Most Ancient Aryan Society

Author(s): Ram Chandra Jain
Publisher: Institute of Bharatalogical Research Sriganganagar Rajasthan

Page 86

( 59 ) The plausible theory put by H. R. Hall regarding the origin of the Sumerians is that they were an Indian race which passed certainly by land, perhaps by Sea, through Persia to the valley of the two rivers. It was in the Indian home (perhaps the Indus Valley) that we suppose for them that their culture developed. There their writing may have been invented and progressed from a purely pictorial to a simplified and abbreviated form, which afterwards in Babylonia took on its peculiar 'cuneiform' appearance owing to its being written with a square-ended stilus on soft clay. On the way they left the seeds of their culture in Elam.3
The one or the other aspect may be emphasised but it appears to me almost certain that the first Bhāratīya immigrants went to Sumer, not by land but by Sea. All the scholars on this subject have employed the legend of Oannes, told by Berossus, to reach their conclusions. Oannes was the supreme leader of a race of people, half-human and halffish came from the Persian Gulf and settled in the cities of Sumer. He introduced the art of writing, of agriculture and of working in metal and 'since that time no further inventions have been made.' They were the first to build houses with bricks. They made the brick-houses in the day and returned to their fleet in the night. This shows that they were the expert mariners skilled in the art of engineering. They had to drain off the marshes and raise a new city. This was a tremendous task of great magnitude. Susa was the seat of power in Elam. Though the people of Ancient Persia were non-Aryans (the Anariakot of the Greeks) and were of the same race that inhabited Bhārata, still they were not so great engineers as their co-citizens of the river-port cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro were. If the Bhāratīyans would have first gone via Elam, they would have left the monuments of the same engineering skill at