Satuf

Were they central Asian? African? Semites from the deep heart of Arabia? came from the Indus valley? white?

Or were they a whole race of their own and didn't belong to other major group?

okamido

Hard to say, Sumerian creation literature states that their homeland was Dilmun which is thought to be the island of Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf. Dilmun is also supposed to be where Upnapishtim,(Sumerian Noah), hails from, as well as being thought of as a possible place of the Garden of Eden. This comes from the Babylonian Enuma Elis.

Who knows, maybe they were the first chosen ones.

Rag

A good question! I don't think anyone is sure. The Sumerians language was not related to any other known language. I would speculate that the ethnicity of the Sumerians was one that has been lost to history.

It could be the case that they didn't have a single ethnicity. I would imagine that the fertile land of Mesopotamia would have attracted quite a few people. So it might be the case that the Sumerians was the result of several nomadic tribes, from different places, settling on the same land and eventually assimilating to produce an ethnicity all of their own.

But I am just guessing here.

beorna

guessing is what we all can do here only. The Sumerians are sometimes linked with the Drawidians. There shall be linguistic connections.
So in the moment all we can say is that the Sumerians are of an unspecific South Asian ethnic.

PS. I've friiends in Darlaston and Wednesbury. So greetings to the Midlands

sylla1

Hope this nice review by A. Soltyziak may help:
http://www.antropologia.uw.edu.pl/SHA/sha-04-07.pdf.

An extract:
"… physical anthropology contributed to the debate, especially to the idea of alleged round-headed “Sumerian race”, and to the theory about the Sumerians’ Indian origins. It is quite evident that this first motif originated in the misunderstanding between some physical anthropologists who treated conventional iconography as comparable with the osteological data, and philologists who enthousiastically accepted the discrepancy between skulls and art representations as “scientific” proof of the small contribution of the “Sumerian race” to the Mesopotamian population. The hypothesis of Indian origins was relatively better grounded, although no author tested it in proper way and it still remains only a speculation… This short overview quite clearly indicates that the use of physical anthropology in research on the population history of Mesopotamia is still marginal ... At present nobody expects that craniofacial measurements can reveal the origin of the Sumerians,"

Zananga

I tought their neigboors the Elamites were the ones who where sometimes linked to the Drawidians. I don think they were related to any of the ancient people of the near east we know, neider to the Semites, nor to the Elamites, Drawidians, Indo-Europeans or Hurrians. I would rather compare them to the Basques: it is allmost impossible to source back where they came from, because the time has covered up the tracks.

beorna

yes, Elams are so, too.

Satuf

I kind of find it hard to believe that humans come from islands.

Indeed, that's why Abraham was a Sumerian..I guess he believed in a "chosen people."

zwolf1215

I would guess that they are Semite. I find it hard to believe that they were from the far east, white or African.

Nemo Neem

Mesopotamian?