Ancient Semitic religion

Ancient Semitic religion encompasses the polytheistic religions of the Semitic peoples from the ancient Near East and Northeast Africa. Its origins are intertwined with Mesopotamian mythology. The term Semitic itself represents a rough category when referring to cultures, as opposed to languages, so the definitive bounds of the term "ancient Semitic religion" are only approximate.

These traditions, and their pantheons, fall into regional categories: Canaanite religions of the Levant, Assyro-Babylonian religion influenced by Sumerian tradition, and pre-Islamic Arabian polytheism. Semitic polytheism possibly transitioned into Abrahamic monotheism, by way of the god El, whose name is a word for "god" in Hebrew and cognate to Islam's Allah.

Proto-Semitic pantheon

Abbreviations: Ac. Akkadian-Babylonian; Ug. Ugaritic; Pp. Phoenician; Ib. Hebrew; Ar. Arabic; OSA Old South Arabian; Et. Ethiopic

Semitic

The term Semitic or Semite most commonly refers to the Semitic languages, a language family currently present in West Asia, North and East Africa, and Malta

Semitic may also refer to:

See also

Semitic languages

The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East. Semitic languages are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of Western Asia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa, as well as in large expatriate communities in North America and Europe. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by German orientalists von Schlözer and Eichhorn, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.

The most widely spoken Semitic languages today are (numbers given are for native speakers only) Arabic (300 million),Amharic (22 million),Tigrinya (7 million), and Hebrew (unknown; 5 million native and non-native L1 speakers).

Semitic languages are attested in written form from a very early date, with Akkadian and Eblaite texts (written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform) appearing from around the middle of the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia and the northern Levant respectively. However, most scripts used to write Semitic languages are abjads—a type of alphabetic script that omits some or all of the vowels, which is feasible for these languages because the consonants in the Semitic languages are the primary carriers of meaning.