Semites

Semites, a convenient name given by J. G. Eichhorn in 1787 to a group of nations closely allied in language, religion, manners, and physical features, who are mostly represented in Genesis x. as descended from Shem, a son of Noah. Their habitat is Abyssinia, Arabia, Palestine, Phœnicia,

Syria, and the countries of the Euphrates and Tigris. Into those lands, according to one theory which is supported by Lenormant and others, there had preceded them an immigration of Cushites of the Hamitic race, who, proceeding from central Asia, occupied not only the lands that afterwards became Semitic, but also the Nile valley. Their Hamitic language and civilisation the Semites do show some affinity with the Berbers and the inhabitants of the Nile valley, and Genesis x. does, for political and geographical or other reasons, distribute the sons of Ham and Shem in a peculiar manner. But the increasingly prevalent theory is that not less than 4000 years B.C. the Semites migrated as nomadic tribes, probably from Arabia, into Mesopotamia. There they found a Turanian population dwelling in cities built of brick, under the regular government of priest-kings, skilled in the use of metals, using the cuneiform mode of writing, and comparatively far advanced in literature and culture. The hold of the Semites upon Shumir, the lower, more fertile, and more thickly inhabited part of the Euphrates valley, was not at first so strong as upon Accad, the upper part. In 3800 B.C. the Semitic adventurer Sharrukin usurped the kingdom of Accad. In Elam also the Turanian population was early overpowered by the intruding Semites, who came to form the upper strata of society. In 2280 B.C. the Semite Khudur-Nankhundi of Elam invaded and conquered Shumir and Accad, founding the Elamite line of princes; and about 2200 B.C. one of his successors, Khudur-Lagamar (Chederlaomer), carried his conquests as far as Palestine (see Genesis xiv.). These painful and oppressive impulses, and probably others like them, seem to have occasioned emigrations of many Semites. Some proceeded towards the north-west, reached the Mediterranean Sea, founded Sidon, Tyre, and other cities, and became known afterwards as Canaanites or Phoenicians. Later from Ur went others in the same direction, settled behind the Phoenicians, and were afterwards known as Israel. Others went northwards and built cities which developed into the empire of Assyria. While the Semites were in Mesopotamia they used the Turanian language in their public documents until they attained the ascendant in political power; and when afterwards they used their own language they continued to use the Turanian cuneiform mode of writing. The Turanian religion also was adopted by the Semites, and mixed with what religion their own primeval tribal religion or totemism had developed into. This amalgamation was consummated by Sharrukin II. of Accad about 2000 B.C.

The Semites as a race have a fine physical organisation, are mentally quick, clever, but not inclined to change, and not persistent in progress. They have been distinguished by a brilliant imagination and love of the beautiful; but have not shone in philosophy nor in science. Their literature has neither epic nor dramatic poetry worth notice. Almost their only arts are the sculpture of Assyria, the exquisite glass and pottery, and the textile fabrics and embroidery of the Phoenicians. Impatient of restraint, the Semites have not by political aptitude welded together themselves or others into large, compact, and enduring commonwealths. They have made their mark on the world in the Phoenician commerce, which visited even the Atlantic shores of Spain and France and drew tin from Britain; in the Phoenician colonies, which, dotting all the coasts and many islands of the Mediterranean Sea as far as Cadiz, and the coast of Asia as far as India, dispensed manufactures, improved primitive navigation, stimulated industry, trade, and ingenuity, and radiated the light of material civilisation; in the Carthaginian empire within Europe and Africa; in the exploits of Hannibal; in the dissemination of alphabetic writing, whereof the Phœnician form was the mother of the European and of most Asiatic alphabets, while the alphabet of the great Sabæan kingdom, or of the great and still more ancient Minæan kingdom in Arabia, is apparently the oldest of all alphabets hitherto discovered; in the Babylonian and Assyrian empires; in the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish religion; in the New Testament and the Christian religion; in the Koran and the Mohammedan religion; in the Mohammedan conquests and empire; and in the preservation of culture thereby during the dark and middle ages.

