ARABIC CULTURE Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

ARABIC CULTURE - Essay Example The Semitic people are said to have originated from the Arab peninsula, gaining the bulk of the people of Mesopotamia from the Jazirat al-Arab or the island of the Arabs which is the place between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf (Goodspeed, p. 54). The Hadramawt forms in the southern border reaching northward to the east of the Dead Sea (Craig, p. 13). The non-Arab Semitic settlers were Arameans, Akkadians, Amorites, Israelites, Eblaites, and Canaanites; and they established their communities in Mesopotamia and the Levant. These people gradually came to intermix and intermarry with each other (Hammer, et.al., p. 6769). They gradually lost their domination of the near east due to internal issues. The first time that the label â€Å"Arab† came into being was in an Assyrian inscription of 853 BCE where King Gindibu was defeated in the Battle of Karkar. At this time accounts of these defeated groups include Assyrian texts which later translated to â€Å"Arab†. These people were considered desert-dwelling Semitic groups (History World, p. 3). War would later break out between the Assyrians and the Arabs during Ashurbanipal’s time. The medieval genealogists divided the Arab people into three groups: first are the ancient Arabs who vanished; second are the pure Arabs of South Arabia; and last are the Arabized Arabs from North Arabia who were considered descendants of Ishmael, son of Abraham (Nydell, p. 53). There are various terms used to define the Arabs, and some of them define Muslims to be nomadic Arabs, formerly nomadic Arabs (Egyptians and Yemenis), and the Saracens as defined by the Christians (Goodspeed, p. 56). The Qur’an does not have the term Arab, instead it uses the term ‘arabiy,’. After the 8th century Islamic conquest, Arabic language was defined as the pure and uncontaminated language of the