# What were the Sumerians ethnically and linguistically? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [June 1, 2015, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-sumerians-ethnically-and-linguistically/721378 "2015-06-01T20:31:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2015, 5:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-sumerians-ethnically-and-linguistically/721378/21 "2015-06-04T05:51:43Z")
[QUOTE=Johanna] Islam at first was a force to redress the imbalance of patriarchal power that had recently caused much social inequality, and allowed women to own and inherit property in their own right, which did not begin to occur in Europe until the 19th century. [/QUOTE] This is an over-statment. Unmarried women and widows could own property in their own right at common law in England for centuries, as a _feme sole_. _Married_ women could own property in their own right, but their husbands had control over it. It was this latter restriction which was done away with in the 19th century with the _Married Women’s Property Act_. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2015, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-sumerians-ethnically-and-linguistically/721378/22 "2015-06-04T22:37:58Z")
> [@Theturkeydidit](#): > > I would say whatever came before Arabs. They can’t be Arabs because women had rights in their society. Arabs are a whole another ball game. This is silly on so many levels. The various proto-Arab cultures arose a couple of thousand years after the Sumerian culture, so the whole statement is pointless. We really do not know exactly how much freedom or what rights Sumerian women had. There are sufficient numbers and varieties of Arab cultures that making a declaration about what rights “Arab” women have or lack without clarifying the group discussed will almost certainly be in error. There really does not appear to have been a purpose to the quoted post aside from making snide remarks about Arabs. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2015, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-sumerians-ethnically-and-linguistically/721378/23 "2015-06-05T01:07:02Z")
> [@Latro](#): > > The surname Bigot, does indeed have a high occurence in Normandy. The Bigod family were Earls of Nofolk from the 1090s to the 1390s. ---
**Author:** ![climbuponahilltop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c0e974/32.png) [@climbuponahilltop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/climbuponahilltop)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2015, 11:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-sumerians-ethnically-and-linguistically/721378/24 "2015-06-05T11:19:16Z")
> [@Latro](#): > > **Nava**? > > i recall an old article about a people living in the Gascogne area during the (late) middle ages. They were supposed to have a distinctly pale skin and were called Bigots, IIRC. > > Can’t find anything about them now. > Does that ring a bell with you? Anything to do with the Basques? Are you thinking of the [Cagots](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagot)? Their persecution is a very interesting case study, because there really was nothing, genetically or linguistically, to distinguish them from their neighbors. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2015, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-sumerians-ethnically-and-linguistically/721378/25 "2015-06-05T14:15:53Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > > [@robert\_columbia](#): > > > > Language and genetics don’t always match up neatly. They often do, but not always. For example, Basque is been classified as a language isolate, but Basque speakers tend to be genetically very similar to western-European speakers of Romance and Celtic languages. For example, Basque speakers display a high percentage of the “R1b” y-chromosome lineage, which also commands a striking majority in Ireland and France. So was everyone in the Basque region and environs originally Basque speaking…The debate is still on… > > That dichotomy doesn’t seem to make sense. It’s expressed as if the Basque Lands were somehow isolated, but they’re not: assuming that Basque existed in the area before “all dem outsiders” started coming (say, before the Greek traders), there’s been an influx of “dem outsiders” into the area ever since, it would be very difficult to find in the whole of Euskal Herria a single person who is “100% Basque since before the Romans” (we do use that expression for some people but as a joke, with the knowledge that even those who can recite a list of Basque lastnames longer than the book of Numbers still have some “outsider” blood). In the first question, are you using “the Basque region” to refer to the very large area where R1b is found, and then the “remnant” would be the current Basque area? Because if you are, I know some political parties who’ll need to decide if they love you or hate your guts… The idea that a large number of speakers of Indo-European “Centum” languages of western Europe (Celtic, Romance, Germanic) are descended from Indo-Europeanized speakers of Basque or a language related to Basque is part of the [Vennemann’s Vasconic Substrate Theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasconic_substratum_theory). It’s quite interesting to me because I am an R1b (specifically, an Insular Celtic subtype most common in areas that speak, or have recently spoken, Irish Gaelic). So, the question of whether my paternal ancestors were probably Celtic speaking since before encountering Basque or Basque-like speakers in western Europe or whether they _were_ Basque or Basquelike speakers who adopted proto-Celtic or proto-Irish for some reason is quite interesting. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2015, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-sumerians-ethnically-and-linguistically/721378/26 "2015-06-05T15:16:09Z")
