Third: The Mother Semitic Language

The mother Semitic language lived in the ages that preceded human history, and it spread along with its people across all the regions they frequented from the most distant times. When history was born and grew up, it opened its eyes upon the faces of that tongue's daughters, who had become like members of that aged lineage.

The research of scholars on this subject indicates that the Semitic language was scant in vocabulary, containing no more than what sufficed for primitive life; it had no need for beauty of expression or for the embellishment of words and phrases — much like certain primitive languages of our present age.

If we wish to know what this language was like, we must turn our gaze to the shared words scattered[?] throughout the historical and modern Semitic languages, for from them we can form an idea — however simple — of how the mother tongue was pronounced. The Semitic languages — which are branches of the mother tongue — may agree on linguistic matters such as pronouns, number, the names of the body's organs, and the terms necessary for man's primitive material life, such as house, camel, dog, donkey, and water; and also certain things that man perpetually sees, such as sky and earth, and other such shared terms — which acquaint us, on the one hand, with something of this language's manner, and confirm, on the other, that these terms are extremely ancient. There are also other words shared among these languages, namely those denoting settlement, animal, and plant.

If we are able to extract the ancient element from all the Semitic languages, and to construct a particular language out of this ancient material, a glimmer of hope opens before us of arriving at some conception of that language from beyond all these remote, bygone ages.

Since the orientalists differ over the cradle and origin of the Semitic peoples, they likewise differ over the cradle in which this language arose. Some have argued that it arose in the land of Babylon and its environs, on the grounds that the land of Babylon is the original birthplace of human civilization. But another group opposes this theory vigorously.

Yet if we grant that human civilization came into being in the lower Euphrates basin, we must grant that it was in this spot that man first busied himself with thought, civilization, and city-building — which brings the first theory closer to the truth.

But if we return to the latter view — namely the spread of the Semitic nation with its tribes throughout all the regions of the Middle East — we are compelled to declare that the language too spread with the spread of the peoples who spoke it.

Be that as it may, determining the birthplace of this language is not of great importance to this study of ours. What is important, rather, is its transmission into living languages that endured for a long time, that were mentioned in the monuments of those peoples, and that have acquainted us, as far as possible, with the pattern of their material and literary life — which benefits us more than an exact knowledge of the birthplace of those languages, or of the birthplace of the mother tongue, would benefit us.

You will find in the Encyclopædia Britannica many comments and opinions concerning the Semitic language that amount to no more than conjectural studies. The same may be said of the study written by Israel Wolfensohn in his work "The History of the Semitic Languages," in which we found nothing more than what appears in the encyclopedia referred to. After these passing glimpses, we move on to our fundamental subject, which is the relations between the Arabic and Aramaic (Syriac) languages.

The Arabs and the Arameans

Before examining the relations between the Arabic and Aramaic (Syriac) languages, it behooves us to know who the Arabs are and who the Arameans are. Here is the answer: it is certain that the Semites were a single nation that arose and spread in its well-known, extensive spread. Let us pass over the study of the other Semitic sub-branches and single out from them two branches, one called "the Arabs" and the other "the Arameans." Who, then, are these two Semitic branches?

Before we learn who they are, it behooves us to picture the Semitic nation as its native land grew too cramped for it, so that some of its tribes resorted to leaving that land in order to obtain their vital daily livelihood. These tribes thus scattered here and there, migrating away from their original homeland: some spread out into the wilds and plains, others penetrated into the highlands, while the remaining portion stayed on in its own land. As for the date of this scattering, it is not known to this day, and we have no need to investigate it. It appears that the portion that stayed behind conferred certain new names upon the migrating portions, in accordance with the nature of the new land to which each had migrated. From this came the name "Arabs" and the name "Arameans," for those who migrated to the wilds and plains were called ("the Arabs"), and those who migrated to the highlands were called ("the Arameans"). And why is this? And what is the meaning of the two words?

"Arab" (al-ʿArab) is an ancient Semitic word meaning (dwellers of the desert or wilderness), preserved in the Semitic languages descended from the mother tongue. We find it in Arabic (al-ʿArbāʾ), in Aramaic (ʿarbā, arobo), and in Hebrew (ʿarabah, Arbat). "The Arabs," in this case, are the tribes that migrated to the desert and the wilderness, who were also called (the Bedouin).

