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arabs and other semitic peoples

• Message 1. 

  Posted by gavigai (U1789913) on Sunday, 7th August 2005

  Presumably the Arabs must have split off from the common ancestor with other semitic peoples at some point.
  
  What is known/believed about where/when this occurred?

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  Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Monday, 22nd August 2005

  I would imagine within the Arabian peninsular but then it depends if we are talking about the language or the people. Common ancestor is a bit of a misleading idea in so far as it suggests that they have a united origin with the other Semitic speakers, though maybe the legend has some value. The Semitic tongues are classified under the Afro-Asiatic language umbrella and are divided into two closely related families. There is far more diversity in the range of related languages in the Ethiopian highlands so it seems likely that there was some interaction across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean before historical records began.
  
  Be that as it may Semitic speaking groups like the Akkadians and Aromites from drier inland regions of Arabia appear to have come into contact with the literate societies of Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. By the latter half Semitic speakers were settled in Ebla and Mari in Syria while Akkadian, language of the legendary Sargon whose powerbase is thought to have been around Sippur in Iraq, soon became the standard for administrative languages eclipsing Sumerian and Elamite cuneiform in government and trade to the extent that descendents of the language were the dominant tongues of the Middle East until the Arab expansion.
  
  All of which suggests that the major division between the Akkadian inspired languages like Hebrew and Aramaic and Arabic dialects took place at least five thousand years ago. The expansion of Northern Arabic speaking nomads in the seventh century AD also seems to have submerged Southern Arabic languages around the Yemen. The Sabaean and Minaean Kingdoms were heavily involved with trade across the Indian Ocean and their language probably had a more lasting impact on Saudi dialects than some would like to admit. By the early first millennium they were using an alphabetic script that had a completely different order to the familiar abc derived from the Phoenicians. The South Arabian hlfm alphabet is attested at Ugarit in Syria at the end of the second millennium AD and is the basis of the modern Coptic alphabet.
  

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  Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Tuesday, 23rd August 2005

  re: message 2.
  
  lol,
  
  thank you very much for this essay.
  
  With esteem,
  
  Paul.

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  Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Tuesday, 23rd August 2005

  Sorry, I'v just spotted an error, well a tecnicality really. The end of the second Millennium AD is when they excavated Ugarit although it was from the end of the second millennium BC that the site yeilded South Arabian texts.

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• Message 5

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Thursday, 1st September 2005

  Lol Beeble, I cannot commend in detail on most of what you say since I did not cross verify everything - however most details fit with my knowledge on the subject: only that you missed one detail: The modern Coptic alphabet did not derive from Ugarit but directly from Greek Alphabet in exactly the same way Cyrilic alphabet was developed: it took the greek alphabet and added letters (i think 2) to cope with the local pronounciations etc. Modern Copts are perhaps the only direct descendants of ancient Egyptians (commoners of the south - cos as we have discussed in the past, i personally believe that the nation we call Egyptians, they were quite multicultural). They are actually descendants of those Egyptians that became christians in the first centuries AD. Even before those Coptic christians, Egyptians used the Greek alphabet in order to write in their language since the new hieroglyphics had already been outfashioned by the time of Roman conquest.
  
  Now, you are on the correct path focusing mainly on the language families rather than in the anthropologic families when talking on the issue of Arabic/Semitic tribes. Arabs and Semites were never exactly on specific anthropologic race as the region was the terrain of noumerous immigrations from all directions. You are right when you imply immigration from India to Ethiopia through South Saudi Arabia - that is a well established fact: there was a huge immigration of people of Dravidian origins (ancient Indians), around 10.000 BC, from India, via sea to South Saudi Arabia, then to Ethiopea - later to ascend to Egypt (and form the historic Egyptians, after 5000 AD. Even today the anthropologic resemblance of South Egyptians to south western Indians is more than obvious, while Ethiopeans and Somalians despite the long time-distance still bare resemblance to Indians. Greeks called Ethiopeans the Indians and not any african nation, since these arrived in east Africa and spread till north western Africa they said that Ethiopeans (Indians) live in the east and the west.
  
