You see; You are proving my point. You are saying you don’t believe in Sumerians being Turks outright without tangible proof. You are free to believe in whatever your logic tells you to believe. It is a free world. But when you write in a respected forum like this, there will be people trying to prove you wrong or agree with you.
Ataturk never said they were Turks. But they were Turkic.
Known Turkish history starts with Modu Chanyu ( we know him as Mete Han). He was the King of Xiongnu (we say Hun) . He came in to power around 209 BC by slaying his Father Touman (Teoman). After 50 AD they broke up and gradually disappeared from the historic scene. But many smaller Turkic states were formed some travelled west like The Huns of Hungarian. But small states were fo4med in and around where Xiongnu lived until the emergence of Goktug Empire in 6th century AD .
Who were Turks before the Xiongnu/Huns? There are no definitive records. But they must have come from somewhere.
I am no historian. But somebody engaged a number of historians nearly 100 years ago and came up with a theory , however weak or unsubstantiated it may be , with some proofs. Have you got any such proofs that they are not proto Turks?
There were Scythians in that geography to the East, around 5th to 3rd century BC. We know them as Saka. Their burial and shamanic rituals are synonymous with Turkic rituals. Were they the off shoot of Proto Turks? If so, where did they come from?
Sumerians lived between 5000BC and 1750BC . Hittites lived between 1700BC and 1200BC.
World’s first known civilisation is Sumer Civilisation. Westerners will never accept this civilisation’s relation with Turks. Not because of historic proofs. But Racial and religious reasons. Their language falls in between Turkic and Kartwelian /Dravidian language categories.
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The fact that the turkish language, in all it’s development, has mantained some common traits with the old sumerian laguage, may be a further indicator. Both turkish and sumerian, in fact, are agglutinative languages with ‘close-to-zero’ grammatical irregularities.
just look at the various words:
Let's review several Sumerian-Karachaevo-Balkarian words
so bottom line is leave an open mind. There may still be more revelations to come. Som may find it far fetched and don’t believe it. But some may say this is enough proof.