As for the word "Aram," it too is an ancient Semitic term compounded of two words that occur in some of the Semitic languages, including Aramaic itself and Hebrew. The two words from which this expression was composed are (arʿā ramtā, areo romtho) (the high land). The Arameans, in this case, are the tribes that migrated to the highlands and elevated lands. Add to this that the ancient historians say that the Arameans are the descendants of (Aram) son of Shem son of Noah.

If we establish that the word "Arab" derives from the desert and the wilderness, and that the word "Aram" arose from the elevated land, the discerning researcher can conclude that it was the new homeland of the two tribes that suggested their two names — and he may go on to infer the original homeland of the Semitic nation as, say, the plains of Babylon or something similar.

Nevertheless, history confirms that these Semitic tribes, even after they had taken up new homelands upon departing from their original homeland, still remained in contact with one another to a limited extent, for particular purposes — whether economic, military, or otherwise. On this basis such relations arose between the inhabitants of Mesopotamia and the inhabitants of many parts of the Arabian Peninsula, just as other relations arose between the inhabitants of the Peninsula and the tribes called Aramean on the other hand — which confirms that the inhabitants of all these regions were able to understand one another, and indeed felt the bonds of kinship that drew them to one another.

The oldest mention of the desert dwellers in the cuneiform monuments occurred in the age of Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria, in which those desert people were called Arabs — that being in the middle of the ninth century BC. The mention of "the Arabs" recurred in the cuneiform records after this date on many occasions, in various forms all derived from a single root, namely the steppe or the desert.

The word "the Arabs" occurred in the inscription of Darius on the "Behistun" stone, in the form Arabaya, corresponding to the Aramaic term specific to the Arab or the Arabian. This designation "the Arabs" likewise occurred in many places in the Torah, and it was sometimes called in the Torah "the mountain of the East," "the land of the East," and "the land of the sons of the East." Even so, the age in which the word "the Arabs" was used to denote nationality or linguistic-ethnic identity is not known. What many historians have relied upon is that this became known from the age of the Jāhiliyya (pre-Islamic era), when the Peninsula was named "the Peninsula of the Arabs" (Jazīrat al-ʿArab).

As for the Arameans, history knew them in the regions of the middle Euphrates from the middle of the second millennium BC, where their fortune surged and their language, culture, and nationality grew. Their Aramaic language likewise began to spread independently from the beginning of the second millennium BC, and their name became widespread in the cuneiform sources from the age of Tiglath-Pileser I, king of Assyria, in the year 1100 BC, so far as we know to this day. However, the oldest written text in which the Aramaic name is mentioned occurs in the Book of Genesis, around the year 1740 BC: namely, "Laban" the Harranite, whom the Torah calls "the Aramean," the maternal uncle of Jacob, father of the tribal patriarchs — for when he made the covenant with his nephew Jacob, he sealed it in Aramaic and named it (Yegar-sahadutha[?]) (Yegar sahadutha), that is, (the pillar of witness). This Aramaic sentence was written in the Hebrew Torah in the Aramaic form in which it occurred.

This is the earliest trace known to us so far of the Aramaic language, indeed the oldest text in which the Aramean name is mentioned. The name "Aram" and "the Arameans" recur in the archaeological and historical references many times after the date we have now fixed. So too in the Torah, where it tells us of the Aramean statelets spread everywhere, such as (Aram-Zobah) and (Aram-Zoba) and (Aram-Maacah) and (Aram-Naharaim) and (Aram-Damascus) and (Aram-Beth-Rehob) and (Paddan-Aram).

If we know that the first mention of the Arabs was in the middle of the ninth century BC, while the first mention of the Arameans was in the middle of the eighteenth century BC, we are inevitably compelled to say that the Arameans precede the Arabs in antiquity by nine full centuries. Yet we must not regard this conclusion as final, for the absence of any mention of the Arabs until the middle of the ninth century does not indicate their non-existence as a nation roaming its wilderness — for their isolation in that far-off wilderness led to the lateness of their mention in the cuneiform sources and elsewhere. For (according to what is recounted in the Torah in the age of Abraham the Friend of God, who was a contemporary of the well-known Hammurabi, king of Babylon, around the twentieth century BC) we find many tribes possessing camels, sheep, and horses, moving through the fertile pastures and returning to the desert, dwelling in tents and living the life of the Bedouin who were known as "the Arabs." This confirms the existence of the Arabs roughly parallel to the Arameans, and assures us of the existence of the Arabs long ages before the date at which they were mentioned.