The World’s Deepest Secrets can be traced back to Sumer in Mesopotamia

• published: 20 May 2015
• views: 0

The world’s deepest secrets all can be traced back to Sumer in Mesopotamia, the first known great civilization which was located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers at the headwaters of the Persian Gulf. In biblical times, it was called Chaldea or Shinar. Today, it is known as Iraq. The Sumerian culture seemed to appear from nowhere more than 6,000 years ago and before it strangely vanished, it had greatly influenced life as far east as the Indus River, which flows from the Himalayas through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, and the Nile of the later Egyptian kingdoms. Virtually nothing was known about the Sumerians until about 150 years ago when archeologists, spurred on by the writings of Italian traveler Pietro della Valle in the early 1600s, began to dig into the strange mounds which dotted the countryside in southern Iraq. Beginning with the discovery of Sargon II’s palace near modern-day Khorsabad by the Frenchman Paul Emile Botta in 1843, archeologists found buried cities, broken palaces, artifacts and thousands of clay tablets detailing every facet of Sumerian life. By the late 1800s, Sumerian had been recognized as an original language and was being translated. Despite today’s knowledge, the general public still has been taught little about this first great human civilization which suddenly materialized in Mesopotamia.