To get a bearing on the study of this lost Sumerian Mother civilization, we switched to the study of Pre-Cuneiform Sumerian inscriptions, for as we found out, long before the invention of the cuneiform method of writing in the Middle East, Sumerians first wrote on stone and rock, pottery, copper, bronze and iron implements. These were all original Sumerian inventions. Sumerian Kings and Emperors also wrote their official kings-seals on the hardwood like ebony.
Sumerian Symbols before & after Cuneiform Writing |
Some of these have been found in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Babylon Mohenjo Daro, and Harappan. Our study of the official seals of the kings of Sumer revealed that Sumer was a great world empire and its kings and emperors were Masters of the Seas and oceans. L.A. Waddell in Makers of Civilization in Race and History (London, 1921) noted that after Sumer was destroyed (2,023 B.C.).
Its civilization continued to thrive in its empires: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Babylon, Harappan, Mohenjo Daro. Zecharia Sitchen who spent his entire life translating and studying Sumerian cuneiform texts observed that Sumer taught the world everything they know and that it was refugees fleeing the destroyed cities of Sumer that seeded the first civilizations in China, India, Assyria, Babylon, Mesopotamia, and that Egypt was a direct offshoot of Sumer. Below, is a brief introduction to the historicity of the Mohenjo Daro civilization of India.
ANCIENT INDIA: Sometime around 6,000 B.C.E. a nomadic herding people, who some now think to be Dravidians, settled into villages in the Mountainous region just west of the Indus River. There they grew barley and wheat, harvesting it using sickles with flint blades.
They lived in small houses built with adobe bricks. After about 5000 B.C.E. the climate in their region changed, bringing more rainfall, which apparently enabled them to grow more food, for they grew in population. They began domesticating sheep, goats, and cows and then water buffalo.
Mohenjo Daro Ruins, India |
Note: The Bronze Figure of the dancing Mohenjo-Daro girl has a tribal mark that is visible on her right cheek. If we use the Igbo Nsibidi Script and Ogham (Ogam) line to transcribe, it equates to the letters T or F/V. Many of such transcription will be presented, later in this article and the next, in order to translate ancient symbols, that are pre-Sumerian cuneiform. Typical of these large planned cities is Mohenjo-Daro, which along with its great buildings, had city streets laid out in a grid.
Mohenjo-Daro Dancing Girl |
The city is thought to have housed roughly 50,000 people and had a granary, baths, assembly halls, and towers. The city was divided into two parts; west of the city there stood a citadel surround by a wall. Also located here were a giant granary, a large residential structure, and at least two aisled assembly halls. To the east of the citadel was the lower city, laid out in a grid pattern.
The people of Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa and the other cities, shared a sophisticated system of weights and measures, used arithmetic with decimals, and had a written language that was partly phonetic and partly ideographic.
The Indus people also utilized seals for signatures and pictorial presentation, as did the people to the northwest in Elam and Sumer. The Indus valley people carried on active trade relations with the middle-east in gold, copper utensils, lapis lazuli, ivory, beads, and semiprecious stones.
Sometime between 1,800 and 1,700 B.C. Civilization on the Indus Plain all but vanished. What befell these people is unknown. One suspected cause is a shift in the Indus River, another is a huge ruinous Earthquake, and still, another is monumental flooding of the rivers. Flooding that would explain the thick layers of silt, thirty feet above the level of the river at the site of Mohenjo-Daro. Of course, these are only unsubstantiated theories, no one knows what really caused the people to leave. Later, people of a different culture inhabited some of the abandoned cities, in what archaeologists call a "squatter period." This citadel appears to have been a religious centre.
It was also speculated that the Mohenjo-Daro civilization perished in an ancient nuclear war, fought by the Gods, through the use of ancient flying machines called Vimana. A vimana is a word with several meanings ranging from temple or palace to mythological flying machines described in Sanskrit epics.
The Vimanas, ancient Indian Flying Machine like Technical Drawing |
The "agnihotra-vimana" with two engines. (Agni means fire in Sanskrit.)
The "gaja-vimana" with more engines. (Gaja means elephant in Sanskrit.)
Other types named after the kingfisher, ibis, and other animals. End of Mohenjo-Daro introduction.
From our study of the official seals of the various kings of Sumer, we could immediately see a direct connection with the Sub-Saharan African continent in terms of common symbols.
