Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were speakers of Semitic languages who lived throughout the ancient Near East and North Africa, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Arabian Peninsula and Carthage from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity, with some, such as Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, Jews, Mandaeans, Samaritans and Amharic/Ethio-Semitic speakers having a historical continuum into the present day.
Their languages are usually divided into two main branches: East and West Semitic. The oldest attested forms of Semitic date to the early to mid-3rd millennium BCE (the Early Bronze Age) in Mesopotamia, the northwest Levant and southeast Anatolia. Perhaps the earliest attested inscription of any Semitic language was written in the Proto-Sinaitic script in King Unas' Tomb in Egypt around the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE.
Speakers of East Semitic included the people of the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, Assyria and Babylonia, but the branch's languages have since fallen out of use. Akkadian influenced East Aramaic and perhaps Dilmun.
West Semitic includes Central Semitic, which combines the Northwest Semitic languages and Arabic. Speakers of Northwest Semitic were the Canaanites (including the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Amorites, Edomites, Moabites and the Hebrews/Israelites), the Arameans and the Ugarites. Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew and Maltese remain spoken to this day. Another major Central Semitic language, Old South Arabian languages, were spoken in the southern Arabian Peninsula in civilizations such as Sheba, Magan, Ubar and possibly Meluhha, and the speakers of Modern South Arabian languages of Yemen, Oman and the Ethiopian Semitic languages.
Many of the groups discussed in this article are known through traditional ethnographic categories inherited from biblical, classical or political sources both ancient and modern. Modern scholarship often emphasizes the complex nature of ancient identities in the same way people can keep true to multiple nationalities or speak multiple languages simultaneously. Linguistic, cultural, political, and ethnic boundaries did not always coincide, and should not necessarily be understood as corresponding to discrete or homogeneous "peoples".
Origins
There are several locations proposed as possible sites for prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking peoples: Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula, the Eastern Mediterranean, Eritrea and Ethiopia,Early Semitic. A diachronical inquiry into the relationship of Ethiopic to the other so-called South-East Semitic languages the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa.
A popular view claims that the Semitic languages originated in the Levant circa 3800 BC, and were later also introduced to the Horn of Africa—often associated with the southern Arabian peninsula—in approximately 800 BC, and to North Africa and southern Spain with the founding of Phoenician colonies such as ancient Carthage in the ninth century BC and Cádiz in the tenth century BC.Sabatino Moscati (January 2001). The Phoenicians. I.B. Tauris. p. 654. .
Some assign the arrival of Semitic speakers in the Horn of Africa to a much earlier date, circa 1300 to 1000 BC, and many scholars believe that Semitic originated from an offshoot of a still earlier language in North Africa, perhaps in the southeastern Sahara, and that the process of desertification may have caused its speakers to migrate in the fourth millennium BC—some southeast into what is now Eritrea and Ethiopia, and others northeast out of North Africa into Canaan, Syria and the Mesopotamian valley.The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age By Steven Weitzman page 69
The Semitic family is a member of the larger Afroasiatic family, all of whose other five or more branches have their origin in North Africa or the Maghreb. Largely for this reason, the ancestors of Proto-Semitic speakers were originally believed by some to have first arrived in the Middle East from North Africa, possibly as part of the operation of the Saharan pump, around the late Neolithic. Diakonoff sees Semitic originating between the Nile Delta and Canaan as the northernmost branch of Afroasiatic. Blench even wonders whether the highly divergent Gurage languages indicate an origin in Eritrea/Ethiopia (with the rest of Ethiopic/Eritreran Semitic a later back migration). Identification of the hypothetical proto-Semitic region of origin is therefore dependent on the larger geographic distributions of the other language families within Afroasiatic, whose origins are also hotly debated. According to Christy G. Turner II, there is an archaeological and physical anthropological reason for a relation between the modern Semitic-speaking populations of the Levant and the Natufian culture.
In one interpretation, Proto-Semitic itself is assumed to have reached the Arabian Peninsula by approximately the 4th millennium BC, from which Semitic daughter languages continued to spread outwards. When written records began in the late fourth millennium BC, the Semitic-speaking Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians) were entering Mesopotamia from the deserts to the west, and were probably already present in places such as Ebla in Syria. Akkadian personal names began appearing in written records in Mesopotamia from the late 29th century BC.
The earliest positively proven historical attestation of any Semitic people comes from 30th century BC Mesopotamia entering the region originally dominated by the people of Sumer, who spoke the language isolate Sumerian.
