ABSTRACT
Originally limited to the area east of the Mediterranean, the Semitic languages spread into North Africa, southern Europe and the Horn of Africa. In antiquity, the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires were major centres of civilisation. Phoenician traders were establishing colonies all over the Mediterranean basin. Hebrew culture, through its monotheistic religion, Judaism, has exerted an exceptional influence, directly or indirectly (through the two religions that followed it: Christianity and Islam), on all of humankind. Arabic, in addition to being the carrier of an important medieval civilisation, has become one of the world’s major languages. While the ancestor of Semitic, Proto-Afroasiatic, is assumed to have originated in
Africa, the homeland of Semitic itself, i.e. the area where, having arrived from Africa, the different branches started to split off, may have been approximately the region where the Arabic peninsula reaches the continental bulk of the Near East. In all likelihood, however, Proto-Afroasiatic and Proto-Semitic contained dialectal variation.