SEMITIC LANGUAGES, the languages spoken by the Semitic nations. One characteristic feature of them is triconsonantal roots from which by prefixed or affixed letters, but mostly by internal vowel changes, the other words are formed. Thus in Arabic kāṭabā = 'he wrote,' kāṭib = 'a scribe,' kitāb = 'a book,' maṭtūb = 'an epistle.' Another characteristic feature is that, though personal pronouns are affixed to nouns, verbs, and prepositions, there is an almost total absence of compound nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Thus, while in Arabic beiti = 'my house,' qatalahu = 'he killed him,' minhā = 'from her,' there are no such compound words as pro-motion, dread-ful, grati-fy. Other characteristic features are a verb with two tenses, and the simple structure of sentences, which are mainly formed by juxtaposition of clauses helped by and. Semitic languages have a much closer family likeness than the Indo-European, and show a large proportion of common words. The most highly developed, and on the whole the most characteristic, probably also the oldest of the group, is Arabic, which, with its ancient Sabæan and Minæan dialects of southern, western, and northern Arabia, and with Ethiopic, forms the southern division of Semitic languages, marked by the use of 'broken plurals,' in which the consonants of the singular are preserved, while the vowels are as much altered as possible. Thus from the Arabic kitāb, 'a book,' comes the plural kūṭūb. Another mark is the universal use of a before the third radical letter of the active preterites; thus Arabic has qāṭala, āṭala, for which Hebrew has qittēl and hīṭil. Another mark is the distinction between the Arabic sād and dād, which are united in the Hebrew letter tsāde.—HEBREW, though a characteristically Semitic speech, shows many marks of linguistic decadence; ancient Hebrew is a more modern type of language than modern Arabic.—PHOENICIAN differs little in grammar and dictionary from Hebrew. In the African territory of Carthage this language was spoken 400 years after the Christian era; a century before that era in Phœnicia itself it yielded to Aramæan or to Greek. Our only examples of it are a few corrupt sentences in the Pænulus of Plautus, and inscriptions, most of which date from the 4th century B.C. or later, few belonging to the preceding three centuries.—MOABITIC, as the Moabite Stone of the 9th century B.C. shows, was Hebrew.—ARAMÆAN had its home in Aram of Damascus and Aram of Mesopotamia. It was the language of Assyria from early times, as we may see in 2 Kings xviii., and of Babylonia, even while Assyrian was used there for official purposes. It was the official language of the provinces of the Persian empire west from the Euphrates. Its western branch was the language of Palmyra and of the northern part of the Arabian kingdom of the Nabatheans, and is seen in the biblical books of Ezra and Daniel, where it has been erroneously named Chaldee. Later developments of this branch are the officially recognised Targums by Onkelos on the Pentateuch, and Jonathan on the Prophets, which were finally edited and fixed in the 4th or 5th century A.D. in Babylonia. Somewhat later are some Midrashies, the Jerusalem Targums, and the Jerusalem Talmud. Of the 4th or 5th century are Palestinian translations of the Gospel.—SAMARITAN is another branch of western Aramæan, written in a Hebrew alphabet older than the Captivity, and spoken about 432 B.C. by an Aramæan people with Israelitish blood in them, who were desirous of conforming in speech as in religion to the Hebrew usage of northern Palestine. Arabic soon expelled western Aramæan after the Mohammedan conquest, though a faint echo of it still lingers in the Anti-Libanus. The Babylonian Talmud shows the common eastern Aramæan of Babylonia from the 4th to the 6th century. The language of the Mandæan sect resembles it. In the 2d century the Edessan dialect of Aramæan, which we call SYRIAC, began to be the language of eastern Christendom for all purposes; but for popular use it was slowly supplanted by Arabic after the Mohammedan conquest, becoming a dead and almost entirely ecclesiastical language. In the mountain regions of ancient Assyria Aramæan is still represented by several local dialects among Christians and even Jews.—ASSYRIAN, so called by us moderns because discovered by us in Assyria, is more correctly named BABYLONIAN. It is written in the difficult, cumbrous, and inadequate cuneiform character received from the Turanian natives. It shows scarcely any sign of a preterite tense. In popular use it early gave way to Aramæan.—ETHIOPIC, a sister tongue to Arabic, in some respects resembles more closely Hebrew and Aramæan even in the most ancient form of the language known to us.

For more detailed information as to the several Semitic peoples and their languages and literatures, see ALPHABET, ARABIA, ASSYRIA, CARTHAGE, ETHIOPIA, HEBREW LANGUAGE, JEWS, PHENICIA; MOHAMMED, KORAN, CALIF, &c. Semitic scholars are Gesenius, Ewald, Halévy, Fürst, Lane, Dozy, J. de Goeje, Dillmann, P. de Lagarde, Land, Delitzsch, Haupt, Strassmaier, Menant, Oppert, George Smith, Rawlinson, Lenormant, Chwolsohn, Renan, Nöldeke, Hommel, Fleischer, Rödiger, A. B. Davidson, Robertson Smith, Wright, Payne Smith, Badger, Sayce, Salmoné, Wüstenfeld, Socin, Kautsch, Böttcher, Petermann, Nestlé, W. H. Green, Driver, Cheyne, Schrader, Schröder, Wellhausen, Baethgen. The 'Records of the Past' give many valuable translations of ancient writings. See Wright's Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages, edited by Robertson Smith (1890).