The Ancient Connection Between Sumerian, Semitic, and Indo-European Religions

For many years I have been pestered by a nagging thought. An idea on the periphery of my consciousness scratching away like an insect, never letting me rest. This idea began to taunt me long before I had the breadth of knowledge I required to properly intellectualize and expand it to a more precise understanding.

Yet when this idea did finally crystallize, it opened the doorway to an intriguing possibility. The possibility of an older, broader connection between the ancient religions and, more to the point, between the main ethnic and linguistic families present in Western Eurasia during the final millennia of prehistory.

This idea revolves around the question:

Why is there such a strong connection between Indo-European religion, myths and legends, and the religions of the linguistically and ethnically distinct Sumerians and the Semitic Akkadians?

Let me explain.

The Layers of Depth of this Problem

One of the layers of this issue is an ethnic and linguistic issue. The Indo-European people are — to some degree at least — an ethnic grouping of people. More precisely the Indo-European peoples are Indo-European speaking peoples, as this is a family of languages connecting a range of modern peoples. A range so extensive as to be surprising if you have never heard this term before.

Nonetheless, there is both an ethnic, cultural, and genetic distinction that comes with this classification, just as to be a Semitic-speaking people (Jewish, Arab, Akkadian, Phoenician, Canaanite, etc.) is a useful ethnic and cultural distinction. The Jews and Palestinian Arabs, for example, are closely related. Cousins or siblings on a genetic level. Arabic and Hebrew are both Semitic languages which, if you trace them back far enough, were both part of the same language. The Arabs claim descent from Abraham according to Islam, just as the Jews do, according to the Hebrew Bible (called the Tanakh, and Old Testament by Christians).

There are extensive documented linguistic, religious, legendary and mythological connections found between Celtic, Norse, Vedic, Greek, and Zoroastrian traditions and cultures. Once we get into the information itself, the depth and breadth of these similarities are genuinely astounding. However, they make sense culturally because all of these people speak languages that were once a singular language perhaps spoken by a single culture — and probably an extended ethnic group that becomes more related the further back in time we go — if we go back far enough. Thus shared traditions, while surprising to discover this as it was unknown before, have a fundamental logic to it.

Iranians, Irish, Vedic Aryans of India, Germanic, Greek, Norse, Assyrian, Ancient Hittite and Hurrian peoples, and many, many more are all Indo-European. This ancient connection is the reason for the extensive connection we see between modern Indo-European peoples (British, French, Spanish, Indian, Welsh, Irish, Germanic, Nordic, Greek, Russian, Armenian, Iranian, and many more.) This is why similarities between Greek and Norse, between Norse and Vedic, or between Celtic and Norse languages and religions are found. (For more information, read about the Indo-European People and Indo-European Languages.) Likewise, this is why there are such extensive religious, cultural, ethnic, and genetic relations between the Semitic people (Jews and Arabs) to this day.

The issue that I struggled with is that when we go back to the dawn of recorded history, to the texts recorded in Ancient Iraq that bear the Sumerian and Akkadian traditions in both languages, there are many shared themes between the Sumerian, Semitic, and Indo-European religions in their most ancient roots. Indeed, Sumerian and Semitic Akkadian culture and religion are essentially the same in the earliest period of history.

So the question is: why (or how) are these three linguistic-ethnic groups so connected in ancient times? Why do these three linguistic, ethnic, and cultural families share the same ancestral traditions at the earliest period of recorded history? Or stated another way, what is the connection between them in prehistory?

Is it possible that the Semites, Sumerians (and related peoples) and the Indo-Europeans have a more ancient bond that reaches back towards the End of the Last Ice Age, to the roots of advanced, urban civilization? Are we more related than previously thought?

Shared religious, mythological, and cultural traditions seem to suggest just that.

The Linguistic Connection Through The Ancient World

There are certain linguistic connections that I find fascinating, which I like to turn to in order to highlight this connection between essentially all people of Eurasia west of the Himalayas. Just look at the word for Mother.

The word ‘mother’ is one of the most profound of these ancient connections. It is nearly identical in an incredible range of ancient and modern languages over an impressive geographical and cultural range: mata (Sanskrit), mutter (German), módir (Icelandic), mathair (Irish Celtic), mathir (Persian), madre (Spanish), and matj (Russian). The resemblance is clear, even for those who don’t study linguistics. As sometimes a linguist will recognize the relationship between two words because they understand the morphology between the languages over time (how certain sounds of one language shifted as it evolved / developed into a new language) which makes it appear very different to a laymen. However, this is not necessary for the word ‘mother’ since the relationship is clear.

