1.
Ebla
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Ebla, was one of the earliest kingdoms in Syria. Its remains constitute a tell located about 55 km southwest of Aleppo near the village of Mardikh, Ebla was an important center throughout the third millennium BC and in the first half of the second millennium BC. Karl Moore described the first Eblaite kingdom as the first recorded world power, starting as a small settlement in the early Bronze Age, Ebla developed into a trading empire and later into an expansionist power that imposed its hegemony over much of northern and eastern Syria. Ebla was destroyed during the 23rd century BC, it was rebuilt and was mentioned in the records of the Third Dynasty of Ur. The second Ebla was a continuation of the first, ruled by a new royal dynasty and it was destroyed at the end of the third millennium BC, which paved the way for the Amorite tribes to settle in the city, forming the third Ebla. The third kingdom also flourished as a center, it became a subject. Ebla maintained its prosperity through a vast trading network, artifacts from Sumer, Cyprus, Egypt and as far as Afghanistan were recovered from the citys palaces. The kingdom had its own language, Eblaite and the organization of Ebla had features different from the Sumerian model. Women enjoyed a status and the queen had major influence in the state. The pantheon of gods was mainly north Semitic and included deities exclusive to Ebla, the city was excavated starting in 1964, and became famous for the Ebla tablets, an archive of about 20,000 cuneiform tablets found there, dated to around 2350 BC. A possible meaning of the word Ebla is white rock, referring to the outcrop on which the city was built. Ebla was first settled around 3500 BC, its growth was supported by many agricultural settlements. The city benefited from its role as an entrepôt of growing international trade, archaeologists designate this early habitation period Mardikh I, it ended around 3000 BC. Mardikh I is followed by the first and second kingdoms era between about 3000 and 2000 BC, designated Mardikh II. I. J. Gelb consider Ebla as part of the Kish civilization, the early period between 3000 and 2400 BC is designated Mardikh IIA. General knowledge about the history prior to the written archives is obtained through excavations. The first stages of Mardikh IIA is identified with building CC, and structures form a part of building G2. Toward the end of period, a hundred years war with Mari started
2.
Language family
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A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. Linguists therefore describe the languages within a language family as being genetically related. Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the precision of ones definition of language, the 2013 edition of Ethnologue catalogs just over 7,000 living human languages. A living language is one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified. Membership of languages in a family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship, speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing, for example, Germanic languages are Germanic in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a unit, all its members derive from a common ancestor. Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a level. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, a top-level family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to other, the closer the languages will be related. For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, there is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically as opposed to horizontally. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations, thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language to nearly twenty, most of the worlds languages are known to be related to others
3.
Afroasiatic languages
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Afroasiatic, also known as Afrasian and traditionally as Hamito-Semitic, is a large language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. It comprises about 300 or so living languages and dialects, according to the 2009 Ethnologue estimate and it includes languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel. Afroasiatic languages have 350+ million native speakers, the fourth largest number of any language family, the phylum has six branches, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic. By far the most widely spoken Afroasiatic language is Arabic, including literary Arabic and it has around 200 to 230 million native speakers concentrated primarily in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Malta. Modern Aramaic, spoken by about 550,000 people worldwide and this is not just one language — It includes a number of subdivisions, with Assyrian Neo-Aramaic being the most spoken variety. In addition to languages spoken today, Afroasiatic includes several important ancient languages, such as Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew and it is uncertain when or where the original homeland of the Afroasiatic family existed. Proposed locations include North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Eastern Sahara, the terms Hamitic and Semitic were etymologically derived from the Book of Genesis, which describes various Biblical tribes descended from Ham and Shem, two sons of Noah. By the 1860s, the constituent elements within the broader Afroasiatic family had been worked out. The scholar Friedrich Müller introduced the name Hamito-Semitic for the family in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft. Maurice Delafosse later coined the term Afroasiatic, however, it did not come into general use until Joseph Greenberg formally proposed its adoption. In doing so, Greenberg sought to emphasize the fact that Afroasiatic spanned the continents of both Africa and Asia, individual scholars have also called the family Erythraean and Lisramic. The term Hamito-Semitic remains in use in the traditions of some European countries. Greenberg and others considered it a subgroup of Cushitic, whereas others have raised doubts about it being part of Afroasiatic at all, Harold Fleming proposes that Ongota constitutes a separate branch of Afroasiatic. Bonny Sands believes the most convincing proposal is by Savà and Tosco, Beja is sometimes listed as a separate branch of Afroasiatic but is more often included in the Cushitic branch, which has a high degree of internal diversity. Whether the various branches of Cushitic actually form a family is sometimes questioned. There is no consensus on the interrelationships of the five branches of Afroasiatic. This situation is not unusual, even among long-established language families, there are also many disagreements concerning the classification of the Indo-European languages. Meroitic has been proposed as an unclassified Afroasiatic language, because it shares the characteristic of the family
4.
Semitic languages
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The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, the most widely spoken Semitic languages today are Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Hebrew, Aramaic and Maltese. Among them are the Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Latin script and the only Semitic language to be an official language of the European Union. The Semitic languages are notable for their nonconcatenative morphology and that is, word roots are not themselves syllables or words, but instead are isolated sets of consonants. Words are composed out of not so much by adding prefixes or suffixes. For example, in Arabic, the root meaning write has the form k-t-b, the similarity of the Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic languages was accepted by Jewish and Islamic scholars since medieval times. Almost two centuries later, Hiob Ludolf described the similarities between these three languages and the Ethiopian Semitic languages, however, neither scholar named this grouping as Semitic. Viewed from this too, with respect to the alphabet used. Previously these languages had been known as the Oriental languages in European literature. In the 19th century, Semitic became the name, however. There are several locations proposed as sites for prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking peoples, Mesopotamia, The Levant, Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula. Both the Near East and North Africa saw an influx of Muslim Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, followed later by non-Semitic Muslim Iranian and Turkic peoples. The Arabs spread their Central Semitic language to North Africa where it gradually replaced Coptic and many Berber languages, with the patronage of the caliphs and the prestige of its liturgical status, Arabic rapidly became one of the worlds main literary languages. Its spread among the masses took much longer, however, as many of the populations outside the Arabian Peninsula only gradually abandoned their languages in favour of Arabic. As Bedouin tribes settled in conquered areas, it became the language of not only central Arabia, but also Yemen, the Fertile Crescent. Most of the Maghreb followed, particularly in the wake of the Banu Hilals incursion in the 11th century, and Arabic became the native language of many inhabitants of al-Andalus. After the collapse of the Nubian kingdom of Dongola in the 14th century, Arabic began to spread south of Egypt into modern Sudan, soon after, the Beni Ḥassān brought Arabization to Mauritania. Meanwhile, Semitic languages were diversifying in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where, under heavy Cushitic influence, they split into a number of languages, including Amharic, Arabic languages and dialects are currently the native languages of majorities from Mauritania to Oman, and from Iraq to the Sudan
5.
