Studies in Historical Anthropology, vol. 4:2004[2006], pp.

145158

Physical anthropology and the

Sumerian problem
Arkadiusz Sotysiak
Department of Historical Anthropology
Institute of Archaeology, Warsaw University, Poland

It is already 35 years since Andrzej Wierciski has published his only paper
on the physical anthropology of ancient Mesopotamia (1971). This short article
was written in Polish and concerned a topic which has for many years been
considered as very important by the international community of archaeologists
and philologists, and especially by the scholars studying the ethnic history of
Mesopotamia. This topic was usually called the Sumerian problem, and may
be summarised as the speculations about the origin of Sumerians, the ethnic
group which was universally considered to be the founder of the Mesopotamian
civilisation. Research on the origins of the Sumerians was accidental in Professor
Wierciskis studies, though it may be included in the larger series of his papers
concerning the problems of ethnogenesis (eg. 1962, 1973, 1978). In spite of
this marginality, it was perhaps the most exhaustive contribution of a physical
anthropologist to the discussion about the Sumerian problem and for that
reason it seems to be a good starting point for an essay about the contribution
of physical anthropology to the research on the history of Mesopotamia.
***
The Sumerians were the rst known ethnic group inhabiting Mesopotamia. It
does not mean that they must have been the rst settlers in that region, but is
the simple result of the fact that it was they who had invented the system of
writing and thus were able to make their ethnicity known to modern scholars.
Their origin was a subject of very intensive debate which began more than
a century ago. Many authors tried to solve the Sumerian problem with the
help of the available archaeological, linguistic, and even osteological data, but
without any universally accepted conclusion. The main problem lies in the
frequent confusion of linguistic, ethnical, cultural, and political components
of self-identication of any human grup. They are often correlated, but never
completely and seldom in the way that may be predicted by any general model.

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Arkadiusz Sotysiak

The history of the Sumerian problem clearly shows that the case of this
ethnic/linguistic group is particularly complicated and perhaps the question is
not only impossible to answer, but simply wrongly addressed.
Table 1. Simplied chronology of ancient Mesopotamia before ca. 2000 BCE.

Dating
(BCE)

Period

Comments

Hassuna / Samarra /
Halaf

~55004500

Neolithic / Chalcolithic archaeological cultures

Ubaid

~50003600

rural settlements in southern Mesopotamia;

introduction of articial irrigation

Uruk

~36003100

large-scale urbanisation; rst pictographic script

Jemdet Nasr

~31002900

development of the cuneiform script

Early Dynastic I/III

~29002350

many Sumerian cities-states in southern

Mesopotamia; Semitic states in the north

Akkadian/Gutean

~23502100

unication of Mesopotamia by a Semitic

dynasty; invasion of Guteans from Gutium

Ur III

~21002000

re-unication by a Sumerian dynasty

Shanidar

Tell Halaf
Tell Hassuna
Khabur

Jarmo

ASSYRIA

Samarra

GUTIUM

Diyala

ZAGROS
MOUNTAINS

Euphrates

BABYLONIA
Babylon

SYRIAN DESERT

Tigris

Kish

Uruk
Ubaid
Eridu

50

100

ELAM
(SUSIANA)

SUMER

Ur

150 km

Fig. 1. The cities of ancient Mesopotamia mentioned in the text. Modern names in italics
(drawing by Barbara Kasprzak).

