Expert: John Shea - 4/16/2009

Question
Hi John, hope you can help. I've been wondering about the Sumerian civilization of ancient Mesopotamia lately, and I am interested in understanding the ethnicity of these people. I understand that they were 'non-Semitic', but beyond that Google hasn't been much help. Who, if anyone, are the 'modern descendants' of the Sumerians, or alternatively, what was the ethnicity of these people in modern terms? Were they 'Asian', 'European', 'Arabic'? I know my terms are not precise, but then, I'm not the expert :-)

Cheers

Answer
Hi Evan
This is on the periphery of my expertise.  Sumerian language is non-Semitic (at least such of it as can be read).  The archaeological record for Mesopotamia is pretty clear that there was a dispersal of Neolithic populations with distinctive pottery from what is now Syria downriver to what is now Iraq and that those dispersed populations were the founders of the Sumerian civilization.  Languages change quite a bit, and it is possible that those parts of the world now occupied by speakers of Semitic languages were formerly and recently occupied by speakers of non-Semitic languages.
Modern descendants of Sumerians are almost certainly the living peoples of Iraq.  Like most Near Eastern peoples, they simultaneously match morphological criteria for European, Asian, and African.  These aren't particularly nuanced ways of dividing up humans, either in terms o of culture or biology. (Our university had a hilarious debate not too long ago over whether Arabs and Arabian culture ought to be included in Asian Studies together with Indians, Chinese, and Japanese. Few seem to have caught on at all that the fact they were having such a debate pointed out how useless such classifications are for sorting people into groups.)
Cheers,
John Shea