"Once upon a time there was no snake, there was no scorpion, There was no hyena, there was no lion, There was no wild dog, no wolf, There was no fear, no terror, Man had no rival. In those days, the lands of Subur (and) Hamazi, Harmony-tongued Sumer, the great land of the decrees of princeship, Uri, the land having all that is appropriate, The land Martu, resting in security, The whole universe, the people in unison To Enlil in one tongue [spoke]. ... (Then) Enki, the lord of abundance (whose) commands are trustworthy, The lord of wisdom, who understands the land, The leader of the gods, Endowed with wisdom, the lord of Eridu Changed the speech in their mouths, [brought] contention into it, Into the speech of man that (until then) had been one". Enmerkar and The Lord of Aratta , The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature
All languages, according to those who keep up with such things, sprang from three parent groups, which have been named Hamitic, Semitic and Aryan. Hamitic and Semitic originated with the Biblical names of Ham and Shem, two of the sons of Noah. The Bible tells us that Canaan, the son of Ham, was destined to become a servant of Shem (Genesis 9:25-26 ). It was once believed that the Hamite language arose in central Africa and was the source of the Egyptian Khemet. Believing that Ham was the father of the black races, along with the Biblical curse allowed early Christians to justify the slave trade by claiming that God has proclaimed the Negroid races are to be servants of other races. That, of course, is false and the Bible did not separate the sons of Noah according to race or color. The use of DNA testing has allowed scientists to conclude that all modern races derived from one single source The Biblical Table of nations is based on language only, not skin color, or location. Although the Hamites were black skinned, the name seems to have described the color of the soil along the Nile River. Khem was an older name for Egypt than Mizraim. It was originally used for all of known Egypt, which the inhabitants called Khemet.The Egyptian Khem was a fertility god in charge of the yearly flooding of the Nile River. Egyptian economy depended on the floods bringing rich soil to the farmlands along the Nile. The banks along the river were called Khemet. The name did not originally mean black land as once believed, although the silt was black in color. Like many ancient words Khem or Ham has become synonymous with black. It is possible that the name originated in central Africa, but the Egyptians had no problem adopting the customs language and gods of foreign people. Today the word Ham is defined as hot, burnt or dark. Hamites include the Australoid, Negroid and Mongoloid.
Assyrian texts referred to a Musri in North Syria, which presented a problem with archaeologists making the connection between Egypt and Mizraim of the Bible. The Assyrians wrote of a people known as Musri who lived in Syria. It has been understood, in the past, by Scholars that the islands off the coast of the Mediterranean were also Hamite. That is due to the misunderstanding that the Biblical Caphtorim was Crete. Historians have seemed to fortify that belief by claiming that the Philistines came from Crete. The earliest settlers on Crete were Minoan, not Hamitic. The Philistines were Hamitic, just as the Bible claims. It will be shown in later chapters that Caphtorim was near the border of Egypt. Pathrusim was in Egypt which indicates that Casluhim was not in the Greek isles The Cush mentioned in the table of nations may not have been the Cush of Africa as it has been thought in the past. The oldest Cushite kingdom was in the Iranian plateau, near where the Medes originated. Bible scholars were reluctant to place any Hamites in that part of the Middle East, due to all others being in Africa, or Arabia across the Red Sea from Africa. According to Scripture, however, the descendents of Cush were all in Eastern Arabia or Mesopotamia. The son of Cush, Nimrod, founded kingdoms from Sumer to Upper Mesopotamia. From there His descendents moved into Syria (Genesis 10:9-12) The Babylonians and the Akkadians of the Bible were Semites, but as history has shown, the Hamites migrated south from the same area where the Ark landed. The descendents of Ham and Shem settled some of the same areas, such as kingdoms in Asshur, Sumer and Havilah. This only stands as evidence that the two languages were at one time difficult to distinguish from each other.
It was once believed that Hamitic was the oldest of the three languages, but the common belief now is that Hamitic and Semitic came from a single parent language, that Linguists now call Afro-Asiatic. It is that language that was carried north from central Africa, and at some point split into two separate groups, somewhere in Mesopotamia. That agrees with the Bible, where the first son of Ham to be listed, Cush, had sons to set up kingdoms in Sumer, Arabia, Babylonia, Acadia and Syria. The second son in the list was Mizraim, which was a Hebrew pronunciation of the Egyptian Misr, or Masor. It was the name given to Northern (Lower) Egypt. The Hebrew Mizraim denotes duality and may have been understood by the early Hebrews to be all of Egypt. The Egyptians, however, called Southern (Upper) Egypt Pathros, which is the Biblical Pathrusim, again signifying two. The name Msr was still in use in the 15th century bce according to the Armana letters, written by the king of Byblos to the king of Egypt: Rib-Addi the ruler of Byblos wrote:
“Now I cannot enter the land of Mitsru ; I am old and I suffer of a serious disease in my own flesh.”
Some claim the Semitic speaking people began to arrive in the Middle East from Africa in the late Neolithic period, while others, including the Bible, claim that Proto-Afro-Asiatic, originated in the Middle East, and Semitic was the only branch to stay put. Proto-Semitic is assumed to have reached the Arabian Peninsula by approximately the 4th millennium BC, which seems to be evidence for at least Semitic originating in the Middle East. The Semites were given credit for most of the inventions and discoveries that catapulted the Middle East into civilization. Those inventions originated in central and northern Mesopotamia. Contrary to many beliefs, the Semites did not “borrow” from the Egyptian, but Semitic customs and religious beliefs had an influence on Egyptian development. Many of those Semitic customs and language root words were also retained by the Aryans, who were a splinter group of the Semites.