  North and western Semites were anthopologically another story: in the mediterranean east there was a strong presence of mediterranean tribes (mainly Greeks) and a lot of mixture occured (e.g. Phoenicians who took also the Cyprean alphabet, I call it simply Linear C, cos the Greek alphabets were nothing more than linear D - Phoenicean one was just one offshoot like all the rest). On the north the strongest anthopologic race was the Armenoid one (not to be confused with modern Armenians, though they are one good representativeof it) as well as much later on, the Perso-iranian tribes (lydians, medians, persians, parthians, kardouchians etc.). Hence anthropologically and depending on geography, the semitic race is something between Dravidians, Mediterraneans, Armenoids and Iranoids (though this is something very rough,perhaps modern Semites will not like the idea much - since the reminiscence of so many tribes and nations of the past that lived there was already fading by the first millenia AD and died soon after muslim conquest that enforced the arabic language everywhere).

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  Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Saturday, 3rd September 2005

  Hmmn, not quite what I meant. So far as I can see the Greeks may have had numerous alphabets but they all follow the pattern set out in Phoenecian script starting aleph, alpha, beth, beta and gamil, gamma etc and ascribe more or less the same characters to particular sounds, even Herodotus could see that. Further Greek alphabetic script has not been found before the eighth century BC.
  
  By contrast Ugarit demonstrates three different alphabetic traditions in use at the same time during the late second millennium BC, distinguished from each other by the sound they ascribed each character and the order the characters were learnt. This must imply that different Asian groups with separate methods of recording transactions were in contact along the Northern Levant. The Phoenician scripts are obviously Levantine in origin, suggested by the appearance of proto Cannanite writings in the Sinai from the middle of second millennium BC. The use of the Southern Arabian tradition suggests interaction with the Indian Ocean coast. Ugaritic, whose wedge shaped alphabet was developed from Mesopotamian cuneiform, also had three vowels although it did not make it into the first Millennium BC and had no influence on the Greek development of the concept.
  
  I did not say that Ge’ez was inherited from Ugarit. I maintain Southern Arabia was the origin of the hlfm alphabet. Although Ugarit is among the earliest sites demonstrating the tradition in any great volume it persisted longest around the Yemen area. Despite Meneleus’ boasts the Red Sea was more closely tied to trade along the Indian Ocean so it seems far more likely that Coptic scripts were derived from Southern Arabia. The Greeks were more concentrated along the Nile Delta and were remarkably exclusive hence Demotic Egyptian script’s continued use in rural areas.
  
  The Helladic levels of the same period were still using Linear B, a syllabary as opposed to an alphabet. They have very different mechanisms for transmitting meaning. True Cypriot scripts operated on the same lines but it must be noted that it continued alongside the Phoenician inspired alphabets for centuries as a kind of sacred language for initiates. Egyptian heiroglyphs took their place as the source of deep and mystical insights, never mind that few had a clue what they meant, and the syllabary fell out of use.
  
  As for your assertions about the Ethiopians, aside from the genealogical nonsense about Somalis, you don’t mind me saying but all that you are doing is taking the evolution of the term in Greek and turning it into a prehistoric narrative. It seems to be only one step removed from the rationalizing traditions of the pre Socratic philosophers. There is thus no basis in fact for your assertion about a Dravidian mass migration, not even with the shared veneration of cattle as it is generally presumed that India and the Ethiopian highlands were separate locations of cattle domestication.
  
  I have to ask what fueled the population expansion of these groups 12000 years ago allowing them to submerge the native populations along the Indian Ocean coast? Animal domestication certainly was not evident at this stage and the first experiments in true agriculture were only just beginning on the Levant and Northern Mesopotamia. I know that the pre-dynastic Egyptian stratigraphy is characterized by dramatic breaks in continuity interpreted as changes in the ethnic composition of the Nile Valley but there are plenty of nearer places that such groups could have arrived from.
  
  Although Elamite has been tentatively identified as being related to Dravidian it seems unlikely that they are evidence of mass migration from the Indus valley into Africa. I gather Elamite is an isolated language caught between the Mesopotamian tongues of Sumer and Akkad and Indo European languages in the Persian Highlands from the second millennium BC. There again the older scripts of Elam remain largely un-translated and it is largely an assumption they are the same tongue as Elamite cuneiform. Any relationship between it and Dravidian seems highly conjectural at any rate, Harrappen also remaining untranslatable at present.
  