Physical anthropology and the Sumerian problem

147

One certain point is that the rst known cuneiform documents were written
in Sumerian and it is almost sure that this language was also denoted by
an earlier pictographical script, attested in some archaic tablets found in the
remains of ancient cities Unug/Uruk, Ur, and Jemdet Nasr and dated back to
Late Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods, ca. 32003000 BCE (Oppenheim 1977:49;
van Driel 2000:495). However, the use of Sumerian in writing does not imply
that the writer was Sumerian. The Sumerians were no longer an identiable
ethnical group after ca. 2000 BCE, and their spoken language became completely
extinct well before ca. 1800 BCE, but remained in use during the subsequent
two millennia (cf. von Soden 1960; Oppenheim 1977:51; Crawford 1991:10).
The discussion about the origins of the Sumerians began in 1874, when
Joseph Halvy argued that the recently discovered archaic language was only
an ideographical system of denoting the Akkadian language belonging to the
Semitic family (cf. Cooper 1991:48). This theory was quickly abandoned and
replaced by the opinion that the Sumerians were the aboriginal inhabitants of
Mesopotamia, eventually conquered by and conicted with the Semites. Most
important authors promoting such a visions were H.U. Hilprecht (1896) and
L.W. King (1910), who had many followers in the early years of the 20th century
(cf. Potts 1997:44; Cooper 1991:65).
The Sumerian problem has been dened explicitely by Henri Frankfort
(1932b; cf. Potts 1997:4445) who argued that the Sumerians were the rst
settlers in southern Mesopotamia and came from the Iranian highlands in the
beginning of the Ubaid period (1932b:23,30,41,46). Next, the Semites arrived in
the Uruk period and broke the link between the Sumerians and their original
homeland (1932b:45). Frankforts theory was a correction of his previous opinion,
published in the same year, that the Sumerians came to the Mesopotamia in the
beginning of the Uruk period from the north. One of arguments in this earlier
Frankforts theory was the assumed anity between the Uruk pottery and
the Anatolian sherds (1932a:63). In both papers Frankfort used iconography
and few osteological data available in his times. Following D. Buxton (1925)
he noted that the original Mesopotamian population was characterised by the
dolichocephaly and that supposedly brachycephalic Sumerians (as represented in
art) never became a dominating race (1932b:4142), although the Mesopotamian
population in Early Dynastic period was composed of many races, similarly as
the early population of Mohenjo Daro in the Indus valley (1932b:28). This racial
motif would become one of important arguments in the later history of the
Sumerian problem.
The rst author who used both osteological data and iconography was
Stephen Langdon. As early as in 1927 he concluded (also with use of Buxtons
data) that the city of Kish in Early Dynastic period was inhabited by the mixture
of Semites and Sumerians represented by two dolichocephalic races identied
by Buxton, namely the Euroafricans and the Mediterraneans. Later, in the
period of Persian domination, the third Armenoid race also contributed to the
local population. This association of races and ethnic groups was later adopted
by the physical anthropologists D. Buxton and D.T. Rice (1931:58) who argued
that the bi-racial structure of Mesopotamian population had been established in
the Early Dynastic period and the subsequent migrations did not inuence it in

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Arkadiusz Sotysiak

a considerable way (1931:66). Such a conclusion was maintained also by T.K.