I like the word ‘mother’ for another reason. It is such a fundamental word in language, as it is part of arguably the most important bond for the human species, that between mother and child. It is often the first word a child learns to speak, in any language, and because of this, it is my opinion that this type of word changes the least within a language over thousands of years. Perhaps because it is so intrinsic, fundamental, and primitive in the sense of its near-elemental meaning. I feel that this is proven by the similarities above.

For arguments sake, let us assume that the Indo-European family divided into three groups maybe between 6000-4000 BCE. (A tripartate division between the Proto-Indo-European people in that specific date range is not a fact, necessarily. I want to be clear on that. The actual story is significantly more complex, dealing with wave after wave of migrations over centuries in all directions. A diffusion across Eurasia. So as a simplification just to better visualize, let us consider three branches.)

One branched off migrating west into Europe in the form of the Corded-Ware culture (and others) becoming the Celtic, Germanic, Greek and eventually Norse peoples. Another faction of the population remained in the center between the Black and Caspian seas, expanding regionally nonetheless, developing into the Yamnaya culture, the Hittites, Hurrians, later Russians. The other moved east becoming the Vedic Aryans (who spoke Sanskrit), Iranians, Persians, and the followers of Zoroastrian Religion.

The point is that they branched off from one another perhaps most intensely within the 6000–4000 BCE date range, but before and after too — in either case well before Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian traditions were first recorded. Yet the Persian mathir and the Irish Celtic mathair, are nearly identical. As are the Icelandic módir, the Spanish madre, Sanskrit mata, German mutter, and Ancient Egyptian mut. From Ireland to India, these words did not change over thousands of years, proving my belief to a degree in the solidity over time of some of these deep words. Even though these people were almost certainly well outside of the range of any meaningful contact this early in history because of huge, insurmountable geographic distance. To make it more interesting, the religious and mythological similarities between these peoples are likewise extensive.

However, there is another layer of facts that makes this connection even more incredible, and curious.

All of the above languages and people I mentioned above are Indo-European (with the exception of Ancient Egyptian, although some of their pharaoh mummies do appear to have red hair…). As I said before, the connection between them is fascinating. But once you know that they are definitively related, it makes sense. (Like when you realize that Wednesday comes from Odens-day and Wodens–day and Thursday from Thors-day, a reference to the Norse gods. The Norse were Germanic people, and the English language and many English bloodlines trace back to German.)

Here is the curveball:

The Sumerianwords for mother is “ama” and “ummum”. I don’t need to point out just how similar those words are to mama in colloquial English to this day (there is even a “mum” within the latter). Equally as curious is that the Hebrew word for ‘mother’ is ima (אִמָא), which is nearly identical to the Sumerian word ama. As are the Arabic terms Mama, Mami, Ommah, and Ommi (to name a few variants). The Hebrew and Arabic similarities make sense because they are both Semitic languages (and part of the Afroasiatic language family with Egyptian) and their similarity with Sumerian has a historical explanation as the Sumerians and Akkadians — the ancestors of the Jews, Abraham was Akkadian — were a single people religiously and culturally (though not ethnically or linguistically). Another indication of how amazingly long the memory of the Jews is, and how admirably accurate their retention is in many cases. In Ancient Egyptian, one of their words for ‘mother’ (and for the mother goddess) is Mut, which is curiously similar to German (Mutter) and Vedic (Mata) and Norweigian (Mor). Even more confusing is that in Mandarin Chinese, their word for ‘mother’ is also māma (妈妈), and in Korean the word is Umma and Omma which is identical to Sumerian, Hebrew, and Arabic.

All of these linguistic connections that I have briefly highlighted suggest the same connection that I saw with the extensive religious connections between Hebrew, Sumero-Akkadian, Greek, Norse, Celtic, Vedic, and Zoroastrian religions. All of this comes together to indicate an ancient connection between the Indo-European, Semitic, and Sumerian people. The problem posed by this information is: what exactly is this connection and the circumstances that fostered it? When did this relationship first take place?, How are these three distinct linguistic and ethnic families so related? Or perhaps, how and when did one people differentiate into three?

