965, p. 506). Sumerian is unique amongst the languages of the Ancient Middle East in being agglutinative (Hawkes & Woollev, 1964). Nevertheless only the non agglutinative Hebrew is used bv scholars of comparative analysis as a basis for their studies of the Sumerian language. This system might concern Akkadian — it is also a Semitic language but not agglutinative — but it can not be applied to Sumerian. Considering historical and archeological evidences. Badiny decides that the starting point of the Sumerian culture and ethnic movements to the north must have been SUBIR-KI — the territory spreading over URI-KI or AGADÉ. That is, the «Royal Title» of the kings of «Sumer and Akkad» — «Kings of the Four Quarters», already owned by Lugalannemundu, king of Adab (2,600 B.C.). It surges from the correspondence between Aradmu and Shulgi, the latter having sent an expedition to the north, the name of the people and territory in mention was SUBAR or SUBIR (Kramer, 1965, pp. 251-52). According to the Armenian historians (Byzant. Faust, M. Chorene, Indsidsian, Mechitar) «A SABAR, SUBAR or SABIR people existed in Urartu, living close to the Hurrians». «Hurrian has genetic and linguistic affinities only with Urartian, the language of ancient Armenia». «The Flurrians flourished from the middle of the third to the end of second millenium B.C. Their greatest political accomplishment was the Mitani Empire... Mitani dominated Assyria and NUZI... prior to the mass Hurrian settlement, the place was occupied by different Subarean ethnic groups (The Interpreters)». The identity of the Subarean people with the Hurrians is advocated by Oppenheim and Ungnad, but Semitic linguists (Speiser and Gelb) say otherwise. From ancient times it is possible to identify Armenia (in the «Northern Quarter of the Sumerian Royal Title») as the Subarean (Subir - Sabir people), which must have played an important role in Mesopotamian political life, as they may have settled in NUZI. We already know that Assyrian cruelty and the continual growth of Semitic power in Mesopotamia forced them to move northward. They founded «Sabiria» in the neighbourhood of Armenia and finally crossed the Caucasus (Padanyi 1965). We may deduce, from the cronicles of the Assyrian Kings and the bronze reliefs of the Gates of Balavat, how the Assyrians destroyed the northern Subirkipeoples and occupied Urartu. Patkanow (1900) expressed the opinion that the Subar-Sabir people are Hungarian tribes. Konstantinos Porphvrogenitos called the Hungarians «Sabartoi asphaloi» (Moravcsik, 1970). Macartney (1950) comes nearest to the truth in ascertaining that «Sabartoi» is identical with the North-Mesopotamia Subartu (Subir-ki) and Asphaloi is «only the usual Greek epitheton ornans» (Badinv, 1974, Dp. 68-69; pp. 72-75). C. Gostony (1975, pp. 58-111) sees in the ward «asphaloi» the Sumerian usbar, a composition of us (blood) and bar (body, skin), meaning: relative, descendant on matrilineal line. The Subarians expanding to the north, reached Siberia which received its name from the Sabir people (DiakonofT. 1971) like the city in western Hungary: Szombathely, received the latin name Sabaria in the frame of the Roman Empire on account of the Sabar (Savir, Savard) population settled in that area. Later a Hun-Sabir ethnic group founded Kazaria (Artamonov, 1962; Avgyijev, 1960), near the territory where Soviet archaeologists excavated the ruins of Szuvar, on the shores of the Volga. Considering these ethnic movements we may conclude that the Subarian language must have left its traces in archaeological finds too: for instance the rock inscriptions at Behistun. Behistun is a giant, towering rock, slightly to the east of the midpoint between Lake Van and the Persian Gulf. The cuneiform inscriptions there are positioned below and by the side of a large relief depicting the victory of Darius the 1st over ten of his enemies. Today it is known that they were written in Old-Persian (Neo-Elamite), Median and Assyro-Babylonian, the three major languages spoken by the population of the Persian Empire. The second language of the trilingual inscription was also spoken