Penniman (1934). The racial stability of ancient Mesopotamia was explained
by C.S. Coon as the result of the pollution of water in Euphrates: according to
this author the immigrants from abroad were not immune to it and died out
without leaving a trace in Mesopotamias racial composition (1951:255).
It is interesting that in the discussion about the Sumerian race very important reports by Sir Arthur Keith (1927, 1934; cf. Molleson, Hodgson 2003) were
almost completely neglected. In his study of the skulls from Ubaid (Chalcolithic)
and Ur (Bronze Age) Keith also observed the continuity of Mesopotamian
population since the 4th millennium BCE till the modern times and suggested
possibility of Iranian or even Indian anities. Some dierences between two
sites, which were close in space but somewhat distant in time, were explained
as the eect of invasion of more dolichocephalic peoples from the Arabic
Pensinsula. However, in conclusion Keith stated that there is no dierence
between the alleged Sumerians (from Ur) and the Semites (from Kish).
In spite of this, Anton Moortgat (1945) and E. Speiser (1951:343) have
observed (most likely after Frankfort) that in iconography the Sumerians were
represented with short heads, while the skulls found at Ur and all other sites
were long (cf. Potts 1997:46). It has been taken as an evidence of relatively late
appearance of Sumerians in Mesopotamia who were thought to come from
a distant place and in small number, sucient to subordinate the local
population, but not to change its racial characteristic (Speiser 1969:97100).
At that point Andrzej Wierciski joined the discussion with his study on
racial typology of the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia (1971). As previous
studies, it was based not only on skeletal remains (from Ubaid, Ur, and Kish),
but also on iconography. Such a choice of sources was forced by the scarcity
of available in that time osteological reports. A. Wierciski, contrarywise to
the earlier authors, found a far more complicated anthropological structure in
the Mesopotamian population, which made the previous search for Sumerian
race pointless. In his opinion the area of Tibet (or generally Central Asia) may
be considered as the Sumerians place of origin.
The discussion about the Sumerian race has been curtailed by the
sober Georges Rouxs remark that the iconographical representations were
conventionalised and thus their comparison with the osteological data gives
no valuable information (Roux 1969:136). However, some remnants of the racial
argument continued to be in use also in later discussions. Fifteen years ago H.
Crawford referred to the old speculation that the Sumerians were round-headed
and the Semites were long-headed and noticed after C.S. Coon (1949) the great
tooth size of early inhabitants of Mesopotamia, which used to be taken as the
evidence of their anities with the Indians (Crawford 1991:9).
***
Frankforts rst theory, placing the coming of the Sumerians in the beginning of
Uruk period, was supported in 1930s by the German scholars, chiey E. Speiser
(1930) and A. Ungnad (1936:10). In Speisers opinion the names of many most
ancient cities of Sumer were Elamite in origin and the Elamites, related by him
to the mountain peoples of Lullubeans and Kassites, inhabited the Mesopotamia

Physical anthropology and the Sumerian problem

149

before the Sumerians (1930:40,46). The Sumerians were thought to invade

Mesopotamia from the south, coming through the Persian Gulf from the east.
Speiser suggested that they may have been related to the Dravidians (1930:83).
In later publications (1951; 1969) Speiser has maintained his theory and added
some new arguments. He has argued that the diversity of cultural tradition in
Late Neolithic Mesopotamia was a reection of ethnical dierences and all
archaeological cultures dened by modern scholars Hassuna, Halaf, Ubaid,
Uruk were developed by dierent ethnic groups (1969:99). In his opinion the
Sumerians came to Mesopotamia relatively late, in the last phase of the Ubaid
period, and initially settled only in the head of the Persian Gulf. During the Uruk
period they moved northward and eventually lost their racial distinctiveness.
Such a vision was accepted also by Anton Moortgat and Beno Landsberger
(cf. Speiser 1951:345353; 1969:99103; Potts 1997:46). Speisers theory has been
further developed by Jan Braun who has gathered many similarities between
Sumerian and Tibetan languages and argued on that base that the Sumerians
came to Mesopotamia on ships from northern India and in spite of their small
number dominated the local population due to their much more sophisticated
culture. Only later the Semitic tribes prevailed (1971:4748). Brauns hypothesis
was supported by the osteological research by A. Wierciski. Also C.S. Coon
suggested (on odontometrical grounds) some anities between the inhabitants
of Chalcolithic Eridu in southern Mesopotamia and the population of the Indus
valley (Coon 1949:104).
Beno Landsberger introduced new linguistic arguments to the debate. In his
opinion many names of important Sumerian cities as well as many technical
terms in Sumerian were borrowed from another language or languages, the
languages of Mesopotamias original inhabitants, which had been forgotten
before the invention of writing. Landsberger tentatively dened two such
substratum languages, and called them Proto-Euphratean and Proto-Tigridian
(Landsberger 1944; 1945; cf. Gibson 1972:8; Potts 1997:46; Rubio 1999:2). This
theory has been very inuential since 1970s and contributed to the temporal
domination of Speisers speculation with which it was compatible (cf. Speiser
1951:345; Oppenheim 1977:3334). Leo Oppenheim later argued that the Sumerian
possibly belonged to a group of languages specic for the mountaineers, and
thus the mountains in the east may have been a cradle of Sumerians (1977:50).
The linguistic arguments have been improved by Ignace Gelb who stressed
the link between ethnical and linguistic identity and recognised the previous
racial arguments as inadequate (1960:259260), although without consistency, as
two pages later on he mentioned again the round-headed Sumerians (1960:262). In
Gelbs opinion the earliest southern Mesopotamian toponyms were non-Sumerian
and similar to the names attested in the northern Mesopotamia. Since they were
also non-Semitic, Gelb assumed that they belonged to a substratum language,
associated by him with the Subarians. Another evidence of this pre-Sumerian
ethnic group would be the duplicated names attested in early texts and attributed
to so-called Banana-language. According to Gelb it is even uncertain that the
Sumerians invented the writing system, because the earliest pictographic tablets
from Uruk may be read also in other languages (1960:263265).