Semitic language
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The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, the most widely spoken Semitic languages today are Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Hebrew, Aramaic and Maltese. Among them are the Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Latin script and the only Semitic language to be an official language of the European Union. The Semitic languages are notable for their nonconcatenative morphology and that is, word roots are not themselves syllables or words, but instead are isolated sets of consonants. Words are composed out of not so much by adding prefixes or suffixes. For example, in Arabic, the root meaning write has the form k-t-b, the similarity of the Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic languages was accepted by Jewish and Islamic scholars since medieval times. Almost two centuries later, Hiob Ludolf described the similarities between these three languages and the Ethiopian Semitic languages, however, neither scholar named this grouping as Semitic. Viewed from this too, with respect to the alphabet used. Previously these languages had been known as the Oriental languages in European literature. In the 19th century, Semitic became the name, however. There are several locations proposed as sites for prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking peoples, Mesopotamia, The Levant, Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula. Both the Near East and North Africa saw an influx of Muslim Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, followed later by non-Semitic Muslim Iranian and Turkic peoples. The Arabs spread their Central Semitic language to North Africa where it gradually replaced Coptic and many Berber languages, with the patronage of the caliphs and the prestige of its liturgical status, Arabic rapidly became one of the worlds main literary languages. Its spread among the masses took much longer, however, as many of the populations outside the Arabian Peninsula only gradually abandoned their languages in favour of Arabic. As Bedouin tribes settled in conquered areas, it became the language of not only central Arabia, but also Yemen, the Fertile Crescent. Most of the Maghreb followed, particularly in the wake of the Banu Hilals incursion in the 11th century, and Arabic became the native language of many inhabitants of al-Andalus. After the collapse of the Nubian kingdom of Dongola in the 14th century, Arabic began to spread south of Egypt into modern Sudan, soon after, the Beni Ḥassān brought Arabization to Mauritania. Meanwhile, Semitic languages were diversifying in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where, under heavy Cushitic influence, they split into a number of languages, including Amharic, Arabic languages and dialects are currently the native languages of majorities from Mauritania to Oman, and from Iraq to the Sudan
6.
Syria
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Syrias capital and largest city is Damascus. Religious groups include Sunnis, Christians, Alawites, Druze, Mandeans, Shiites, Salafis, Sunni Arabs make up the largest religious group in Syria. Its capital Damascus and largest city Aleppo are among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, in the Islamic era, Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad Caliphate and a provincial capital of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt. The post-independence period was tumultuous, and a number of military coups. In 1958, Syria entered a union with Egypt called the United Arab Republic. Syria was under Emergency Law from 1963 to 2011, effectively suspending most constitutional protections for citizens, Bashar al-Assad has been president since 2000 and was preceded by his father Hafez al-Assad, who was in office from 1970 to 2000. Mainstream modern academic opinion strongly favours the argument that the Greek word is related to the cognate Ἀσσυρία, Assyria, in the past, others believed that it was derived from Siryon, the name that the Sidonians gave to Mount Hermon. However, the discovery of the inscription in 2000 seems to support the theory that the term Syria derives from Assyria. The area designated by the word has changed over time, since approximately 10,000 BC, Syria was one of centers of Neolithic culture where agriculture and cattle breeding appeared for the first time in the world. The following Neolithic period is represented by houses of Mureybet culture. At the time of the pre-pottery Neolithic, people used vessels made of stone, gyps, finds of obsidian tools from Anatolia are evidences of early trade relations. Cities of Hamoukar and Emar played an important role during the late Neolithic, archaeologists have demonstrated that civilization in Syria was one of the most ancient on earth, perhaps preceded by only those of Mesopotamia. The earliest recorded indigenous civilisation in the region was the Kingdom of Ebla near present-day Idlib, gifts from Pharaohs, found during excavations, confirm Eblas contact with Egypt. One of the earliest written texts from Syria is an agreement between Vizier Ibrium of Ebla and an ambiguous kingdom called Abarsal c.2300 BC. The Northwest Semitic language of the Amorites is the earliest attested of the Canaanite languages, Mari reemerged during this period, and saw renewed prosperity until conquered by Hammurabi of Babylon. Ugarit also arose during this time, circa 1800 BC, close to modern Latakia, Ugaritic was a Semitic language loosely related to the Canaanite languages, and developed the Ugaritic alphabet. The Ugarites kingdom survived until its destruction at the hands of the marauding Indo-European Sea Peoples in the 12th century BC, Yamhad was described in the tablets of Mari as the mightiest state in the near east and as having more vassals than Hammurabi of Babylon. Yamhad imposed its authority over Alalakh, Qatna, the Hurrians states, the army of Yamhad campaigned as far away as Dēr on the border of Elam
7.
Mari, Syria
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Mari, was an ancient Semitic city in Syria. Its remains constitute a tell located 11 kilometers north-west of Abu Kamal on the Euphrates river western bank and it flourished as a trade center and hegemonic state between 2900 BC and 1759 BC. Mari was first abandoned in the middle of the 26th century BC but was rebuilt and this second Mari engaged in a long war with its rival Ebla, and is known for its strong affinity with the Sumerian culture. It was destroyed in the 23rd century BC by the Akkadians who allowed the city to be rebuilt, the governors later became independent with the rapid disintegration of the Akkadian empire and rebuilt the city as a regional center in the middle Euphrates valley. The Shakkanakkus ruled Mari until the half of the 19th century BC when the dynasty collapsed for unknown reasons. A short time after the Shakkanakku collapse, Mari became the capital of the Amorite Lim dynasty, the Mariotes worshiped both Semitic and Sumerian deities and established their city as a center of old trade. The Amorites were West-Semites who began to settle the area before the 21st century BC, by the Lim dynastys era and they also revealed the wide trading networks of the 18th century BC, which connected areas as far as Afghanistan in Southern Asia and Crete in the Mediterranean region. The city is difficult to excavate, as it is buried deep under the layers of habitation. A defensive system against floods, composed of an embankment was unearthed. Other findings include one of the city gates, a beginning at the center and ending at the gate. The city was abandoned at the end of the Early Dynastic period II c.2550 BC for unknown reasons, around the beginning of the Early Dynastic period III, Mari was rebuilt and populated again. The new city kept many of the first city exterior features, including the internal rampart and gate. Also kept was the outer circular embankment measuring 1.9 km in diameter, at the heart of the city, a royal palace was built which also served as a temple. Four successive architectural levels from the second kingdoms palace have been unearthed, the first two levels were excavated, the findings include a temple named Enceinte Sacrée, which was the largest in the city but it is unknown for whom it was dedicated. Also unearthed were a pillared throne room and a hall that have three double wood pillars leading to the temple, six more temples were discovered in the city, including the temple called the Massif Rouge, and temples dedicated for Ninni-Zaza, Ishtarat, Ishtar, Ninhursag and Shamash. 2350 BC, which was sent to Irkab-Damu of Ebla, and in it, however, the reading of this letter is still problematic and many interpretations have been presented by scholars. The next king mentioned in the letter is Saʿumu, who conquered the lands of Raak and Nirum, the war continued with Išhtup-Išar of Mari conquest of Emar, at a time of Eblaite weakness in the mid-24th century BC. King Igrish-Halam of Ebla had to pay tribute to Iblul-Il of Mari, Enna-Dagan also received tribute, and his reign fell entirely within the reign of Irkab-Damu of Ebla, who managed to defeat Mari and end the tribute
8.