The Curious Case of China

Indeed, based on this information I also believe there is an argument for a connection between the Indo-European-Semitic-Sumerian group and the Ancient Chinese. (I am talking about even before the semi-mythical Xia Dynasty in prehistory, before the Shang Dynasty.) Partially because I found Mandarin easy to learn as it appeared to me to be incredibly close to English from a grammar perspective (compared to Japanese, which was truly foreign by comparison … I am talking significantly harder strictly because of the grammar that will be almost nonsensical from an English, German, French perspective).

Secondly, because the advanced ancient Chinese urban lifestyle and nobility originated in China in the north-northwest, perhaps moving into what became China from the direction, i.e. from the Greate Eurasian Steppe in the north above the Himilayas where the Silk Road was to develop later which connected them to Central Asia, the Near East, and Europe. Their nobility were fair, light-skinned people compared to darker-skinned Southeast Asian — light, pale skin being a status symbol among nobility in Ancient China suggesting genetic admixture from a foreign, northern group — leading me to believe that China was settled in a way similar to the Vedic Aryans movement into India, subjugating the dark-skinned indigenous Dravidians in the south. The Qin Dynasty did just this from their home in the northwest, thus it might have happened 2000+ years earlier too.

The Cultural, Genetic, and Religious Context

Above we explored briefly the linguistic indication that found these arguments of an ancient connection between the Indo-European, Semitic, and Sumerian peoples — a connection far more prominent in their religions — which indicate their traditions all descend from a shared Ancestral Tradition.In light of the discovery of the similarities in Indo-European languages (which set a precedent for this type of argument) while it wasn’t understood well at the beginning, peoples from Ireland to India, and from Turkey and Greece northwards to Norway and Russia are all part of the same family of people.

I stated above that the Indo-European people are also a genetically and ethnically distinct people, in general terms. We are, to some degree. But from another perspective, we really are not. European people (including the Norse, Irish, Germanic, and British peoples) are ultimately the descendents of Neolithic Farmers from the Middle East. Our blood traces right back to the same homeland as the Sumerians and Semitic Akkadians, but with the admixture of the native people we slaughtered, conquered, and absorbed (foreign, indigenous women specifically, as male genetic lines end) in our progression across Europe. (The indigenous Europeans look very much like the ancient Asian and Native American peoples.) People from Russia, West Asia and Europe are far more similar than we are different, compared to Africans or Asians.

It is a fact that all people outside of Africa are less genetically diverse than the genetic diversity we see among African populations. Eurasian, Native American, and Oceanic peoples as a collective group are less genetically diverse among themselves, than Africans are on their continent. (Hence the instances of bitter racism that exist between Africans in Africa, like the Tutsis v. Hutus.) This is because Africans are the first homo sapiens, and have lived in Africa for 200,000+ years longer than any of us have been outside of Africa.

In our migrations out of Africa, we can see the human race divide itself into four major ethnic families. These used to be called “races” of humans, although this term has gone out of style because it is perceived to be “racist” by some. However, this distinction is valuable because there historically were apparently four major families of human beings (perhaps even three) that represent major, visible, ethnic groups of our species across geography. White/Caucasian, Black/Negroid/African, Asian/Mongoloid, and potentially a fourth, Australoid.

We see a wave of migration Out of Africa that seem to link people like the Dravidians of southern India with other Southeast Asian, Pacific Islanders and Australian Aboriginees who, at least by appearance, seem to be closer with black Africans. (I must specify Black Africans, because technically, we are all Africans.) This is the Australoid human lineage which are sometimes considered as a direct subgroup of the African group, the people who never left Africa — specifically Black. Then we have the Caucasians (Indo-Europeans and Semites of Europe and West Asia, including northern Indians, Jews, Arabs, Russians, Europeans, Armenians, Persians, etc.). The final group, Asian, is formed by a variety of Asian peoples (with a potential distinction between those in the far south versus the north) including Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian in addition to the Paleo-Indians (the ancestors of the Native American People) and the indigenous people of Europe before they were … “assimilated”.

The whole story of human migration Out of Africa is fascinating, even though we have so many gaping holes in our knowledge of the full story of humanity. The above distinction is a vast over-simplification, and not completely accurate, yet accurate enough in general theme. Those are probably the four major distinctions among humanity. The relevance of this in our present discussion of the Connection Between Indo-European, Semitic, and Sumerian Religion is that when we move back in time towards the last Ice Age, the homeland of the Indo-European, Semitic, and Sumerian peoples converge into one another — into the Near East, Anatolia, and the Fertile Crescent. This is the homeland of all Europeans.

