The Home of the Semites

ACCORDING TO THE PREVALENT VIEW the home of the Semites is Arabia, which has been like a seething caldron, boiling over at intervals and emitting its surplus population in successive eruptions, poured out as the lid was forced up. This theory, which has been worked out with beautiful symmetry, is represented in almost all the histories of Hither Asia of the last quarter or even half century, and I have myself presented it as established fact in my writings. Indeed it seemed to me that additional incidental evidence for this theory was found in the fact that as the successive waves of invasion poured northward the invaders displayed a linguistic connection with those ahead as well as with those behind. So inscriptions found in northern Syria seemed -to show that the Aramaeans in the forefront of the great Aramaean wave of invasion adopted in part the language of the preceding Semitic emigrants, while the Hebrews, Moabites, and kindred peoples, Aramaean' in race, spoke a language practically identical with that of the Canaanites. Similarly, while the Nabataeans were Arabs, their language was a variant of the Aramaean of the preceding wave of emigration. The first Semitic eruption from Arabia, according to the prevalent view, took place in the fourth millennium B. C., resulting in the establishment of the Babylonian-Semites on the east, and of the Semitic peoples in northern Syria on the west; the wave of emigration from Arabia, divided by the desert, pouring up on both east and west. Somewhere toward the middle of the third millennium B. C. came another wave of invasion, which occupied Canaan, and strengthened and modified the Semitic element in Babylonia. A thousand years later came the Aramaeans, occupying Palestine, east and west of the Jordan, in the four nationalities of Hebrews, Ammonites, Moabites, and Edomites

Ancient history · Archaeology · Emigration · Genealogy · Hebrews · Linguistics · Population · Semitic languages · Sociology · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Ancient Near East History · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Classics · Demography · History · Philosophy

• Foundations of the Age-Area Hypothesis

  Open Access•M J Baker•Humanities and Social Sciences…•2021

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