Drought May Have Killed Sumerian Language | LiveScience - 1 views
www.livescience.com/-killed-sumerian-language.html
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shared by Emily Horwitz on 05 Dec 12
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A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says.
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no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues.
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his was not a single summer or winter, this was 200 to 300 years of drought," said Matt Konfirst, a geologist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.
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Sumerian culture disappeared around 4,000 years ago, and the Sumerian language went extinct soon after that.
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geological records point to a long period of drier weather in the Middle East around 4,200 years ago, Konfirst said. The Red Sea and the Dead Sea had increased evaporation; water levels dropped at Lake Van in Turkey, and cores from marine sediments around that period indicate increased dust in the environment.
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Around the same time, 74 percent of the ancient Mesopotamian settlements were abandoned, according to a 2006 study of an archaeological site called Tell Leilan in Syria. The populated area also shrank by 93 percent, he said.
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great drought, two waves of marauding nomads descended upon the region, sacking the capital city of Ur. After around 2000 B.C., ancient Sumerian gradually died off as a spoken language in the region. For the next 2,000 years, the tongue lingered on as a dead written language, similar to Latin in the Middle Ages, but has been completely extinct since then, Konfirst said.