And he wasn’t…. White…. Jesus was an African so don’t get all happy that Jesus was white. Jesus was a Semite… Who are the Semites? Let’s find out.

The Semitic family is a member of the larger Afro-Asiatic family, all of whose other five or more branches have their origin in North Africa or the Maghreb. The Maghreb is North West Africa, the part over by the Atlantic Ocean.

Because the Maghreb is African the ancestors of Proto-Semitic speakers were originally believed to have arrived in the Middle East from North Africa, possibly as part of the operation of the Saharan pump, around the late Neolithic. Diakonoff sees Semitic originating between the Nile Delta and Canaan as the northernmost branch of Afro-Asiatic. Blench even wonders whether the highly divergent Gurage languages indicate an origin in Ethiopia (with the rest of Ethiopic Semitic a later back migration).

Identification of the hypothetical proto-Semitic region of origin is therefore dependent on the larger geographic distributions of the other language families within Afroasiatic, whose origins are also hotly debated. According to Christy G. Turner II, there is an archaeological and physical anthropological reason for a relation between the modern Semitic-speaking populations of the Levant and the Natufian culture.

In one interpretation Proto-Semitic itself is assumed to have reached the Arabian Peninsula by approximately the 4th millennium BC, from which Semitic daughter languages continued to spread outwards. When written records began in the late fourth millennium BC, the Semitic-speaking Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians) were entering Mesopotamia from the deserts to the West, and were probably already present in places such as Ebla in Syria. Akkadian personal names began appearing in written records in Mesopotamia from the late 29th century BC.

The earliest positively proven historical attestation of any Semitic people comes from 30th century BC Mesopotamia, with the East Semitic-speaking peoples of the Kish civilization,[8][9] entering the region originally dominated by the people of Sumer (who spoke a language isolate).

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