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Landsbergers theory of pre-Sumerian substratum in Sumerian language

has been recently rejected by G. Rubio who examined the available data and
concluded that all terms interpreted as the evidence of a substratum language
were gradually adopted by the Sumerians together with some technical
innovations in a process of diusion, and not inherited from any hypothetical
coherent language (Rubio 1999:11). Similar conclusion has been drawn by
G. Gragg on a more general base (1995:2177). This situation of the Sumerian
language may be compared with the present-day adoption of many English
terms concerning computer technologies by other languages: in that case
nobody would claim that such an inuence points at English as the substratum
of other languages.
Another way of reasoning has been presented by Samuel Kramer. This
author has also agreed with Speiser that the Sumerians were not the aboriginal
inhabitants of Mesopotamia and that they had come not long before the Late
Uruk period (1948:156157). In his opinion the reminiscences of their early
history had been preserved in the tales of Sumerian legendary kings, Gilgamesh,
Enmerkar, and Lugalbanda. Kramer has struck upon the idea that the invasion
of barbarous tribes to more civilised country is often recorded in heroic age epics
as known from the Greek, Germanic, and Aryan traditions (1948:159). If the
Sumerians produced such kind of literature, it meant for Kramer, that originally
they must have been the barbarians who invaded the Mesopotamia. In Kramers
reconstruction Mesopotamia was rst settled by immigrants from Iran who
had painted their pottery. Somewhat later they mixed with the Semites who
came from the west. Both ethnic groups created a civilisation, which expanded
and eventually came into contact with early Sumerians, the nomadic tribes
from Transcaucasia or Transcaspia. These Sumerians were initially defeated by
the Mesopotamians, but later they learned the more advanced art of war and
nally conquered Mesopotamia. After the heroic age, the time of regress
and perturbations, the Sumerians restored the civilisation, established their
cities, invented the cuneiform script, and eventually were defeated by other
barbarians, the Aryan tribes (1948:160163).
This theory was perhaps most pictoresque of all and due to Kramers
authority it was seriously considered by subsequent authors in spite of its highly
speculative base and clear negative evidence in the texts themselves, reporting
the conicts between well developed urban centres. In a later paper Kramer
referred to the Landsbergers Proto-Euphratean hypothesis, but still argued that
the Semites inhabited Mesopotamia before the Sumerians (1963:4042). This
idea was not new, being invented by Eduard Meyer already in the rst decade
of the 20th century (Meyer 1906; cf. OCallaghan 1948:14). Kramer maintained
also his opinion that the Sumerians came from the area of the Caspian Sea and
pointed at their relation to the city of Aratta somewhere in Iran and the alleged
anity with Ural-Altaic languages (Kramer 1963:42; cf. Potts 1997:47).
Much better grounded in actual archaeological evidence was the
reconstruction proposed by Joan Oates who has noticed the cultural continuity
from the beginning of Ubaid period until the times when the Sumerians
denitely dominated in the southern Mesopotamia (Oates 1960:3334; cf. Potts
1997:47). There was not only the continuity in the pottery style, but also the

