Social and Cultural Anthropologist and contributor Scherin Barlow-Massay
Community news. Arabia is the world’s largest peninsula with an area of 2,600,000 sq km. It is located close to Jordon, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia and Djibouti.
Originally the people settling in the regions north of the Arabian Peninsula were from diverse ethnic groups which included the Brahuis, a Dravidian speaking people, Turkic, Armenians, Assyrians and Jews.
Indo-Europeans (Aryans) who included Iranians, Balochi, Bakhtyari, Lurs, Armenians and Kurds also settled in that region. That whole area in ancient times was called Mesopotamia.
According to the Hebrew Scriptures, people from seven different related family clans populated the areas of south and south-west Arabia. Some of these descended from Kush (Gen.10:6, 7) whose descendants settled in Ethiopia.
His other descendants; Haviah, Sabtah, Raamah, Sheba, Dedan and Sabteca, all settled in Arabia. All were Hamitic in origin and spoke a Hamo-Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) language. Evidence suggests that in pre- Islamic times the whole of the southern part of Arabia used a South Semitic type of writing script of which today’s Ethiopic script is an offshoot.
From antiquity, the people of southern Arabia had ancestral affiliations to those in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea, Ancient Egypt, Libya and other parts of Africa. They also had familial relations with the Canaanites, a people living in the Levant, the area between Egypt and Anatolia, which later became known as Palestine. The Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th Edition; 245-46 s.v.Arabia) had this to say about their origins:
“Regarding the origin of the Arab race…the first certain fact on which to base our investigations is the ancient and undoubted division of the Arab race into two branches, the ‘Arab’ or pure; and the ‘Mostareb’ or adscititions…A second fact is, that everything in proto- Islamic literature and record… concurs in representing the first settlement of the ‘pure’ Arabs as made on the extreme south-western point of the peninsula, near Aden, and then spreading northward and eastward…
Photo courtesy realhistoryww.com
A third is the name Himyar, or dusky…a circumstance, pointing, like the former, to Afrikan origin. A fourth is the Himyaritic language … (The preserved words) are Afrikan in character, often identified. Indeed the dialect commonly used along the south-eastern coast hardly differs from that used by the (Somali) Afrikans on the opposite shore.
Fifthly, it is remarkable that where the grammar of the Arabic, now spoken by the ‘pure’ Arabs, differs from that of the north, it approaches to or coincides with the Abyssinian…Sixthly, the pre-Islamitic institutions of Yemen and its allied provinces-its monarchies, courts, armies, and serfs-bear a marked resemblance to the historical Africao-Egyptian type, even to modern Abyssinian.
Seventhly, the physical conformation of the pure-–blooded Arab inhabitants of Yemen, Hadramaut, Oman, and the adjoining districts-the shape and size of head, slenderness of the lower limbs, the comparative scantiness of hair, and other particulars-point in an African rather than an Asiatic direction.
Eighthly, the general habits of the people, given to sedentary rather than nomadic occupations, fond of village life, of society, of dance and music; good cultivators of the soil, tolerable traders, moderate artisans, but averse to pastoral pursuits have much more in common with those of the inhabitants of the Afrikan than those of the western Asiatic continent.”