An example of many Ikom Monoliths |
We also discovered that the earliest Sumerian writing form was written on stone. Since 2002, we have been studying ancient stone inscriptions in Cross River State, Nigeria popularly called Ikom monoliths. We have been connecting with international scholars who are involved in the same kind of research.
In the process, it was discovered that one particular kind of stone inscription found all over the world, which is called Ogam in Britain, which had never before been translated into any form of sensible sentence, easily lent itself into translation in the Igbo language of South-Eastern Nigeria, and we were the first to score this feat! We later found out that Ogam was one of the many forms of Stone Inscriptions created by the ancient Sumerians of West Africa.
We have discovered that most of the native lines and symbols that grace ancient African artifacts are forms of Sumerian inscriptions, whose meanings have been lost until now, of which the commonest is Ogam.
Ogam Lines |
Using Ogam we have transcribed some famous ancient NOK artifacts of Middle Belt Nigeria and found that every one of the ubiquitous slanting eyes on Nok read the word MA-GAN! (See plate 11).
Magan was an ancient Sumerian nation conquered by Menes - the founder of First Dynasty Egypt. This means that Magan was once a name for ancient Nigeria, of which NOK was a major city.
To date, the whereabouts of the ancient homeland of the fleeing Sumerians has remained a mystery. Archaeological efforts to find it in Mesopotamia have struck zero. However, our transcriptions of ancient African artifacts such as the 350 inscribed stone monoliths of Cross River State, Nigeria, the ancient NOK terracotta inscriptions of Plateau state, Nigeria, and especially the pottery, bronze, and copper inscriptions on the artifacts excavated in 1950 by British archaeologists Thurstan Shaw in Igbo Ukwu, Anambra State, have revealed them to be Sumerian!
Some of these ancient symbols are emblems of Sumerian cities recorded in Egyptian mythological texts such as the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts and The Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Plate 11A Nok Terracotta inscriptions |
Others are emblems of Sumerian and Egyptian gods such as Shamash (Utu), Sin, Sheshat, Adad, Thoth, Osiris, Horus, and many others, all of whose activities are well recorded in Yoruba, Benin and Igbo local pantheons of Gods in their native Nigerian as well as Sumerian names.
A recently published linguistic research on the language that the Sumerians spoke, concluded that they spoke a Niger-Congo language. Niger-Congo is the language spoken in Southern Nigeria and Cameroon. Sumerians and Nigerian Shared Many Cultural Traits: There is documented evidence that ancient Sumerians shared cultural, traditional and occupational traits with rural Nigerians. People of both nations were farmers, merchants, metallurgists.
Both were adept in bronze alloy making. They lived in mud houses of reed, worshipped tutelary gods in small shrines, drank palm wine, wore wrappers and loincloths, ground grains on stone querns and used hoes in farming. Their kings used the same instruments of power used by Nigerian kings to this very day.
Pre-Dynastic Egyptian Symbols vs Niger-Congo Symbols |
In a portrait of King Sargon’s grandson, King Narmer (Enzu) located in the Imperial Ottoman Museum in Turkey, he is wearing a wrapper, Nigeria-style with one shoulder bare “and carries a club in the right hand and a whip in the left and wears bracelets on both arms and a tall Phrygian hat.”
The Phrygian hat (Santa Claus hat) is the traditional Hat of Igbo initiates and Chiefs of Eri. Among Sumerian emblems and inscriptions, it is called Eri.
Narmer’s “club” is the Igbo traditional wooden club-like emblem of divine authority called Ofo.
The whip is the traditional Igbo/Black African horse-tail found in all Black Africa, borne by elders.
Like Igbo people, Sumerian people of high rank were buried in their private houses which they had inhabited while they lived. Their priests were called Shangu, a name derived from the Yoruba god of thunder Shango, Xango or Sango whose equivalent in Sumer was Utu. Like native Yoruba, Benin and Igbo priests Sumerian priests wore white wrapper while performing rituals in their shrines. The list of similarities is endless…
Emblems of Sargon the Great and His Lost City of Akkad Found in Anambra State, Nigeria
Sargon the Great was Sumer’s first official post-Deluge king (ca. 3500 B.C.). His city of Akkad, the oldest Post Deluge city of Sumer, has never been found, nor excavated, by archaeologists.
Ifa Priests |
However, based on our recent discoveries from the study of pre-cuneiform texts attributed to Sargon and his line of kings, we believe we have found Sargon’s lost city – a buried city in Igbo land excavated in 1950 by a young British archaeologist fresh from the university.
