Semitic peoples

Semitic people or Semitic cultures (from the biblical "Shem", Hebrew: שם‎‎) was a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group who speak or spoke the Semitic languages. The terminology was first used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen School of History, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis. The term "Semitic", together with the parallel terms Hamitic and Japhetic, is now largely obsolete outside of linguistics. However, in archaeology, the term is sometimes used informally as "a kind of shorthand" for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples.

In the racialist classifications of Carleton S. Coon, the Semitic peoples were considered to be members of the Caucasian race, not dissimilar in appearance to the neighbouring Indo-European, Northwest Caucasian, Berber and Kartvelian-speaking peoples of the region. As language studies are interwoven with cultural studies, the term also came to describe the religions (ancient Semitic and Abrahamic) and Semitic-speaking ethnicities as well as the history of these varied cultures as associated by close geographic and linguistic distribution.