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Their homeland may be underwater
The Lost Valley
During the Ice Age's low sea levels, the Tigris and Euphrates joined into one river that flowed another 600 kilometers through a low valley between what is now Iran and Saudi Arabia, reaching the Indian Ocean near present-day Dubai. People from the Neolithic period may have lived in that fertile valley.
Rising Seas
As the glaciers melted, the sea advanced for about five thousand years, slowly at first and then faster, swallowing forests and villages. The people living there would have been pushed north into denser and denser groups, never able to settle for long. The coast reached its furthest point around 5000 BC, just when Sumerian culture appears.
Language and Myth
The Sumerian language has no relation to any language around it, and the first scholars to read it thought it was a secret code. The first-century Roman historian Josephus recorded a Babylonian legend of a half-man, half-fish named Oannes who rose from the sea and taught the people of Mesopotamia letters, the building of cities and temples, laws, and the measuring of land before jumping back into it. The theory asks whether the Sumerians arrived in southern Iraq on foot from a land that now lies at the bottom of the sea.
A Sumerian creation myth places humans in Dilmun, an earthly paradise like the Garden of Eden where the lion does not kill and the wolf does not prey on the lamb. Dilmun is believed to be present-day Bahrain, an island in the Persian Gulf, the body of water that was once a fertile river valley.
How do we know the Gulf was once dry?
The Persian Gulf is shallow, averaging only a few dozen meters deep, so it would have been dry land when the sea stood roughly 120 meters lower. The archaeologist Jeffrey Rose gave the exposed lowland the name Gulf Oasis. He argued that it sheltered people when drier conditions made life harder elsewhere. He published the idea in 2010 in the journal Current Anthropology.
Where does the Oannes legend come from?
The Oannes story comes from Berossus, a Babylonian priest who wrote a history of Babylonia in Greek around 290 BC. His own book is lost. We know it only from quotations by later writers, among them Josephus. In Berossus's account, Oannes taught people writing, the arts, and the founding of cities.
Why do many scholars doubt the Gulf origin?
Most archaeologists trace Sumerian culture to the Ubaid culture, which was already living in southern Mesopotamia in the sixth millennium BC. Ubaid-style pottery has also been found at sites along the Arabian coast of the Gulf. The Sumerian language itself has no known relatives that would point to a homeland.
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