Tell Brak
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Tell Brak was an ancient city in Syria. Its remains constitute a tell located in the Upper Khabur region, near the village of Tell Brak,50 kilometers north-east of Al-Hasaka city. The citys original name is unknown, during the second half of the third millennium BC, the city was known as Nagar and later on, Nawar. Nagar prospered again by the 19th century BC, and came under the rule of different regional powers, in c.1500 BC, Tell Brak was a center of Mitanni before being destroyed by Assyria c.1300 BC. The city never regained its importance, remaining as a small settlement. Different peoples inhabited the city, including the Halafians, Semites, the culture of Tell Brak was defined by the different civilizations that inhabited it, and it was famous for its glyptic style, equids and glass. When independent, the city was ruled by an assembly or by a monarch. Tell Brak was a center due to its location between Anatolia, the Levant and southern Mesopotamia. It was excavated by Max Mallowan in 1937, then regularly by different teams between 1979 and 2011, when the work stopped due to the Syrian Civil War, the original name of the city is unknown, Tell Brak is the current name of the tell. East of the mound lies a lake named Khatuniah which was recorded as Lacus Beberaci in the Roman map Tabula Peutingeriana. The lake was named after Tell Brak which was the nearest camp in the area. The name Brak might therefore be an echo of the most ancient name, during the third millennium BC, the city was known as Nagar, which might be of Semitic origin and mean a cultivated place. The name Nagar ceased occurring following the Old Babylonian period, however and those scholars opt for a city closer to Urkesh which was also called Nawala/Nabula as the intended Nawar. The earliest period A, is dated to the proto Halaf culture c.6500 BC, many objects dated to that period were discovered including the Halaf pottery. By 5000 BC, Halaf culture transformed into Northern Ubaid, in southern Mesopotamia, the original Ubaid culture evolved into the Uruk period. The people of the southern Uruk period used military and commercial means to expand the civilization, in Northern Mesopotamia, the post Ubaid period is designated Late Chalcolithic / Northern Uruk period, during which, Tell Brak started to expand. Period Brak E witnessed the building of the walls. By the late 5th millennium BC, Tell Brak reached the size of c.55 hectares, area TW of the tell revealed the remains of a monumental building with two meters thick walls and a basalt threshold
9.
Akkadian
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Akkadian is an extinct East Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the writing system, which was originally used to write the unrelated Ancient Sumerian. The language was named after the city of Akkad, a centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire. The mutual influence between Sumerian and Akkadian had led scholars to describe the languages as a sprachbund, Akkadian proper names were first attested in Sumerian texts from around the mid 3rd-millennium BC. From the second half of the third millennium BC, texts written in Akkadian begin to appear. By the second millennium BC, two variant forms of the language were in use in Assyria and Babylonia, known as Assyrian and Babylonian respectively, for centuries, Akkadian was the native language in Mesopotamian nations such as Assyria and Babylonia. However, it began to decline during the Neo-Assyrian Empire around the 8th century BC, by the Hellenistic period, the language was largely confined to scholars and priests working in temples in Assyria and Babylonia. The last known Akkadian cuneiform document dates from the 1st century AD, Akkadian belongs with the other Semitic languages in the Near Eastern branch of the Afroasiatic languages, a family native to East Africa, which then spread to West, Northwest and Northeast Africa. Within the Near Eastern Semitic languages, Akkadian forms an East Semitic subgroup and this novel word order is due to the influence of the Sumerian substratum, which has an SOV order. Additionally Akkadian is the only Semitic language to use the prepositions ina and ana, other Semitic languages like Arabic and Aramaic have the prepositions bi/bə and li/lə. The origin of the Akkadian spatial prepositions is unknown, in contrast to most other Semitic languages, Akkadian has only one non-sibilant fricative, ḫ. Akkadian lost both the glottal and pharyngeal fricatives, which are characteristic of the other Semitic languages, until the Old Babylonian period, the Akkadian sibilants were exclusively affricated. Old Akkadian is preserved on clay tablets dating back to c.2500 BC and it was written using cuneiform, a script adopted from the Sumerians using wedge-shaped symbols pressed in wet clay. As employed by Akkadian scribes, the cuneiform script could represent either Sumerian logograms, Sumerian syllables, Akkadian syllables. For this reason, the sign AN can on the one hand be a logogram for the word ilum, additionally, this sign was used as a determinative for divine names. Another peculiarity of Akkadian cuneiform is that many signs do not have a phonetic value. Certain signs, such as AḪ, do not distinguish between the different vowel qualities, nor is there any coordination in the other direction, the syllable -ša-, for example, is rendered by the sign ŠA, but also by the sign NĪĜ. Both of these are used for the same syllable in the same text
10.