in and around Susa and is therefore named Neo-Elamite. Its decipherers (Westergaard, 1844; Hincks, 1857; Rawlinson, 1847; Norris, 1852) established that it was also agglutinative as Hungarian and Turkish, they were of the opinion that it was spoken by the Medians and that is related to the languages spoken by Scythian or Turanian fcig. 4 Charts comparing standard pictograms from Tordos, Troja femdet Nasr, Knossos and Tartaria. peoples (Erdy 1974, p. 50). According to Oppert — says Érdy — «the contemporary people whose language was placed in the distinguished second position had to be the Turanian Medes, who had played a very important role in vanquishing Assyria. He confirmed this by the argument that the Medes called themselves Mada which is an ancient Turanian word meaning land and country in Sumerian. The same word was the source of the geographic name of Media and of the ethnic name of its inhabitants» (Érdy 1974, p. 51). Oldjas Suleimanov provides new evidence of the linguistic affinities between the Sumerian and the Turkish. He presents, not only parallels in the lexical material, but similarities in the religious beliefs, customs, rituals, burial traditions, ethnic arts and practices. He regrets that Western scholars in their enthusiasm for Indo-European history, show no concern for the languages and cultural history of Asia (cf. Avgyijev, I960). G.J. Pelih proves the affinity of the Sumerian and Selcoup languages mainly in the religious beliefs, burial customs, particularly in the Narimi archaic area. Fig. 5 Fishnet weight with pictograms from Tordos. The Reguly Vogul collection, gathered in the last century, gives proof of the high cultural level in which they lived earlier (Orbán, 1975). In these poems, hymns and prayers — in stylistical forms very similar to the Sumerian ones — the people and their leaders present themselves as having known the writing, «the book, the metallurgy, smithery, husbandry, town and house-building» (Bobula, I960). It is known, that this cultural wave coming from the south met the dolichocephalic European «race» in the area of Ananino (Baráth, 1974). In Finland not only the name of their own country, Suomi, but also the linguistic vestiges, point to the south (Helmi, 1973). C. Gostony presents his arguments and other proofs in his demonstration table (1975, pp. 194-202). In Tartaria (Tatárlak), Transylvania, in 1963 Nicolae Vlassa excavated a Neolithic settlement where he found three tablets from the 5th millennium B.C. On these tablets there are pictographic writings similar to those discovered at Lepenski Vir in Yougoslavia by D. Srejovic (Badiny, 1974, pp. 33-38). Tig. 6 Three Sumerian-type, pictographyc clay tablets excavated by N. Vlassa in 1961 at Tatarlak (Tartaria, Transylvania), 18 km. from Zsófia Torma’s site at Tordos. Ca. 2/3 of original size (after Vlassa, 1963). Near to Tartaria, in Tordos, the Hungarian archaeologist Zs. Torma, in the second half of the past century, found ca. 10,000 Neolithic pieces of Körösculture (Kalicz, 1970) much of them with pictographic-symbolic writing. Sumerologists making an examination of these Tartaria inscriptions stated that the writing is a thousand years older than similar finds unearthed in Mesopotamia at Djemdet Nasr. Boris Perlov (1975) commented on the statement at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and concluded: the presumerian pictographic-symbolic writing, as it seems, moved from the Karpathian basin toward the south. The Sumerian language however presented itself about the 3rd millenium B.C. in an unfolded although transitional writing stage. A. Kifisin, a Soviet sumerologist, ascertains, that the earlier common Eurasian symbolic system with its ca 7o symbol-families dissolved in the 7th millennium B.C. on account of the polifeminisation. Thus the development of the writing guides us back to the 8th millennium, when the Scythic world began to move towards the est and south with the Turanian peoples (A. Endrey, 1975). As far as the rest goes the Tartaria writing is very similar to the symbols of the ancient Hungarian writing system (Zakar, 1976, cf. Telegdi, 1558).