Bronze Age Between the 30th and 20th centuries BC, Semitic languages were spoken and recorded throughout much of the Ancient Near East, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Arabia, and the Sinai Peninsula. The earliest written evidence of them is found in the Fertile Crescent (Mesopotamia) c. the 30th century BC, an area encompassing Sumer, the Akkadian Empire and other civilizations of Assyria and Babylonia along the Tigris and Euphrates (modern Iraq, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey and the fringe of northwest Iran), followed by historical written evidence from the Levant (known also as Canaan; now Israel, Palestine, western Jordan, Lebanon, and southern Syria ), Sinai Peninsula, southern and eastern Anatolia (modern Turkey) and the northeast Arabian Peninsula. No written or archaeological evidence for Semitic languages exists in North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, or the Caucasus during this period.
The earliest known Akkadian inscription was found on a bowl at Ur, addressed to the very early pre-Sargonic king Meskiang-nunna of Ur by his queen Gan-saman, who is thought to have been from Akkad. However, some of the names appearing on the Sumerian King List as prehistoric rulers of Kish have been held to indicate a Semitic presence even before this, as early as the 30th or 29th century BC. By the mid-third millennium BC,Georges Roux — Ancient Iraq many states and cities in Mesopotamia had come to be ruled or dominated by Akkadian-speaking Semites, including Assyria, Eshnunna, the Akkadian Empire, Kish, Isin, Ur, Uruk, Adab, Nippur, Ekallatum, Nuzi, Akshak, Eridu and Larsa, and also Dilmun to the south of Mesopotamia. During this period (c. 27th to 26th century BC), another East Semitic-speaking people, the Eblaites, appear in the historical record from northern Syria. They founded the state of Ebla, whose Eblaite language was closely related to the Akkadian of Mesopotamia. The Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians and Eblaites were the first Semitic-speaking people to use writing, using the cuneiform script originally developed by the Sumerians c. 3500 BC, with the first writings in Akkadian dating from c. 2800 BC. The last Akkadian inscriptions date from the late first century AD, and cuneiform script in the second century AD, both in Mesopotamia, and Akkadian grammatical features and words endure in the East Aramaic dialects of the still extant Assyrians.Adkins 2003, p. 47.
By the late third millennium BC, East Semitic languages such as Akkadian and Eblaite, were dominant in Mesopotamia and north east Syria, while West Semitic languages, such as Amorite, Canaanite and Ugaritic, were probably spoken from Syria to the Arabian Peninsula. However Ancient South Arabian is considered by most people to be a South Semitic language despite the sparsity of data. The Akkadian language of Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia had become the dominant literary language of the Fertile Crescent, using the cuneiform script that was adapted from the Sumerians. The Old Assyrian period, Babylonian Empire, and in particular the Middle Assyrian Empire (1365–1050 BC) facilitated the use of Akkadian as a lingua franca in many regions outside its homeland. The related, but more sparsely attested, Eblaite disappeared with the city, and Amorite is attested only from proper names in Mesopotamian records.
For the 2nd millennium, more data are available, thanks to the Egyptian hieroglyphics-derived Proto-Sinaitic script. Texts in the Proto-Canaanite alphabet from around 1500 BCE yield the first undisputed attestations of West Semitic languages, although earlier testimonies are possibly preserved in Middle Bronze Age alphabets. This was followed by the much more extensive Ugaritic tablets of northern Syria from around 1300 BC. Incursions of nomadic and West Semitic-speaking Arameans and Suteans began around this time, followed by Chaldeans in the late 10th century BC. Akkadian continued to flourish, splitting into Babylonian and Assyrian dialects.
Of the West Semitic-speaking peoples who occupied what is today Syria (excluding the East Semitic-speaking Upper Mesopotamia), Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and the Sinai Peninsula, the earliest references concern the Canaanite-speaking Amorites (known as "Martu" or "Amurru" by the Mesopotamians) of northern and eastern Syria, and date from the 24th century BC in Mesopotamian annals."Amorite (people)". Encyclopædia Britannica online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. Retrieved 30 November 2012 The technologically advanced Sumerians, Akkadians and Assyrians of Mesopotamia mention the West Semitic-speaking peoples disparagingly: "The MAR.TU who know no grain... The MAR.TU who know no house nor town, the boors of the mountains... The MAR.TU who digs up truffles... who does not bend his knees (to cultivate the land), who eats raw meat, who has no house during his lifetime, who is not buried after death."^ Chiera 1934: 58 and 112 However, after initially being prevented from doing so by powerful Assyrian kings of the Old Assyrian Empire intervening from northern Mesopotamia, these Amorites would eventually overrun southern Mesopotamia, and found the state of Babylon in 1894 BC, where they became Akkadianized, adopted Mesopotamian culture and language, and blended into the indigenous population. Babylon became the centre of a short lived but influential Babylonian Empire in the 18th century BC, and after this, Lower Mesopotamia came to be known as Babylonia, with Babylon superseding the far more ancient city of Nippur as the primary religious center of southern Mesopotamia. Upper Mesopotamia had long before already coalesced into Assyria.