  True there is evidence of cultural interaction between the Persian Gulf and the Indus valley and they share the same pattern of word construction but that is a long way to suggesting they are directly related. It is like assuming the Etruscans were Asian colonists because of the Oriental style of many of their artifacts and the fact that like Ugaritic their alphabet distinguished between three vowels. There again the Elamite language, known as Khuzi, survived in the courts of the Persians and around the Persian Gulf well as into the Islamic period. For that matter I notice you have artfully co-opted the Anatolian Hittites with their Indo European language as Greek.

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Saturday, 3rd September 2005

  Of course you are repeating the nonsense we have all been taught in schools which so perversive as to ignore our common sense. I invite you to any site (e.g. ancient scripts) showing all these alphabets and there you may see that Linear A, Linear B, Linear C (and not Cypriot) are all a continuation, Phoenicean is just a part of that continuation, you can call it Linear D and later Greek alphabets could be called Linear Es. If people want to be so naif to eat what they are served then that is ok by me - anyway 99 of our history taught is nothing but nonsense.
  
  You mention Herodotus when it fits you but you do not mention him when he does not. Very scientific. Herodotus is known as father of history but also as father of lies. To his honour, he admits often 'I do not know, they just told me it is like that', then Herodotus never said that the alphabet was a phoenician invention, he only said that it came from their territories. Territories largely habitated by Greeks - but we have to believe that is accidental, it could be more possily Chinese or Africans there.
  
  Now for you the obvious evolution of Greek born alphabets and the more than obious resemblance of earlier Linear C with the later Phoenician is less worthy as a clue than the obvious .... irrelevance of Ugarit cuneiform with Phoenicians. So what if the Ugarit cuneiform had the sequence A B ( and here the similarity it ends!!! ouaou!!). A and B are of the most basic sounds existing in most if not all languages, then the one (one!!!bravo!!!! viva la science!!) plate found cannot form a whole theory on the expense of our own eyes (what cuneiform has to do with Phoenician Linear-like alphabet? They are totally different unfortunately so the sauce goes sour.
  
  Yes! We have to believe that Phoenicians changed the 5000 year old tradition of middle eastern cuneiform to create an alphabet that largely resembles the Greek ones, but... 'scientifically no!' this has scientifically nothing to do with Greek, any resemblance is accidental, any Greek presence in Palestine is accidental.
  
  Then we are scientifically obliged to believe that Greeks stopped to write and read between 10th and waited until the 8th century to be educated by... Phoenicians. Nice science. Has any smart one of those who write such crap ever thought that writings are 99% written on destructible materials like any kind of paper, wood, earth etc. No, what we are taught is that Dorians were bad guys, came down (from where actually?????!!!!) and destroyed Mycenean cities being the jealous they were especially hunting down literate people and killing them, thus no literate man was existing after that in Greece. Of course as cities were destoryed and texts destoryed and people dies, the literacy levels reached a low, but ... please... not a single literate man? No alphabet? Please, do not be so scientific... too much science rained on this earth that in the end it does not help...
  
  They say, 'but in pottery we see writtings only after 8th century'. Personally I would not expect to find on pottey Ö÷²¥´óÐãr's poems!!!!! Yes mr Ignorants, pottery had been always the creation of slaves and poor people, how would you expect them to know how to write - no literate would spent his hours playng with clays, and if one did that would be the exception - you go find it, its not up to us who do not eat whatever served to prove anything. Then, as societies were progressing financially and culturally, the number of literate people increased (using the by then simplified alphabets) so writtings appeared on pottery which had by then had become much more elaborate and had became a mass production industry (that is why even iliterate slaves would copy the 'lines and forms' they could clearly see on their prototypes). Does it need too much fantasy to think of such facts? No, we are still searching to find Ö÷²¥´óÐãr on the pottery.
  
  Why, have we ever found any 8th temples? No, most modern historians believe there weren't many. Unlucky for their ignorance, there were as many as later only that they were smaller (due to the financial and ressource difficulties of those times), and usually built by wood, thus easily destroyed, most were destroyed or dissasembled in antiquity. Any writting on these would had been lost even before classical times. They also try to tell us Ö÷²¥´óÐãr wrote all his poems based on oral stories but fail to explain why these stories were simultaneously taught in all over Greece with relatively small variations (i.e. there must have been written records along oral ones).
  