Northwest Semitic
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Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic language family comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant. It would have emerged from Common Semitic in the Early Bronze Age and it is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze Age. The oldest coherent texts are in Ugaritic, dating to the Late Bronze Age, which by the time of the Bronze Age collapse are joined by Old Aramaic, and by the Iron Age by the Canaanite languages. The term was coined by Carl Brockelmann in 1908, who separated Fritz Hommels 1883 classification of West Semitic languages into Northwest and Southwest, brockelmanns Canaanite sub-group includes Ugaritic, Phoenician and Hebrew. Some scholars would now separate Ugaritic as a branch of Northwest Semitic alongside Canaanite. Central Semitic is an intermediate group comprising Northwest Semitic and Arabic. Central Semitic is either a subgroup of West Semitic, or a division of Semitic alongside East Semitic. SIL Ethnologue in its system of classification eliminates Northwest Semitic entirely by joining Canaanite, the time period for the split of Northwest Semitic from Proto-Semitic or from other Semitic groups is uncertain. The first attestation of a Northwest Semitic language is of Ugaritic in the 14th century BC, during the early 1st millennium, the Phoenician language was spread throughout the Mediterranean by Phoenician colonists, most notably to Carthage in todays Tunisia. By the 6th century BC, the use of Aramaic spread throughout the Northwest Semitic region, the ancient Judaeans adopted Aramaic for daily use, and parts of the Tanakh are written in it. With the Islamic conquest in the 7th century AD, Arabic began to gradually replace Aramaic throughout the region, Aramaic survives today as the liturgical language of the Syriac Christian Church, and is spoken in modern dialects by small and endangered populations scattered throughout the Middle East. There is an Aramaic substratum in Levantine Arabic, phonologically, Ugaritic lost the sound *ṣ́, replacing it with /sˤ/. That this same sound became /ʕ/ in Aramaic, suggests that Ugaritic is not the parent language of the group, an example of this sound shift can be seen in the word for earth, Ugaritic /ʔarsˤ/, Hebrew /ʔɛrɛsˤ/ and Aramaic /ʔarʕaː/. The vowel shift from *aː to /oː/ distinguishes Canaanite from Ugaritic, also, in the Canaanite group, the series of Semitic interdental fricatives become sibilants, *ð, *θ and *θ̣ became /z/, /ʃ/ and /sˤ/ respectively. The effect of this sound shift can be seen by comparing the words, Blau. Some Difficulties in the Reconstruction of Proto-Hebrew and Proto-Canaanite, in In Memoriam Paul Kahle, pp. 29–43 Cross, F. M.1965. “The Development of the Jewish Scripts, ” in The Bible, reprinted 1965, Anchor Book Edition, New York, pp. 133–202. “The Origin and Early Evolution of the Alphabet, ” EI5, “Alphabets and pots, Reflections on typological method in the dating of human artifacts, ” MAARAV3, 121-136
11.
Northwest Semitic languages
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Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic language family comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant. It would have emerged from Common Semitic in the Early Bronze Age and it is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze Age. The oldest coherent texts are in Ugaritic, dating to the Late Bronze Age, which by the time of the Bronze Age collapse are joined by Old Aramaic, and by the Iron Age by the Canaanite languages. The term was coined by Carl Brockelmann in 1908, who separated Fritz Hommels 1883 classification of West Semitic languages into Northwest and Southwest, brockelmanns Canaanite sub-group includes Ugaritic, Phoenician and Hebrew. Some scholars would now separate Ugaritic as a branch of Northwest Semitic alongside Canaanite. Central Semitic is an intermediate group comprising Northwest Semitic and Arabic. Central Semitic is either a subgroup of West Semitic, or a division of Semitic alongside East Semitic. SIL Ethnologue in its system of classification eliminates Northwest Semitic entirely by joining Canaanite, the time period for the split of Northwest Semitic from Proto-Semitic or from other Semitic groups is uncertain. The first attestation of a Northwest Semitic language is of Ugaritic in the 14th century BC, during the early 1st millennium, the Phoenician language was spread throughout the Mediterranean by Phoenician colonists, most notably to Carthage in todays Tunisia. By the 6th century BC, the use of Aramaic spread throughout the Northwest Semitic region, the ancient Judaeans adopted Aramaic for daily use, and parts of the Tanakh are written in it. With the Islamic conquest in the 7th century AD, Arabic began to gradually replace Aramaic throughout the region, Aramaic survives today as the liturgical language of the Syriac Christian Church, and is spoken in modern dialects by small and endangered populations scattered throughout the Middle East. There is an Aramaic substratum in Levantine Arabic, phonologically, Ugaritic lost the sound *ṣ́, replacing it with /sˤ/. That this same sound became /ʕ/ in Aramaic, suggests that Ugaritic is not the parent language of the group, an example of this sound shift can be seen in the word for earth, Ugaritic /ʔarsˤ/, Hebrew /ʔɛrɛsˤ/ and Aramaic /ʔarʕaː/. The vowel shift from *aː to /oː/ distinguishes Canaanite from Ugaritic, also, in the Canaanite group, the series of Semitic interdental fricatives become sibilants, *ð, *θ and *θ̣ became /z/, /ʃ/ and /sˤ/ respectively. The effect of this sound shift can be seen by comparing the words, Blau. Some Difficulties in the Reconstruction of Proto-Hebrew and Proto-Canaanite, in In Memoriam Paul Kahle, pp. 29–43 Cross, F. M.1965. “The Development of the Jewish Scripts, ” in The Bible, reprinted 1965, Anchor Book Edition, New York, pp. 133–202. “The Origin and Early Evolution of the Alphabet, ” EI5, “Alphabets and pots, Reflections on typological method in the dating of human artifacts, ” MAARAV3, 121-136
12.
Hebrew language
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Hebrew is a language native to Israel, spoken by over 9 million people worldwide, of whom over 5 million are in Israel. Historically, it is regarded as the language of the Israelites and their ancestors, the earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date from the 10th century BCE. Hebrew belongs to the West Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family, Hebrew is the only living Canaanite language left, and the only truly successful example of a revived dead language. Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining since the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Aramaic and to a lesser extent Greek were already in use as international languages, especially among elites and it survived into the medieval period as the language of Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce, and poetry. Then, in the 19th century, it was revived as a spoken and literary language, and, according to Ethnologue, had become, as of 1998, the language of 5 million people worldwide. After Israel, the United States has the second largest Hebrew-speaking population, with 220,000 fluent speakers, Modern Hebrew is one of the two official languages of the State of Israel, while premodern Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world today. Ancient Hebrew is also the tongue of the Samaritans, while modern Hebrew or Arabic is their vernacular. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as Leshon Hakodesh, the modern word Hebrew is derived from the word Ivri, one of several names for the Israelite people. It is traditionally understood to be a based on the name of Abrahams ancestor, Eber. This name is based upon the root ʕ-b-r meaning to cross over. Interpretations of the term ʕibrim link it to this verb, cross over, in the Bible, the Hebrew language is called Yәhudit because Judah was the surviving kingdom at the time of the quotation. In Isaiah 19,18 it is called the Language of Canaan, Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages. In turn, the Canaanite languages are a branch of the Northwest Semitic family of languages, according to Avraham ben-Yosef, Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during about 1200 to 586 BCE. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew was a vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile. In July 2008 Israeli archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel discovered a ceramic shard at Khirbet Qeiyafa which he claimed may be the earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered, dating around 3000 years ago. The Gezer calendar also dates back to the 10th century BCE at the beginning of the Monarchic Period, classified as Archaic Biblical Hebrew, the calendar presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that through the Greeks, the Gezer calendar is written without any vowels, and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places where later Hebrew spelling requires it
13.