> [@climbuponahilltop](#): > > Are you thinking of the [Cagots](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagot)? Their persecution is a very interesting case study, because there really was nothing, genetically or linguistically, to distinguish them from their neighbors. YES!!! _THAT_ is what I was looking for. Cagots. Thank you. What I remembered from the article was that they had paler skin. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2015, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-sumerians-ethnically-and-linguistically/721378/27 "2015-06-05T18:22:30Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > … I am an R1b (specifically, an Insular Celtic subtype most common in areas that speak, or have recently spoken, Irish Gaelic). So, the question of whether my paternal ancestors were probably Celtic speaking since before encountering Basque or Basque-like speakers in western Europe or whether they _were_ Basque or Basquelike speakers who adopted proto-Celtic or proto-Irish for some reason is quite interesting. The dating of Y-chromosome events is becoming much firmer. [This site shows a detailed chart for the clades of R1b-L151, with dates](http://www.yfull.com/tree/R-L151/). R1b-L151 is ancestral to a very large share of Western Europeans including both the U106 (“Germanic”) and P312 (“Italo-Celtic”) subclades; the latter includes most Basques and Irish. L151 is shown with TMRCA of 4900 ybp (2900 BC). If you hover the cursor over the date estimate, “error bars” are indicated. L151 TMRCA might be as early as 3400 BC. In other words, there was an “L151 Adam” who probably lived near Bavaria sometime after 3400 BC, and who is the patrilineal ancestor of about half of Western Europeans. This was presumably long after the establishment of a proto-Basque language in Spain, so we can assume the R1b elite spoke an Indo-European language. The spread of L151 was partly coincident with the spread of Bell Beaker. Burials from that period shows there was indeed a male elite class, with beakers as a prestige good. The pre-I-E West European women continued to procreate and are ancestral to today’s Europeans, but the males were largely replaced by the newcomers. The poor success of other males to procreate was due in part to initial violence, but the longer-term failure of lower-caste children to thrive may have also played a role. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2015, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-sumerians-ethnically-and-linguistically/721378/28 "2015-06-05T19:06:41Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > The dating of Y-chromosome events is becoming much firmer. [This site shows a detailed chart for the clades of R1b-L151, with dates](http://www.yfull.com/tree/R-L151/). R1b-L151 is ancestral to a very large share of Western Europeans including both the U106 (“Germanic”) and P312 (“Italo-Celtic”) subclades; the latter includes most Basques and Irish. L151 is shown with TMRCA of 4900 ybp (2900 BC)… > The pre-I-E West European women continued to procreate and are ancestral to today’s Europeans, but the males were largely replaced by the newcomers. The poor success of other males to procreate was due in part to initial violence, but the longer-term failure of lower-caste children to thrive may have also played a role. Thanks. It could be the case that many western Europeans today are descendants of Basque or Basque-like women and Italo-Celtic men - that could explain why people who seem so similar in genetics speak widely disparate languages. The ancestors of today’s Basque speakers may have preserved their mothers’ language while the rest of western Europe went with dad’s language. And this could provide a plausible explanation for the origins and/or fate of the Sumerians - originally, there may have been both Sumerian and Proto-Semitic speakers in the Middle East, and due to complex but not that hard to understand social phenomena, they merged and became largely the same in terms of genetics (e.g. ‘general Iraqi’) but one branch ended up Sumerian-speaking while another became a Semitic-speaking population. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2015, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-sumerians-ethnically-and-linguistically/721378/29 "2015-06-06T03:36:33Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > The idea that a large number of speakers of Indo-European “Centum” languages of western Europe (Celtic, Romance, Germanic) are descended from Indo-Europeanized speakers of Basque or a language related to Basque is part of the [Vennemann’s Vasconic Substrate Theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasconic_substratum_theory). It’s quite interesting to me because I am an R1b (specifically, an Insular Celtic subtype most common in areas that speak, or have recently spoken, Irish Gaelic). So, the question of whether my paternal ancestors were probably Celtic speaking since before encountering Basque or Basque-like speakers in western Europe or whether they _were_ Basque or Basquelike speakers who adopted proto-Celtic or proto-Irish for some reason is quite interesting. OK, so the answer to my question was “yes”, you were using “the Basque lands” to refer to a much larger area than the current one; you were also talking about a way back when even older than our legends, a way back so back it was before Breogán left Galicia, so back it was before those same areas started trading with each other, going fishing with each other, making babies with each other’s daughters. For what it’s worth, those legends say that the Basque are later-arrivals than the Celts and that they started marrying local women about as soon as they arrived (they have more than a whiff of rewritten Abrahamic myth, but at the same time they match known migration patterns including that better chromosomic dating). ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2015, 12:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-sumerians-ethnically-and-linguistically/721378/30 "2015-06-06T12:35:54Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > … For what it’s worth, those legends say that the Basque are later-arrivals than the Celts and that they started marrying local women about as soon as they arrived … This is interesting. Are there any discussions of these legends on-line? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-sumerians-ethnically-and-linguistically/721378.md?page=1)