Sumer is considered a river civilisation like Egypt. Phys.org has Liviu Giosan and Reed Goodman, on Uruk which they date 4000-3200 BC (Wiki would say, overlapping Ubeyd down to 3700 BC). They argue that this Uruk civilisation - yes, Sumerian - started not along the Tigris (much less Euphrates) but through the Marsh.
The paper points out that the flood/farm cycles don't match in Iraq like they do (rather, pre-Nasser - did) in Egypt. I assume the Nile Delta could have supported a low-level culture too, but didn't need to scale up to a river civilisation. Well-fed Upper Egypt could just conquer the villages down there, mostly to establish trade-ports.
Back to Sumer, this has two deltas at first: Euphrates and "Khuzestan". The locals weathered the 6200 BC freeze and the various droughts. But the deltas merged over the next millennium. 5500 BC commences the "Ubeid" ceramic style. The tides had declined so by the late Uruk era 3500 BC, there's no direct record left in Sumerian - save myths, about separating the sweet water from the brine, tropes alien to the Semites and Egyptians.
The good news for Sumer: lessons learnt from that elder hydrology could scale to the impressive irrigation of Uruk and beyond.
A pack of marsh Karankawa suddenly ratcheting up to agriculture explains why Sumerian is an isolate, unrelated to Hurrian / Semitic / Elamite. Everybody ignored those swampy yokels, excepting the odd trader. Until suddenly they couldn't be ignored. If the culture had come from the Euphates we'd expect it to be Akkadian-only; likewise, if across the Tigris, Elamite-only.
I would however like to know more of Ubeid upriver. They weren't as good as irrigation, but they did do some, and herded cattle as well. Their villages weren't as hierarchical as was Gilgamesh's city; Ubeid was more like Cucuteni in this. City-names like Arbela-Erbil and Babil (Babylon) are still not comprehensible as Semitic or Sumerian. So who were they?
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