Physical anthropology and the Sumerian problem

151

unbroken sequence of temples in Eridu and no traces of any invasion have

been found in any excavated sites from the Ubaid and Uruk periods. It is likely
that the Late Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic Mesopotamian population was
not homogenous as in later times when many ethnic groups shared the same
way of life but there is not a single piece of evidence that any migration had
occured in that period and also no proof that the Mesopotamian civilisation
had been created by a population of Iranian origins (Oates 1960:3437). Joan
Oates scepticism gradually prevailed and the Sumerian problem started
to be recognised as insoluble (cf. Rubio 1999:1). In recent years the studies
on the early history of Mesopotamian populations has been more cautious,
and there is general acceptance of Leo Oppenheims opinion that the relation
between three categories, linguistic, racial and ethnic, is exceedingly complex in
Mesopotamia and still far from being suciently investigated (1977:48). This
complexity has been acknowledged also by McGuire Gibson who explained the
origins of Mesopotamian civilisation as the result of the vanishing of the eastern
Euphrates branch ca. 3300 BCE. The population had been forced to move to the
cities and the Sumerians used this opportunity to establish their domination
over other ethnic groups inhabiting southern Mesopotamia at that time (Gibson
1976:56). Such a way of explaining the origins of Sumerian civilisation, although
disputable, was distant the from racial and linguistic speculations, which had
prevailed even a decade earlier.
In the story of the Sumerian problem the linguistic arguments were
most intensively discussed and sometimes the lologists ignored in their
speculations the archaeological and historical background. However, also
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 rst 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 scientic 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.
***
The discussion on the Sumerian problem began to wane in 1970s. This was
chiey the result of a paradigm shift in archaeology (but in linguistics too):
the scholars of previous generations tended to explain the cultural changes in
terms of ethnical dierences, while the followers of New Archaeology aimed
at the reconstruction of interactions between human populations and their
environments. In this new paradigm the research on human remains was much
more underlined than in the discussion on the Sumerian race, also because
the general poor state of preservation of bones in Mesopotamia. The scarcity
of well preserved skulls, which were suitable for racial speculations made the
physical anthropology only a supplement for linguistic and archaeological data
in ethnogenetical speculations. However, the lack of complete skulls is not

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Arkadiusz Sotysiak

such a great problem for ecological studies, which use a much broader toolkit
than measurements of basic craniofacial diameters. In case of biochemical,
paleopathological or odontological research even very fragmented human
remains may provide us with valuable data.
At rst sight, Mesopotamia seems to be a perfect region for studies on the
history of interactions between men and their environment. There are at least
three dierent ecological zones (the dry farming zone in the north, irrigation
zone in the alluvial plain of Euphrates and Tigris, and the steppe/desert areas
in the interior), two possible main subsistence strategies (plant cultivation and
transhumant pastoralism) and which is most important ve thousand years
of history recorded by the written sources. In spite of this great potential, the
studes on human remains are still scarce, although much more numerous than
in the period of hottest discussion of the Sumerian problem.
Figure 2 shows temporal distribution of eldwork and laboratory reports
on human remains from Mesopotamias three regions: the dry farming zone
in the north, the alluvial plain of Euphrates and Tigris in the south, as well as
the steppes, valleys and highlands between them (joined together as Central
Mesopotamia). In total, there are 92 reports. Taking into account the fact that
such reports used to be sometimes published in marginal journals or available
only as manuscripts and that majority of them was never quoted, it is likely that
the actual number of osteological papers is somewhat higher and may exceed
one hundred. This gure is still not impressive and there are many European
countries where more reports on human remains from archaeological sites are
written each year than the total number of all papers from the whole history of
excavations in Mesopotamia.

Fig. 2. The number of reports on human remains from Mesopotamian archaeological sites
per decades.