  PS: I do not understand why historians contribute less in history than other sciences like for example engineering, that guy, Ventris who worked along with Chadwick and decoded Linear B did not even know ancient Greek, he was just using his brains and the logical assumption that the Myceneans must had talked nothing else than Greek. That was a punch in the face of most historians who lousely believed greeks formed themselves after Ö÷²¥´óÐãr!!! Nowdays they dare not decode Linear A cos they say 'we do not know what language it is'. Yes, right.
  
  PS: What I say is nothing new or unique, there are quite larg enumbers of honest historians and archaiologists that recognise these facts. However, I am thinking sometimes I should quit my job and start stydying from the beggining ancient history of that period to write a book to comment on the 'common history we are taught in schools and in universities'. I have seen how they are working in universities through friends of mine - some of them are very capable of analysing one text, or a monument or translating a language but the majority of them lack the basic skills for doing a further analysis that can be classified as something more worthy of a hollywood scenario.

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Saturday, 3rd September 2005

  Dear lolbeeble,
  
  you know the message above was targetted mainly to mass-produced history texts around the world.
  
  For your comments I cannot comment in detail on Elamites or the numerous ethnic groups in the Arabiab peninsula because I do not know much (not that historians know a lot!!!). The mass population move from India to East Africa, then West Africa is established, and it did happen around 10,000 BC or earlier. Trust me, humans would not wait for cows and donkeys to remain to a place. Taken for granted that we accept (I accept it of course) the theory of Dravidians having moved to Australia 40,000 years exploiting the lower water levels but on cases using boats, the move by see of populations from West India through Arabia to East Africa is nothing on the age of 10,000 BC.
  
  Do not tell me you still believe people started cultivating in 10,000 and domestication started around that age. If you do, you probable missed the latest 30 years of findings, only to give you an example of the findings in northern India about that city that is dated well before 8000 BC. It was reaching a population higher than 100,000 people probably from various different tribes and had sanitation systems and such. You see, I find it much more scientific to make logical guesses, to say 'perhaps' cultivation might have locally happened well before 20,000 but we do not know. Domestication of cattles well before 15,000... rather than to say 'we found this zinc-copper weapon in the north pole ice, in a layer around 6000 BC, it is the oldest specimen found till now, SO the first people in the world who used the winc-copper or metal were the Eskimos... sorry this is no science at all and that has been underlined repeatedly - nontheless archaiologists need to justify funds, need to become famous, to sell 1,2 books etc. ...well in their reports they have to talk at least 'passionately' of their 'work'. I do not know why we have to always believe them.
  
  PS: No, Coptic is an alphabet almost identical to Greek as much as the Latin. Coptic is the alphabet used by South Egyptian Copts (orthodox-related christians) - unless you use this name for anything else.
  
  PS: I am also not trying to prove all writtings were Greek other than that most alphabets that exist or existed came from the Greek ones either you like this idea or not. From Latin, Oscan, Venetic, Germanic Runes and Furthark,Iberian, Etruscan, Slavic, Coptic and whatever else (even the unseemingly georgian and armenian were greek inspired alphabets), all were based on the numerous Greek Linears (there were many variations cos each place had its own interpretation of the Linear since these often were used as codes). Phoenicians were of the first Asians to use the Greek alphabets and that is the story. Nothing more nothing less. Alphabets were used by other people also, the invention of phonetic alphabets was a gradual one and not an out-of-space one that some want us to believe, and it was done on the basis of the evolution of Linear writtings, nothing else.

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Saturday, 3rd September 2005

  ... to use the 'common logic', there have been found in Greece, in places that were preserved accidentally written signs that correpond to writting systems dating around 5000 BC. Scientists do not know much on that, some say that these are accidental Hence Greeks were certainly the first to have created written speech.
  
  What I say is that Greeks, or if you do not like that name, the habitants of that land, are certainly the first candidates for having developed the first definite written speech (distinguished from drawings).