While we do not know why these people spoke three distinct languages — or what it means that they did — it does help us to explain the extensive religious connection between these peoples in much later times. Long after they had evolved independently from one another for thousands of years.

Direction Of Transmission of the Ancestral Tradition, and the Origins of Stories

In recognizing the similarities in culture and religion between the earliest recorded Semites (the Akkadians), the Sumerians, and the Indo-Europeans, one of the first questions to arise was on the Direction of Transmission of the Ancestral Tradition.However, that doesn’t matter much to me now because I think all three of these groups converge into one another somehow, making the point somewhat redundant. Nonetheless, it is still important to investigate thoroughly in case there is evidence to be found.

For example, consider extensive similarities between Sumerian Religion and Ancient Greek Religion. They both possess a pantheon of super-human beings, with the gods and figures of that pantheon aligning directly to one another with a high degree of accuracy, with many of the themes of their mythologies, specific stories and legends matching up nearly perfectly (with a similar crossover between Sumerian-Norse, Sumerian-Zoroastrian, Sumerian-Celtic, and Sumerian-Vedic mythologies).

At around 3000 BCE we have the nation of Sumer emerging, probably the first advanced urban civilization on Earth, at around the same time that the Greek Minoans emerged on the island of Crete. We actually know they were in contact, the Minoans a trading empire even then connecting Sumer and Old Kingdom Egypt, and have inscriptions in an early Greek language referencing their gods (Zeus specifically, for example) at a similarly early date. In essence, we have written records which document the existence of their respective religions around the dawn of history. At least in name, So a question we can ask is:

Who came first?

There is so much cross-over between the religions. The Greek religion was actually documented more completely from a much more recent time period than Sumerian, between 1-2 millennia later. Yet the similarities are still extensive. We can assume that they are equally ancient, based on extant inscriptions. Literally prehistoric. The Ancient Greeks were Indo-European people. The Sumerians spoke a language isolate disconnected from Indo-European languages and the Semitic languages, thus were linguistically and probably ethnically distinct from both. They are also somewhat mysterious, ethnically speaking. Yet they shared extensive religious and cultural elements. This issue of three distinct linguistic and ethnic families practicing the same religion, over such a wide expanse of Eurasia, and sharing many elements of culture is the crux of the point I am trying to make.

Why?

How?

The fact that we now know that the Ancient Greeks and all Indo-European people are descended from Near Eastern farmers clarifies the issue. (As are the rest of the peoples of Europe to varying degrees, including the Germanic peoples, ironically … if only we could go back in time and tell racist 19th century German scholars, Hitler, and his Nazi scientists who started this line of inquiry). We know that we genetically descend from the same region, so it gives us a shared homeland and more time for shared cultural-religious continuity to have existed in the final several millennia of Prehistory.

This means that we don’t have to answer whether Ancient Greek Religion or Sumerian Religion is older, first because they were shared by people from the same region perhaps from the beginning. While Sumerian (and Egyptian) are definitively oldest from the perspective of written record, that doesn’t tell us the age of Sumerian tradition and speaks nothing of the age of the roots of Greek — Vedic, Zoroastrian, Celtic, Norse, etc. — traditions either. Yet specific accounts within those respective mythologies (such as references to the Great Flood and Ice Age, tell us that they all date back to 10,000 BCE at minimum, at least before the end of the Younger Dryas c.9,700 BCE).

Adding another layer of complexity to this issue, and another resolution of detail, we see extensive connections between Norse-Vedic and Celtic-Vedic and Norse-Greek Indo-European religions. The only completely realistic conclusion for these shared beliefs and languages, is that a religious tradition existed before they branched off from one another. Thus this happened before about 4000 BCE. Predating documentation of both Sumerian and Greek religion. Therefore the tradition existed before this date already, to some degree and in some form well before the dawn of history.

We can compound this further by remembering that the Semitic Akkadian people shared Sumerian religion and culture, which then ties the Akkadians into the related Indo-European traditions, and fosters connections between other younger Semitic groups like the Canaanites and Phoenicians.

Moreover, the Akkadians are the ancestors of the Jews, and Hebrew Tradition stems from Sumero-Akkadian Religion, which means that the roots of Abrahamic Religion all go back to this ancient religious nexus that I call The Ancestral Tradition. So here we have three groups — representatives of three major ethnic and linguistic groups in the Sumerians (language isolate), Akkadians (Semitic, like later Jewish and Arab), and Indo-European — who practice religions that have enough in common to indicate an earlier, coherent, shared tradition.