There are some clear tendencies shown in the diagram. First one is the
distinct increase of published reports after 1970s, related to the paradigm shift
(and accompanied by the comparable increase of interest in archaeozoological

Physical anthropology and the Sumerian problem

153

and paleobotanical studies). Second, the best decade for the osteological studies
was 1980s; after the Gulf War the excavations in Iraq were suspended, which
diminished the number of reports from Central and South Mesopotamia in the
last two decades. However, the number of excavations in Syrias eastern provinces
increased at that time and the number of reports from North Mesopotamia has
been constantly rising for last 40 years.
In spite of this rise, the actual material base for the studies on the history of
Mesopotamian population is still very poor. Most reports on human remains are
very general (and sometimes limited to the diagnosis of age and sex), many of
them concern single skeletons or very small samples. There are only three series
of human remains stored in safe places and large enough for population studies.
About 550 more or less complete skeletons found in Kish have been transported
to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago: this is the largest available
sample from one site, but, unfortunately, the majority of remains are not dated
(Rathbun 1975). Human bones from Ur, Ubaid, Kish, Tell Arpachiya, Tell Abu
Hureyra and some other sites are stored in the National History Museum in
London and this is possibly the most important and most extensively studied
museal series (e.g. Molleson 2000a, 2000b, Molleson, Blondiaux 1994; Molleson,
Campbell 1995; Molleson, Hodgson 2000, 2003; Molleson, Jones 1991; Molleson
et al. 1993). Bones of almost 600 individuals from the Hamrin basin in Central
Mesopotamia were collected and transported to the Osaka University by the
Japanese anthropologists in the late 1970s (Ishida 1981a, 1981b; cf. Ikeda et al.
1985; Wada 1982, 1994, 1998; Wada et al. 1987a, 1987b). There is also a dental
collection of about 500 individuals from many sites from eastern Syria and
northern Iraq housed in the Department of Historical Anthropology at Warsaw
University (cf. Sotysiak 2003[2006]).
Following the small number of available data, also research papers on the
ancient human populations of Mesopotamia are very few. Apart from the
discussion of the Sumerian problem, the discussion of the racial history,
or the population history of Mesopotamia, is included chiey in more general
papers and books on the physical anthropology of the Near East, and this
problem is often treated very briey (Kappers, Parr 1934:4347; Ferembach 1959,
1973; Cappieri 1969; Bernhard 1993). Only Marco Cappieri tried to reconstruct
the population history of Mesopotamia from Late Neolithic to the beginning of
the Iron Age, but his sample of 56 individuals from all sites and all periods was
insucient to draw any valuable conclusions (Cappieri 1970).
Similarly, regional paleopathological and paleodemographical studies
are exceptional. There is one general review of all previous observations of
pathologies (Rathbun 1984) and few papers concerning articial deformations
(Meiklejohn et al. 1992; Molleson, Campbell 1995). In very abundant literature
discussing the changes in the size of Mesopotamian populations only few
papers even used the data obtained at the cemeteries (Vertesalji 1989; Hole
1989). Relatively many papers concern the Neolithic population of North
Mesopotamia; especially the remains from Abu Hureyra were carefully studied
(cf. Molleson, Jones 1991; Molleson et al. 1992; Molleson 2000a, 2000b), although
there are quite detailed odontological reports also from Jarmo (Dahlberg 1960),
Tell Halula (Anfruns et al. 1996), Sheikh Hassan (Clre et al. 1985), and Tell

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Arkadiusz Sotysiak

Mureybet (zbek 1979). Most abundant literature is dedicated to the nds of

Neanderthal men in Shanidar, in northmost part of Mesopotamia (cf. Stewart
1959, 1961, 1977; Trinkaus 1977, 1983).
This short overview quite clearly indicates that the use of physical anthropology in research on the population history of Mesopotamia is still
marginal, in spite of the growing number of publications and a much broader
possible scope of research than in the period when the Sumerian problem
was discussed. At present nobody expects that craniofacial measurements can
reveal the origin of the Sumerians, but the physical anthropologists can try
to reconstruct the health status, diet, occupation, and many other individual
and population characteristics, which may widen our modern insight into
the living conditions of Sumerians and other ethnic groups inhabiting Mesopotamia in the past. The material base for such studies is still not well developed,
but the constant growth of number of publications in the eld allow us to
be optimistic.

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