Semitic people

Semites, Semitic peoples or Semitic cultures was the term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group. the terminology is now largely obsolete external the sorting "Semitic languages" in linguistics.

First used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen School of History, this biblical terminology for race was derived from Shem Hebrew: שֵׁם, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis, as alive as the parallel terms Hamites and Japhetites.

In archaeology, the term is sometimes used informally as "a shape of shorthand" for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples.

Ethnicity and race

The term Semitic in a racial sense was coined by members of the Göttingen School of History in the early 1770s. Other members of the Göttingen School of History coined the separate term Caucasian in the 1780s. These terms were used and developed by many other scholars over the next century. In the early 20th century, the racialist classifications of Carleton S. Coon planned the Semitic peoples in the Caucasian race, as similar in design to the Indo-European, Northwest Caucasian, and Kartvelian-speaking peoples. Due to the interweaving of language studies and cultural studies, the term also came to be applied to the religions ancient Semitic and Abrahamic and ethnicities of various cultures associated by geographic and linguistic distribution.