Biblical Hebrew
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The term Hebrew was not used for the language in the Bible, which was referred to as Canaanite or Judahite, but the name was used in Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts. Biblical Hebrew is attested from about the 10th century BCE, and persisted through and beyond the Second Temple period, Biblical Hebrew eventually developed into Mishnaic Hebrew, which was spoken until the second century CE. There is also evidence of regional dialectal variation, including differences between Biblical Hebrew as spoken in the northern Kingdom of Israel and in the southern Kingdom of Judah. Biblical Hebrew has been written with a number of different writing systems, the Hebrews adopted the Phoenician alphabet around the 12th century BCE, which developed into the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. This was retained by the Samaritans, who use the descendent Samaritan alphabet to this day, however, the Aramaic alphabet gradually displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the Jews, and it became the source for the modern Hebrew alphabet. All of these scripts were lacking letters to represent all of the sounds of Biblical Hebrew, though these sounds are reflected in Greek and these scripts originally only indicated consonants, but certain letters, known by the Latin term matres lectionis, became increasingly used to mark vowels. In the Middle Ages, various systems of diacritics were developed to mark the vowels in Hebrew manuscripts, of these, Biblical Hebrew possessed a series of emphatic consonants whose precise articulation is disputed, likely ejective or pharyngealized. Earlier Biblical Hebrew possessed three consonants which did not have their own letters in the system, but over time they merged with other consonants. The stop consonants developed fricative allophones under the influence of Aramaic, the pharyngeal and glottal consonants underwent weakening in some regional dialects, as reflected in the modern Samaritan Hebrew reading tradition. Biblical Hebrew had a typical Semitic morphology with nonconcatenative morphology, arranging Semitic roots into patterns to form words, Biblical Hebrew distinguished two genders, three numbers. Verbs were marked for voice and mood, and had two conjugations which may have indicated aspect and/or tense, the tense or aspect of verbs was also influenced by the conjugation ו, in the so-called waw-consecutive construction. Default word order was verb–subject–object, and verbs inflected for the number, gender, pronominal suffixes could be appended to verbs or nouns, and nouns had special construct states for use in possessive constructions. The earliest written sources refer to Biblical Hebrew by the name of the land in which it was spoken, the Hebrew Bible also shows that the language was called יהודית Judaean, Judahite. In the Hellenistic period Greek writings use the names Hebraios, Hebraïsti, Jews also began referring to Hebrew as לשון הקדש the Holy Tongue in Mishnaic Hebrew. The term Classical Hebrew may include all pre-medieval dialects of Hebrew, including Mishnaic Hebrew, the term Biblical Hebrew refers to pre-Mishnaic dialects. The archeological record for the prehistory of Biblical Hebrew is far more complete than the record of Biblical Hebrew itself, Early Northwest Semitic materials are attested from 2350 BCE to 1200 BCE, the end of the Bronze Age. Hebrew developed during the half of the second millennium BCE between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, an area known as Canaan. The earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered was found at Khirbet Qeiyafa, the kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BCE
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Mishnaic Hebrew
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Mishnaic Hebrew is one of the few of the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud, except for direct quotations from the Hebrew Bible. The dialects can be further sub-divided into Mishnaic Hebrew proper, which was a language, and Amoraic Hebrew. It was not used by the Samaritans, who preserved their own dialect, a transitional form of the language occurs in the other works of Tannaitic literature dating from the century beginning with the completion of the Mishnah. These include the halachic Midrashim and the collection of Mishnah-related material known as the Tosefta. The Talmud contains excerpts from works, as well as further Tannaitic material not attested elsewhere. The dialect of all these works is similar to Mishnaic Hebrew. Mishnaic Hebrew is found primarily from the 1st to the 4th centuries of the Common Era, Dead Sea Scrolls Archaeologist Yigael Yadin mentions that 3 Bar Kokhba documents he and his team found at Nahal Hever are written in Mishnaic Hebrew. But Yadin mentions that it was Bar Kokhba who revived the Hebrew language, possibly the change was made by a special decree of Bar-Kokhba who wanted to restore Hebrew as the official language of the state. Within a century after the publication of the Mishnah, Mishnaic Hebrew began to fall into disuse as a spoken language, the Babylonian Gemara, as well as the earlier Jerusalem Talmud published between 350 and 400, generally comment on the Mishnah and Baraitot in Aramaic. Nevertheless, Hebrew survived as a liturgical and literary language in the form of later Amoraic Hebrew, Mishnaic Hebrew developed under the profound influence of spoken Aramaic in all spheres of language, including phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. Many of the features of Mishnaic Hebrew pronunciation may well have been found already in the period of Late Biblical Hebrew. A notable characteristic distinguishing it from Biblical Hebrew of the period is the spirantization of post-vocalic stops. A new characteristic is that final /m/ is often replaced with final /n/ in the Mishna, perhaps the final nasal consonant in the morphemes was not pronounced, and the vowel previous to it was nasalized. Alternatively, the agreement morphemes may have changed under the influence of Aramaic, also, some surviving manuscripts of the Mishna confuse guttural consonants, especially and ayin. That could be a sign that they were pronounced the same in Mishnaic Hebrew, Mishnaic Hebrew displays various changes from Biblical Hebrew, some appear alreadying in the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some, but not all, are retained in Modern Hebrew, for the expression of possession, Mishnaic Hebrew mostly replaces the Biblical Hebrew status constructus with analytic constructions involving של of. Missing in Mishnaic Hebrew is the waw-consecutive, the past is expressed by using the same form as in Modern Hebrew. For example, משה קיבל תורה מסיני, continuous past is expressed using the present tense of to be unlike Biblical but like Modern Hebrew
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Medieval Hebrew
