منتديات المُنى والأرب - Who in fact were the Semites

Who in fact were the Semites

It lumps together under this collective name all the major races which from 3500 BC onwards emigrated from the deserts of Arabia towards the flourishing civilizatons of the Nile and Euphrates. Thus the Akkadians who occupied Sumeria are called Semites, as were the Jews, who would cling so stubbornly to Palestine, and of course their present-day enemies the Arabs

What seems to have distinguished these peoples as a single group was not so much particular racial characteristics (such as a hooked nose) as their speech - a ******** rich in guttural and palatal sounds which was common to most of them. But even this cannot be proved with any certainty, as the early nomad tribes did not leave any written evidence in corroboration

So there remains the vague category, a name taken from the Pentateuch, or table of the nations. There all the tribes known to the authors were traced back to three forefathers, Noah's sons

Shem, the eldest, was promoted in eighteenth-century Europe as the founder of the Semites; Ham, the second son, was **id to be the father of the Hamites, and Japheth was held responsible for the Japhetic race, the peoples of Asia Minor. It was a fairly arbitrary ruling, which has no logical foundation, as the following point illustrates: Canaan and Sidon, two symbolic figures connected with Phoenicia, were held to be descendants of Ham. But the Phoenicians were not Hamites but Semites

reference:
The Phoenicians
** Gerhard Herm
Chapter one "the Bedouins of the sea" page 23