Ebla Ebla (Arabic: إبلا‎, modern Tell Mardikh, Idlib Governorate, Syria) was an ancient city about 55 km southwest of Aleppo. It was an important city-state in two periods, first in the late third millennium BC, then again between 1800 and 1650 BC. The site is most famous for the Ebla tablets, an archive of about 20,000 cuneiform tablets found there, dated from around 2250 BC, written in Sumerian script to record the Eblaite language — a previously unknown language that is now the earliest attested Semitic language after the closely related Akkadian. ---------------------- Canaan Canaan included what today are Lebanon,Palestin, northwestern Jordan, and some western areas of Syria. According to archaeologist Jonathan N. Tubb, "Ammonites, Moabites, Israelites and Phoenicians undoubtedly achieved their own cultural identities, and yet ethnically they were all Canaanites", "the same people who settled in farming villages in the region in the 8th millennium BC." Ebla and Amorites at Hazor, Kadesh (Qadesh-on-the-Orontes), and elsewhere in the Syrian area bordered Canaan in the north and northeast. (Ugarit may be included among these Amoritic entities.) Lebanon, in northern Canaan, bordered by the Litani river to the watershed of the Orontes river, was known by the Egyptians as upper Retjenu. In Egyptian campaign accounts, the term Djahi was used to refer to the watershed of the Jordan river. Many earlier Egyptian sources also mention numerous military campaigns conducted in Ka-na-na, just inside Asia. In biblical usage, the name was confined to the country west of the Jordan, the Canaanites being described as dwelling "by the sea, and along by the side of the Jordan" (Numbers 33:51; Joshua 22:9), and was especially identified with Phoenicia (Isaiah 23:11). The Philistines, while an integral part of the Canaanite milieu, do not seem to have been ethnic Canaanites; the Hurrians (who spoke a language isolate), Hittites (Indo-European speakers), as well as the Semitic Arameans, Moabites, and Ammonites, are also considered "distinct" from generic Canaanites/Amorites, in scholarship or in tradition, although in the biblical Table of Nations, "Heth", representing the Hittites, is a son of Canaan. The Hittites spoke an Indo-European language (called Nesili), but their predecessors the Hattians had spoken a little-known language (Hattili), of uncertain affinities. The biblical narrative makes a point of the renaming of the "Land of Canaan" to the "Land of Israel" as marking the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land. --------------------------------------- Israelites The Israelites (בני ישראל, Standard: Bnai Yisraʾel; Tiberian: Bnai Yiśrāʾēl;: Bnai Yiśraʾel, translated as: "Children of Israel" or "Sons of Israel") were a Semitic Hebrew-speaking people of the Ancient Near East, who inhabited part of the Land of Canaan during the tribal and monarchic periods (15th to 6th centuries BCE), later evolving into the Jews and Samaritans, inhabiting the territories of Judea and Galilee, and Samaria respectively. In modern Hebrew usage, an Israelite is, broadly speaking, a lay member of the Jewish ethnoreligious group, as opposed to the priestly orders of Kohanim and Levites. -------------------------------------------- Arameans The Arameans were a Northwest Semitic people who originated in what is now modern Syria (Biblical Aram) during the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Large groups migrated to Mesopotamia, where they intermingled with the native Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian) population. A large proportion of Syriac Christians in modern Syria still espouse an Aramean identity to this day, though few now speak the Western Aramaic language. The Arameans never had a unified nation; they were divided into small independent kingdoms across parts of the Near East, particularly in what is now modern Syria. After the Bronze Age collapse, their political influence was confined to a number of Syro-Hittite states, which were entirely absorbed into the Neo-Assyrian Empire by the 8th century BC. By contrast, the Aramaic language came to be the lingua franca of the entire Fertile Crescent, by Late Antiquity developing into the literary languages such as Syriac and Mandaic. Scholars have used the term "Aramaization" for the process by which the Assyro-Babylonian Akkadian-speaking peoples became Aramaic-speaking during the later Iron Age. -------------------------------------------- Adnanites According to Islamic tradition, the Adnanites are "Arabized Arabs", descended from Adnan.They were from the northern, central and western Arabia, as opposed to the Qahtanites of southern and south eastern Arabia who were of pure Arabic stock. According to modern historians, the traditional distinction between Adnanites and Qahtanites lacks evidence and may have developed out of the later faction-fighting during the Umayyad period.

• published: 26 Dec 2013
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