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Medieval Hebrew was a literary and liturgical language that existed between the 4th and 18th century. It was not commonly used as a language, but mainly in written form by rabbis, scholars. Medieval Hebrew had many features that distinguished it from older forms of Hebrew, important Hebrew grammarians were Judah ben David Hayyuj and Jonah ibn Janah. This literary Hebrew was later used by Italian Jewish poets, many have direct parallels in medieval Arabic. Another important influence was Maimonides, who developed a style based on Mishnaic Hebrew for use in his law code. Subsequent rabbinic literature is written in a blend between this style and the Aramaized Rabbinic Hebrew of the Talmud, by late 12th and early 13th centuries the cultural center of Mediterranean Jewry was transferred from an Islamic context to Christian lands. The written Hebrew used in Northern Spain, Provence and Italy was increasingly influenced by Latin, particularly in philosophical writings, in Italy we witness the flourishing of a new genre, Italian-Hebrew philosophical lexicons. The Italian of these lexicons was generally written in Hebrew characters and are a source for the knowledge of Scholastic philosophy among Jews. One of the earliest lexicons was that by Moses b, shlomo of Salerno, who died in the late 13th. Century, it was meant to clarify terms that appear in his commentary on Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed, Moses of Salernos glossary was edited by Giuseppe Sermoneta in 1969. There are also associated with Jewish savants who befriended Pico della Mirandola. Hebrew was also used as a language of communication among Jews from different countries, mention should also be made of the letters preserved in the Cairo geniza, which reflect the Arabic-influenced Hebrew of medieval Egyptian Jewry
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Yemenite Hebrew
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Yemenite Hebrew, also referred to as Temani Hebrew, is the pronunciation system for Hebrew traditionally used by Yemenite Jews. Yemenite Jews brought their language to Israel through immigration and their first organized immigration to the region began in 1882. Yemenite Hebrew has been studied by scholars, many of whom believe it to contain the most ancient phonetic, the Yemenites, themselves, among all main Jewish diaspora groups, have garnered considerable praise because of their strict application of the laws of grammar. The notable Tunisian rabbi and scholar, Rabbi Meir Mazuz, once said of Yemenites that they are good grammarians and it is believed by some scholars that its phonology was heavily influenced by spoken Yemeni Arabic. Hence, pronunciation of Yemenite Hebrew was not only uninfluenced by Arabic, among the dialects of Hebrew preserved into modern times, Yemenite Hebrew is regarded as one of the forms closest to Hebrew as used in ancient times, particularly Tiberian Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew. As late as 937 CE, Qirqisāni wrote, “The biblical readings which are wide-spread in Yemen are in the Babylonian tradition, indeed, in many respects, such as the assimilation of paṯaḥ and səġūl, the current Yemenite pronunciation fits the Babylonian notation better than the Tiberian. This is because in the Babylonian tradition of vocalization there is no symbol for the səġūl. For example, there is no symbol for the Tiberian səġūl. It should be noted in this connection that the Babylonian vowel signs remained in use in Yemen long after the Babylonian Biblical tradition had been abandoned, thus, the verse וּמִי, גּוֹי גָּדוֹל is realized as, umi, ğoi ğaḏol. Gímel/gimal without dāḡēš/dageš is pronounced غ /ɣ/ like Arabic ġayn. dāleṯ/dal without dāḡēš/dageš is pronounced ذ /ð/ as the th in this, thus, the word one in Shema Yisrael is always pronounced aḥāḏ. The pronunciation of tāv/taw without dāḡēš/dageš as ث /θ/ is as the th sound in thick or thank, thus, Sabbath day is pronounced in Yemenite Hebrew, Yom ha-Shabboth. Vāv/Waw is pronounced /w/ as the English w. Emphatic and guttural letters have nearly the same sounds, the voiceless pharyngeal fricative of ḥêṯ/ħet is equivalent to the Arabic character ح /ħ/, with a slight aspirated sound, but never like the ch in Bach. The phoneme ʻáyin/зajin is identical to the Arabic ع /ʕ/, and is a voiced pharyngeal fricative. The Hebrew phoneme /q/ is pronounced by the Yemenites as a voiced /g/, as in go, qāmaṣ gāḏôl/Qamac qadol is pronounced /ɔː/, as in Ashkenazi Hebrew. The Yemenite pronunciation for Qamats gadol and Qamats qatan is identical, there is no distinction between the vowels paṯaḥ/pataħ and səḡôl/segol all being pronounced /æ/, like the Arabic fatḥa. A šəwâ nāʻ/šwa naз, however, is identical to a חטף פתח, final hê/hej with mappîq/mefiq has an aspirated sound, generally stronger sounding than the regular hê/hej. Aleph with a dagesh - a rare occurrence - is pronounced with a glottal stop, e. g. the word וַיָּבִיאּוּ in Genesis 43,26. Conversely, some words in Hebrew which are written with the final hê ending are realized by a glottal stop, meaning, they are abruptly cut short
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Samaritan Hebrew
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Samaritan Hebrew is a reading tradition as used liturgically by the Samaritans for reading the Ancient Hebrew language of the Samaritan Pentateuch, in contrast to Biblical Hebrew. The phonology of Samaritan Hebrew is highly similar to that of Samaritan Arabic, today, the spoken vernacular among Samaritans is evenly split between Modern Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic, depending on whether they reside in Holon or in Shechem. The Samaritan language first became known in detail to the Western world with the publication of a manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch in 1631 by Jean Morin. In 1616 the traveler Pietro della Valle had purchased a copy of the text in Damascus, between 1815 and 1835, Wilhelm Gesenius wrote his treatises on the original of the Samaritan version, proving that it postdated the Masoretic text. Between 1957 and 1977 Zeev Ben-Haim published in five volumes his monumental Hebrew work on the Hebrew, Samaritan Hebrew is written in the Samaritan alphabet, a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which in turn is a variant of the earlier Phoenician alphabet. The Samaritan alphabet is close to the script that appears on many Ancient Hebrew coins and inscriptions, */w/ has shifted to /b/ everywhere except in the conjunction ו- and where it is pronounced as /w/. */ɬ/ has merged with /ʃ/, unlike in all other contemporary Hebrew traditions in which it is pronounced /s/, the laryngeals /ʔ ħ h ʕ/ have become /ʔ/ or null everywhere, except before /a ɒ/ where */ħ ʕ/ sometimes become /ʕ/. /q/ is sometimes pronounced as, though not in Pentateuch reading, /q/ may also be pronounced as, but this occurs only rarely and in fluent reading. Phonemic length is contrastive, e. g. /rɒb/ רב great vs. /rɒːb/ רחב wide, long vowels are usually the result of the elision of guttural consonants. /i/ and /e/ are both realized as in closed syllables, e. g. /bit/ בית house /abbət/ הבית the house /ger/ גר /aggər/ הגר. In other cases, stressed /i/ shifts to /e/ when that syllable is no longer stressed, e. g. /dabbirti/ דברתי but דברתמה /dabbertimma/. /u/ and /o/ only contrast in open syllables, e. g. ידו /jedu/ his hand ידיו /jedo/ his hands. In other environments, /o/ appears in closed syllables and /u/ in open syllables, stress generally differs from other traditions, being found usually on the penultimate and sometimes on the ultimate. This, masc. ze, fem. zéot, pl. ílla, when suffixes are added, ê and ô in the last syllable may become î and û, bôr pit > búrôt pits. Note also af anger > éppa her anger, segolates behave more or less as in other Hebrew varieties, beţen stomach > báţnek your stomach, ke′seph silver > ke′sefánu our silver, dérek > dirkakimma your road but áreş earth > árşak your earth. The definite article is a- or e-, and causes gemination of the consonant, unless it is a guttural, it is written with a he, but as usual. Thus, for example, énnar / ánnar = the youth, ellêm = the meat, regular plural suffixes are -êm masc. -ôt fem, eyyamêm the days, elamôt dreams, affixes are, in, using, pronounced, b- before a vowel, b-érbi = with a sword, b-íštu with his wife