We found among the images of the excavated bronze and copper artifacts of Igbo Ukwu, the two official seals of the most famous of Sumer’s emperors - Sargon the Great of Akkad - among the excavated artifacts of Igbo Ukwu, which are mostly lodged in the British Museum. Not only Sargon’s official seals but also those of all his sons who ruled after him were preserved in Igbo Ukwu! Sargon was also identified with Biblical Nimrud. Both Sargon’s and Nimrud’s known Sumerian emblems are found in Igbo Ukwu (plates 1a-k). One of the artifacts (famously called an altar-stand) portrays a man and a woman standing back to back.
The man bears the Seal of Sargon on his forehead and the Sumerian pictograph for ‘Bara’, from which is derived Egyptian word ‘Pharaoh’ and Hindu word ‘Bharat’. His two hands form the word A-KAD in mirror-image (plate 1aa, bb), beneath the image below! Sargon is understood to be the same as Biblical Nimrud, both in his name and symbols. The artifact also features Serpent Writing which is an ancient writing form known to Hindus and Phoenicians alike.
Ogam Lines Translation, artwork by S A Akinyemi |
Our discoveries suggest strongly that the present neighboring towns of Igbo Ukwu and Oraeri are standing on the ruin of the lost city of Akkad – the city of the Chaldean Magi located in the land the Sumerians called ‘Land of BU’: the colonialists called it EBO and the natives call it IGBO. L.A. Waddell in Makers of Civilization insists that the name Sargon/Shargon when properly read in Sumerian means SHA-ERI-GAN – ‘EMPEROR ERI OF THE GARDEN OF EDEN’!
Local legends say that Ora-Eri - ‘Eri Folk’ were the original inhabitants of the land where the excavations were found, having been driven out in war by the present inhabitants. Eri is the putative ancestor of the Kwa/Qa tribes of Nigeria and Ghana. True to type, many Sumerians god-kings proudly bore the Nigerian title Qa/Kwa.
Plate 1AA |
Akkad is the Ancient City of Ayodhya of Indian Ramayana Epic: Akkad, otherwise called Agade in Sumerian texts, was known by the name Ayodhya in Indian epic tale Ramayana.
L.A. Waddell in his comparative translations of Pre-cuneiform Sumerian texts with Indus Valley Purana epics and Aryan epic texts (the Eddas) observed that the king-lists of Sumer were exactly the same with those of the Lower Indus, the Aryans of Europe and of Pre-dynastic Egypt.
The Sumerian name of Sargon is SHAR KIN. SARKIN is the Nigerian word for ‘KING’ in one of the many ethnic languages of Nigeria! Many Sumerian names of kings have survived in Nigeria.
One king of Sargon’s line was called Gani Eri. Another was called Attah, to name a few. These are existing names of Nigerian royal houses. Sumerians introduced saddled horses to the world. A saddled horse with a rider was found in the grave of the Monarch buried in Igbo Ukwu. Many other sacred emblems of Sumer too numerous to mention here, were among the excavations. All Sumerian textual images listed here are from L.A. Waddell – Makers of Civilization in Race and History, London, 1921.
They consist of an upper line from texts recovered in excavations in Mesopotamia featuring Indus type Sumerian letters (upper line) in comparison with actual Mesopotamian-type pictographs, all of them pre-cuneiform. Our listings indicate a generic connection between West African, Middle Eastern and Indus Valley inscriptions of the Sumerian mother-culture. All bronze/copper artifacts listed here are from the Thurstan Shaw excavations,
Plate 1BB |
Plate 1aa (Above - Igbo Ukwu): Various pictographs of Sumer can be seen on this bronze stand: a hand curving to the right of the observer is the letter A. The ‘hand’ is the syllabic sound KAD: meaning A-KAD!
The forehead double concentric circle is the emblem of Sargon the Great, cf. plate 1bb, (right) Pre-Cuneiform Sumerian letters: concentric circle (Sharu) plus Man (Gin) = Sharru-Gin anglicized as ‘’Sargon. See also Omphalos symbol for Bara and surrounding Serpent Writing.
These will be listed in our new forthcoming book on the subject titled Eden in Sumer on the Niger. In fact, Thurstan Shaw noted repeatedly that many of the artifacts look Indian in style. One such seal is the elephant-head seal of Narmer, the grandson of Sargon the Great (plate 2a, b). It also bears the quadrangle emblem of Sargon. End of part 6 of 10. Next blog on 02/03/19.