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  Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Sunday, 4th September 2005

  Good grief, where do I start. Apologies to anyone reading for the length but it seems the followers of Critias are alive and well and working for Apogevmatini and the Davlos publishing house. I see you have lapped up that Hancock nonsense about pre-diluvial civilization for that matter. To start with I think it would be helpful if you did not make up pseudo classifications that only you recognize. Spin a yarn if you must but give the rest a chance to look up the data and pass their own judgment. In any case you are spouting rubbish that one can trace a continuous development from Vinca scripts, Linear A and B though to the Phoenetic alphabet and beyond, never mind creative editing by the hosts of the sites you refer to. As such there are few common symbols between the Cypriot Syllabary and Linear B. I don’t know about you but all that mystical double meaning for Greek script smacks of Cabalism to my mind.
  
  The evidence of cylinder seals in Crete and Thebes before Linear A was even developed suggests that it was interaction with the Near East not the Balkans that was the primary inspiration for the invention of a separate writing system in the Aegean. The point is that these were not traditions stretching back thousands of years as different groups adopted and adapted the idea of writing to suit their own needs as well as processes of evolution or even abandonment when social situations changed, one might argue that Elamite represents the former wheras the scripts of Old Europe imply the latter.
  
  In so far as alphabets springing fully formed form the head of Zeus, Egyptian hieroglyphs do have a basic core of symbols to represent specific consonants that appear to have been rationalized by Canaanite speaking groups. By the end of the Bronze Age this concept appears to have taken hold in the Levant and Arabian coast though further inland there was more conservatism about the retention of older written scripts. Moreover it can be seen that the use of permanent media like pottery for record keeping in Mesopotamia and later the Aegean was very different papyri in Egyptian writing that influenced the form of the Phoenician and Arabian alphabets. Ugraitic is just an alphabet using characters suitable for quick entry onto clay tablets as opposed to writing on papyrus or painted on wood or stone. Wax tablets would prove to be ideal for any means of recording data however.
  
  As it stands I know Herodotus and could tell you who coined those titles but even if his conclusion about how the Greeks adopted writing are wrong they are based on sound observations. Do tell where the names for the characters of the Phoenician alphabet arose if not from a Semitic language? There again I would imagine the references to Nestor’s cup inscribed in early Attic script dated to the eighth or early seventh century BC must be quite a shock if you have such a low regard for artisans. Mind you I would have thought there would have been a damn site more graffiti, usually inscribed on more permanent media like rock, pottery or even on lead for cursing someone if the Greeks were literate. The absence of graffiti before the eighth century suggests that if there was literacy in the Greek world before this it was highly restricted. Even then the fact that the Ö÷²¥´óÐãric world appears to be ignorant of writing, save for an allusion to sinister signs in the story of Bellephron, suggests that writing had fallen out of use.
  
  In any case once you have got past the physical shape of the characters used in each writing system you might consider how they formed the words. For example a syllabary works by combining consonants and vowel sounds and representing them as a character whereas an alphabet has separate characters to represent individual sounds. Now it is true that Ventris was an architect but his methodology for working out what the characters stood for was based on the earlier work of linguists. Certainly he initially felt Linear B could not be Greek as he could not spot a common ending for words that would equate to the –se symbol found in the Cypriot syllabary. It was therefore a surprise when the roots of the words he identified turned out to be Greek. All the same the lack of clarity in ending the words suggests that for the most part Linear B was primarily used for book-keeping so the roots beginning of the terms were of more importance than ascribing any grammatical context.
  
  It therefore seems that as literacy in the second millennium BC was intimately tied to the Palace economies of the Aegean once these collapsed so Linear B fell out of use. Even if examination of surviving palace archives suggest that as many as fifty scribes were contributing to Mycenaean records in any one year the fact that there is no evidence for writing being used outside this context must imply that it was restricted by cultural norms. This is re-enforced when one considers the actual use of the Cypriot syllabary. One can see that the oral tradition was certainly far stronger in Greek society even after the adopting Phoenician scripts so with the removal of the Palace economies it lost its significance for the population as a whole until a more flexible means of recording speech was adopted.
  
  With regard to your assertions about Dravidians, I think it would be wise to suggest what practices allowed them to expand and subsume their neighbours without resorting to some crude application of the uncertainty principle. Perhaps you would care to look at Gobekli Tepe in the Kurdish zone of Turkey for an urban centre stretching back 12000 years. As for copper, I think you are getting mixed up with Oetzi the ice man, a Chalcolithic body from the Alps. Tassos made the same point, you must read the same newspaper. There again the Zagros Mountains have turned up copper pendants in levels associated with the ninth millennium BC.

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