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Modern Hebrew
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Modern Hebrew or Israeli Hebrew, generally referred to by speakers simply as Hebrew, is the standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. It was revived as a language in the 19th and 20th centuries and is one of the two official languages of Israel, along with Modern Standard Arabic. Modern Hebrew is spoken by about nine people, counting native, fluent. The organization that directs the development of the Modern Hebrew language. The most common term for the language is Modern Hebrew. Most people refer to it simply as Hebrew, the term Modern Hebrew has been described as somewhat problematic as it implies unambiguous periodization from Biblical Hebrew. Rosén supported the now widely used term Israeli Hebrew on the basis that it represented the nature of Hebrew. In 2006, Israeli linguist Ghilad Zuckermann proposed the term Israeli to represent the origins of the language. Jewish contemporary sources describe Hebrew flourishing as a language in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew remained a spoken vernacular following the Babylonian captivity, Hebrew died out as a vernacular language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 CE, which devastated the population of Judea. After the exile Hebrew became restricted to liturgical use, the revival of the Hebrew language was led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Modern Hebrew used Biblical Hebrew morphemes, Mishnaic spelling, and Sephardic pronunciation, idioms and calques were made from Yiddish. Ben-Yehuda used a stock of 8,000 words from the Bible and 20,000 words from rabbinical commentaries and codified and planned the new language, some words he invented, such as ḥatzilīm for eggplants and ḥashmal for electricity. Sometimes, old Hebrew words took on different meanings altogether, for example, the Hebrew word kǝvīš, which now denotes a street or a road, is actually an Aramaic adjective meaning trodden down, blazoned, rather than a common noun. It was originally used to describe a blazoned trail, for a simple comparison between the Sephardic version of Mishnaic Hebrew and the Yemenite version of the same, see Yemenite Hebrew. Modern Hebrew is classified as an Afroasiatic language of the Semitic family, although it has been influenced by non-Semitic languages, Modern Hebrew retains its Semitic character in its morphology and in much of its syntax. A minority of scholars argue that the language had been so influenced by various substrate languages that it is genealogically a hybrid with Indo-European. These theories have not been met with acceptance, and Modern Hebrew continues to be considered a Semitic language by most experts
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Phoenician language
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Phoenician was a language originally spoken in the coastal region then called Canaan in Phoenician, Arabic, Greek, and Aramaic, Phoenicia in Greek and Latin, and Pūt in the Egyptian language. It is a part of the Canaanite subgroup of the Northwest Semitic languages, other members of the family are Hebrew, Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite. The area where Phoenician was spoken includes modern-day Lebanon, coastal Syria, coastal northern Israel, parts of Cyprus and, at least as a prestige language, some adjacent areas of Anatolia. Phoenician, together with Punic, is known from approximately 10,000 surviving inscriptions. In addition to their inscriptions, the Phoenicians are believed to have left numerous other types of written sources. In their cities by the sea, the air and soil were damp, thus disappeared the literature of the people who taught a large portion of the earth’s population to write. The only written documents of Phoenicians and Carthaginians are monumental inscriptions on stone, a few letters or notes on pieces of broken pottery. Thus, no Tyrian primary sources dating from Hiram I’s time are available, roman authors, such as Sallust, allude to some books written in the Punic language, but none have survived except occasionally in translation or in snippets. Even as late as 1837 only 70 Phoenician inscriptions were known to scholars and these were compiled in Wilhelm Geseniuss Scripturae linguaeque Phoeniciae monumenta, which comprised all that was known of Phoenician by scholars at that time. Basically, its core consists of the edition, or re-edition of 70 Phoenician. However, just to note the advances made in the century, it is noteworthy that Gesenius’ precursor Hamaker. On the other hand only 30 years later the amount of Phoenician inscribed monuments had grown so enormously that Schröder in his compendium Die phönizische Sprache. Entwurf einer Grammatik nebst Sprach- und Schriftproben of 1869 could state that Gesenius knew only a quarter of the material Schröder had at hand himself, the Phoenicians were the first state-level society to make extensive use of the Semitic alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is the oldest verified consonantal alphabet, or abjad and it has become conventional to refer to the script as Proto-Canaanite until the mid-11th century BCE, when it is first attested on inscribed bronze arrowheads, and as Phoenician only after 1050 BCE. The Phoenician phonetic alphabet is believed to be at least the partial ancestor of almost all modern alphabets. From a traditional perspective, Phoenician was a variety of the Canaanite languages. Through their maritime trade, the Phoenicians spread the use of the alphabet to North Africa and Europe, later, the Etruscans adopted a modified version for their own use, which, in turn, was modified and adopted by the Romans and became the Latin alphabet. Carthaginian colonisation spread Phoenician to the western Mediterranean, where the distinct Punic language developed, Punic also died out, although it seems to have survived slightly longer than the original Phoenician, perhaps into the fifth century CE
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Moab
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Moab is the historical name for a mountainous tract of land in Jordan. The land lies alongside much of the shore of the Dead Sea. The existence of the Kingdom of Moab is attested to by numerous archaeological findings, most notably the Mesha Stele, according to the Hebrew Bible, Moab was often in conflict with its Israelite neighbours to the west. Moab occupied a plateau about 3,000 feet above the level of the Mediterranean, or 4,300 feet above the Dead Sea, the northern boundary varied, but generally is represented by a line drawn some miles above the northern extremity of the Dead Sea. In Ezekiel 25,9 the boundaries are given as being marked by Beth-jeshimoth, Baal-meon, the principal rivers of Moab mentioned in the Bible are the Arnon, the Dimon or Dibon, and the Nimrim. The limestone hills which form the almost treeless plateau are generally steep, in the spring they are covered with grass and the table-land itself produces grain. In the north are a number of long, deep ravines, the rainfall is fairly plentiful and the climate, despite the hot summer, is cooler than