What is going on here?

The simple answer is the suggestion of transmission, like the spread of Christianity or Islam, perhaps the dissemination of Mesopotamian Religion into, and throughout, Europe. However, while there is a small possibility of this being the case, it is vanishingly small. First, there is the issue of sheer geographic distance. These diverse regions were hard enough the reach by sea, let alone by land. From Iraq, to India, Greece, Germany, and France. Alexander couldn’t do this c.300 BCE, nor did he have any impact on Hinduism or Vedic Religion, just like Julius Caesar had no impact on Celtic or Germanic religions. If dissemination did occur, it would have had to have occurred very, very early as the transmission would have had to have occurred before the Indo-Europeans migrated away from one another, roughly before 5000 BCE, to become the Celts, Norse, Germans, Iranians (Aryans), Vedic Aryans, and perhaps Greeks.

After migration they were simply too far apart, especially in prehistory before the invention of the wheel. It is unlikely any significant contact was made between Ireland or India at this time, for example, let alone between Ireland and Norway, or Ireland and Greece. Moreover, this doesn’t make sense because of the Indo-European language family itself. This is an ancient lineage tied to ancient cultural and ethnic lines, of a people who tended to dominate others, not the other way around. The most likely conclusion is that the Ancestral Tradition became Vedic, Norse, Celtic, Greek, and Zoroastrian tradition, just as Indo-European language became these respective languages. Thus the shared traditions probably exist for the same reason that they share language: at one time they were one people, with one religion, who spoke the same tongue.

Yet while this conclusion is logically sound (to me) and fits the evidence objectively, perfectly, how Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian religions factor into the equation, bridging the ethnic and linguistic divide, remains a mystery.

With the diverse network of shared traditions we can draw connecting lines that result in a tangled web that makes questions of direction of transmission redundant, not to mention nearly impossible to resolve. In the end we can generally reduce this to a strange Sumerian-Semitic-Indo-European body of traditions that existed before major migrations, and potentially before these groups became further differentiated from one another. An older religious tradition that all those mentioned descend from.

I refer to this by a few terms, such as the Ancestral Tradition, or the Original Mythology.

The historical, archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and anthropological context of this situation is complex — not least because we still have a great deal to learn and discover in all of these fields, and within the realm of human origins and the development of civilization in general. This article is by no means a technical exploration of this situation, but rather a thorough introduction to the problem itself, and a small fraction of the relevant evidence that we do have (and also what we need to uncover to properly answer this question).

At the beginning the problem that weighed on my mind was related to where the Sumerians fit into this story. The fact that their language is unrelated to Semitic and Indo-European languages is mysterious, and a major issue in understanding their role, given that their religion appears to be from the same Ancestral Tradition as all of the great Ancient Religions mentioned. Later on, the next layer of mystery for me personally revolves around the nature of the connection between these three distinct ethnic and linguistic families.

I want to make it absolutely clear that we know from evidence within the mythologies that can be definitively dated because they reference specific geological, environmental, and cosmic events — very specific accounts that are held unanimously in all of these traditions. The origin of specific traditions predates the Greeks, Sumerians, Vedic Aryans, Ancient Iranians, Germanic, Norse, and Celtic peoples and traces all the way back to the End of the Last Ice Age to a time when the ancient ancestors of the Indo-European, Sumerian, and Semitic peoples lived perhaps within hundreds of kilometers of one another around the Fertile Crescent, as that is where European ancestry ultimately hails from.

It appears that there is a deeper Sumerian-Semitic-Indo-European religious and cultural network of some kind in prehistory. A deeper relationship between these ethnic and linguistic families that bonds them together somehow before the historical period. The details of this relationship and interaction in prehistory are yet to be understood.

Essentially this is the preliminary stages of reverse engineering stages of prehistory, using the known conditions at the dawn of the historical period c.3000 BCE as a springboard, and then constructing the story using all the evidence we have with the definitively known pieces as datapoints along the story to enable us to reasonably reconstruct general trends of the story going backwards. Gobekli Tepe, Catalhoyuk, Asili Hoyuk, Trypillia, Mohenjodaro, the Corded-Ware Culture, Battle-Axe Culture, and Yamnaya Culture are examples of these known data points which must tie into this greater narrative. In the cases where coherent traditions survived to this day in the land a people immigrated to, religious beliefs carried by a people to their new homes, along with their language, are all positive affirmations of distant cultural connections, thus the people can be considered as carriers of what became relics of an ancient common tradition.