the area west of the Jordan river, snow falling frequently in winter and in spring. The plateau is dotted with hundreds of dolmens, menhirs, and stone circles, the land is now occupied chiefly by Bedouin, though it contains such towns as al-Karak. The country of Moab was the source of natural resources, including limestone, salt. The Moabites occupied a place along the Kings Highway, the ancient trade route connecting Egypt with Mesopotamia, Syria. Like the Edomites and Ammonites, trade along this route gave them considerable revenue, the Moabites likely settled in the Transjordanian highlands. Whether they were among the nations referred to in the Egyptian language as Shutu or Shasu is a matter of debate among scholars. According to the account, Moab and Ammon were born to Lot and Lots elder and younger daughters, respectively, in the aftermath of the destruction of Sodom. The Bible refers to both the Moabites and Ammonites as Lots sons, born of incest with his daughters and these Amorites, described in the Bible as being ruled by King Sihon, confined the Moabites to the country south of the river Arnon, which formed their northern boundary. God renewed his covenant with the Israelites at Moab before the Israelites entered the promised land, Moses died there, prevented by God from entering the promised land. He was buried in a location in Moab and the Israelites spent a period of thirty days there in mourning. According to the Book of Judges, the Israelites did not pass through the land of the Moabites, after the conquest of Canaan the relations of Moab with Israel were of a mixed character, sometimes warlike and sometimes peaceable. With the tribe of Benjamin they had at least one severe struggle, in union with their kindred the Ammonites and the Amalekites
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Aramaic language
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Aramaic is a language or group of languages belonging to the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic language family. More specifically, it is part of the Northwest Semitic group, the Aramaic alphabet was widely adopted for other languages and is ancestral to the Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic alphabets. During its approximately 3000 years of history, Aramaic has served variously as a language of administration of empires, therefore, there is not one singular, static Aramaic language, each time and place rather has had its own variation. The Aramaic languages are now considered endangered, Aram is used as a proper name of several people in the Torah including descendants of Shem, Nahor, and Jacob. Ancient Aram, bordering northern Israel and now called Syria, is considered the epicenter of Aramaic. The language is often considered to have originated within Assyria. Interestingly, the Christian New Testament, for which the constituent texts are written in Koine Greek. The Hellenized Jewish community of Alexandria instead translated Aramaic to the Syrian tongue, a related language, Mlahsô, has recently become extinct. Mandaeans living in the Khuzestan Province of Iran and scattered throughout Iraq and it is quite distinct from any other Aramaic variety. Central Neo-Aramaic consists of Turoyo and the recently extinct Mlahsô, very little remains of Western Aramaic. All these speakers of Modern Western Aramaic are fluent in Arabic, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic and Samaritan Aramaic are preserved in liturgical and literary usage. Each dialect of Aramaic has its own pronunciation, and it would not be feasible here to go into all these properties. Aramaic has a palette of 25 to 40 distinct phonemes. The open vowel is an open near-front unrounded vowel and it usually has a back counterpart, and a front counterpart. There is much correspondence between these vowels between dialects, there is some evidence that Middle Babylonian dialects did not distinguish between the short a and short e. In West Syriac dialects, and possibly Middle Galilean, the long a became the o sound, the open e and back a are often indicated in writing by the use of the letters א alaph or ה he. The close front vowel is the long i and it has a slightly more open counterpart, the long e, as in the final vowel of café. Both of these have shorter counterparts, which tend to be pronounced more open
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Syriac language
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Syriac /ˈsɪri. æk/, also known as Syriac Aramaic, is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent and Eastern Arabia. Indeed, Syriac literature comprises roughly 90% of the extant Aramaic literature, Old Aramaic was adopted by the Neo-Assyrian Empire when they conquered the various Aramean city-kingdoms to its west. The Achaemenid Empire, which rose after the fall of the Assyrian Empire, also adopted Old Aramaic as its official language, during the course of the third and fourth centuries AD, the inhabitants of the region began to embrace Christianity. Along with Latin and Greek, Syriac became one of the three most important Christian languages in the centuries of the Christian Era. Primarily a Christian medium of expression, Syriac had a cultural and literary influence on the development of Arabic. Syriac remains the language of Syriac Christianity to this day. Syriac is a Middle Aramaic language and, as such, a language of the Northwestern branch of the Semitic family and it is written in the Syriac alphabet, a derivation of the Aramaic alphabet. Syriac was the local accent of Aramaic in Edessa, that evolved under the influence of Church of the East and it has been found as far afield as Hadrians Wall in Ancient Britain, with inscriptions written by Assyrian and Aramean soldiers of the Roman Empire. Modern Syriac/Modern Syriac Aramaic is an occasionally used to refer to the modern Eastern Aramaic languages. In this terminology, Modern Syriac is divided into, Modern Western Syriac Aramaic, note however that these are sometimes excluded from the category of Modern Syriac. The modern varieties are, therefore, not discussed in this article, in 132 BC, the kingdom of Osroene was founded in Edessa and Proto-Syriac evolved in that kingdom. Many Syriac-speakers still look to Edessa as the cradle of their language, there are about eighty extant early Syriac inscriptions, dated to the first three centuries AD. All of these examples of the language are non-Christian. As an official language, Syriac was given a relatively coherent form, style, in the 3rd century, churches in Edessa began to use Syriac as the language of worship. There is evidence that the adoption of Syriac, the language of the Assyrian people, was to effect mission, much literary effort was put into the production of an authoritative translation of the Bible into Syriac, the Peshitta. At the same time, Ephrem the Syrian was producing the most treasured collection of poetry, in 489, many Syriac-speaking Christians living in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire fled to the Sassanid Empire to escape persecution and growing animosity with Greek-speaking Christians. The Christological differences with the Church of the East led to the bitter Nestorian schism in the Syriac-speaking world, as a result, Syriac developed distinctive western and eastern varieties. Syriac literature is by far the most prodigious of the various Aramaic languages and its corpus covers poetry, prose, theology, liturgy, hymnody, history, philosophy, science, medicine and natural history