As you can see in the diagram — which is an extremely general graphic representation, only roughly accurate from a geographical, linguistic, and cultural perspective drawn only for purposes of visualization of this problem — we can see the six general cultural zones where these resonant ancient traditions are found. The majority of the cultural-linguistic zones which define a specific tradition (4/6) are Indo-European. The central zone is that of the Sumerian and Mesopotamian cultures, divided linguistically between the Sumerian language isolate (truly perplexing!) the rest of the languages of the region are largely Semitic — a member of the Afroasiatic language family, the fourth-largest language family indigenous to West Asia and North Africa, of which Ancient Egyptian is a member. Although we spoke almost nothing about Ancient Egyptian Religion or language, they have extensive crossover with the Sumerian religion, thus to the rest of the network.

Conclusions?

So where did these traditions originate? When did they emerge? Who were the initial holders of the tradition? How did it spread between Sumerian, Semitic, and Indo-European speaking groups? What was the circumstance that fostered this relationship?

Was there an ancient, advanced civilization in Egypt at an early date (such as before the End of the Last Ice Age) from which this tradition radiated somehow to the people of these three linguistic families? Perhaps as groups left Africa? I always thought the location was interesting for both Sumer and Egypt, located right at the gateway from Africa to Eurasia, where people filtered out in waves only in the last 70,000-or-so years. It is curious that the most advanced civilizations of the ancient world lived right at this gateway, just hundreds of kilometers from where homo sapiens were born in North Africa.

Or was there a cultural nexus deeper into the Near East — perhaps in Anatolia at Gobekli Tepe, or further north towards Trypillia in the Ukraine or eastwards into Iran or northern India towards the Himilayas — from where these traditions descended into the Fertile Crescent and radiated north, west, and east into Europe and India. Or, as some believe, was the kingdom of an advanced people located in Ireland, remembered as the supernatural race of the Tuatha De Danaan? Or did a race of aliens come down to Earth to teach humanity, and send out a group to instruct humanity (called the Saptarishi or Apkallu — the Seven Sages) as Sumerian, Egyptian, and Vedic records tell us explicitly?

There is so much that we don’t know. In order to explain these religious, mythological, linguistic, and cultural connections our search is firmly in the mists of Prehistory, where we have comparatively little data.

I have no conclusions in this article. My only intention is to pose to you the problem. What I will say, however, is that advanced ancient sites discovered in Turkey (Gobekli Tepe, Catalhoyuk, Asilihoyuk and more) dating back towards 10,000 BCE, as well as advanced sites further north such as Trypillia in the Ukraine dating back to 4000 BCE — contemporary with the beginnings c.4500-4000 BCE in what would become the city of Uruk and the nation of Sumer — are shedding light on the roots of advanced civilization in a vastly greater region.

We might have been distracted by the written record in places like Sumer, Akkad, and Egypt into thinking that these are the oldest roots. Losing site of the fact that the Vedic, Celtic, and later Norse peoples (who are all Indo-European people on the periphery of the Anatolia-Ukraine region) could write, but chose not for some reason. The Celtic Druids and the Vedic Brahmins specifically vehemently denied writing as a perversion of their traditions. Perhaps we equated writing with superior cultural sophistication, which might not have always been the case.

Yet at the same time, the staggering architectural feats of Egypt specifically — some of which are not fully comprehensible even to modern engineers given the technology at the time — cannot be ignored. The magnitude of that achievement means something. Certain of their structures are as grand as anything ever built by human hands. As are the architectural achievements like the temples and palaces of the Minoans, Sumerians, and Akkadians, which are exquisite in their own right given the technology they had available. All of which were head and shoulders above the rest of the world at the time. This means something, in addition to the writing in this region, which may highlight this land as being crucial in the story.

Again, a web of mysteries, paradox, and contradictions.

This is one of the most interesting questions of history, and in my opinion, one of the most important. For one, it is a significant question in the understanding of human origins, and intrinsic in the development of advanced civilization. Moreover, not only does this involve all of the ancient religions and virtually all people of Europe and West Asia, it has profound repercussions for the Abrahamic Religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) as they emerged as descendants from the traditions of the Sumerian and Akkadian religion.