 Hi guys, so I originally wanted to make a video about the languages that Jewish people have spoken over time, but I wound up getting into a lot of the history of the languages of the ancient Middle East as background, and when I finally finished the script for the whole thing, it wound up being really, really long, so I decided to split it into two videos. The first being this one about the ancient languages of the Middle East, and the second one being about the actual history of the Jewish people and the languages they've spoken. I already have the research and the scripts for both of them done, so the next one should easily be out within a week or so. Alright, so there's a lot of different places we could start this, but how about we begin with Proto-Aphroasiatic? Similar to Proto-Indo-European, we don't have any written records of it or anything, but rather it's the theoretical ancestor of the Afroasiatic languages, a group of similar languages spoken in a lot of Northern Africa and the Middle East. We don't have any idea when it might have been spoken, or at least nothing more specific than before 7000 BC and after 16000 BC, but since then it's diverged into a lot of different languages, like Hausa, which is a lingua franca for a lot of Western Africa, Somali spoken around the Horn of Africa, Tuareg, the language spoken by most of the rebels in Northern Mali you might have heard about in 2012, and most famously Ancient Egyptian. But besides Ancient Egyptian, most of the Afroasiatic languages you've probably heard of are all from the same branch of Afroasiatic, a branch called the Semitic languages. The two big ones spoken today are Hebrew and Arabic, but there used to be a lot of other Semitic languages that were important to the early Middle East. The traditional theory about how the Semitic languages diverged goes like this. First, Proto-Semitic branched into West Semitic and East Semitic, with East Semitic eventually going on to become Akkadian. Then, the West Semitic languages diverged into the Northwest Semitic languages, which became Hebrew and other languages like Phoenician and Aramaic, and the South Semitic languages, which became Arabic and a bunch of other languages spoken around the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula and in Ethiopia. The newer, more popular theory, however, is that the West Semitic languages diverged into the South Semitic languages and the Central Semitic languages, with the Central Semitic languages then branching into Arabic and the Northwest Semitic languages. The big problem comes from the fact that Arabic has a lot of stuff in common with both the Northwest Semitic languages and the South Semitic languages, and linguists disagree on which of the similarities are there because they share a common ancestor and which are there because they spread from one to the other after they split off. However, the earliest language we actually have records of in Mesopotamia, or anywhere in the world for that matter, isn't Semitic or Afroasiatic at all. Rather, it's Samarian, a language spoken in what is today Southern Iraq, and that doesn't seem to be related to any other known language. The Samarians were one of the earliest civilizations ever. Between 3000 BC and 2300 BC, they had a complex society made up of a bunch of different city-states, a little like the ancient Greeks. They were the first people in the world to start writing down their history, and one of the things they wrote down was the story of Gilgamesh, which you might have heard of. During this period, they had a lot of interaction with the Acadians who lived just north of them. The Acadians were those guys who were part of the Eastern Semitic branch, which branched off from the other Semitic languages really early on. Anyway, the Samarians and the Acadians developed a really close relationship, including a lot of learning each other's languages. So much so, in fact, that the two languages started borrowing a lot of words and grammatical features from each other. Eventually, an Acadian king named Sargon of Akkad conquered the entire area and made Acadian the lingua franca of the whole region, and after that, Samarian gradually became extinct. After that, Acadian eventually split into two dialects, Assyrian in the north and Babylonian in the south. And now, I'm just gonna skip over about a thousand years of history, during which time sometimes the Assyrians dominated the area, sometimes the Babylonians, and sometimes various foreign powers like the Goethe, the Amorites, the Cassites, and the Hittites. Not too much happened linguistically during this period, the Mesopotamians still spoke the same two dialects of Acadian, even when they were dominated by people who spoke other languages, like, say, the Hittites who spoke an Indo-European language. Eventually, by the 800s BC, the Assyrians had founded the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which dominated all of Mesopotamia. By this time, the northwest Semitic languages had started diverging from each other, and one rather large group of people who spoke a northwest Semitic language called the Arameans lived in modern-day Syria at the time. After they were conquered by the Assyrians, they gradually started to adopt Acadian culture and mixing in with the Acadians. Eventually, everyone in this region was basically an ethnic mix of Arameans and Acadians, and everyone had started speaking Aramaic instead of Acadian, even though they still thought of themselves as Assyrians or Babylonians. The Neo-Assyrian Empire eventually came to conquer not only all of the Fertile Crescent, but also ancient Egypt, and one of the places they conquered was modern-day Israel, which was inhabited by another group of northwest Semitic-language-speaking people called the Israelis. Frankly, we don't know too much about their early history. Before they were invaded by the Assyrians, they might have been an actual centralized kingdom, or they might have just been a loose tribal confederation. We're pretty sure they spoke ancient Hebrew, but we don't actually have any manuscripts from them in ancient Hebrew that date from before the 400s BC. Whoever they were, they were subjugated by the Assyrians, and when the Assyrian Empire collapsed in the 600s BC, they were reconquered by the Neo-Babylonian Empire that took its place. Around 589 BC, the king of the southern part of Israel, Judah, from which the word Jew comes from, rebelled against Babylon, and the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II defeated them, plundered the city of Jerusalem, and deported many of the Israelis. Of course, this is all according to the modern archaeological community, and a lot of it contradicts the traditional biblical narrative, according to which... Abraham was a guy who lived in Mesopotamia, got told him to move to Israel, made a covenant with Aramaic, promised his descendants would dominate the entire region of the 11th. His children and grandchildren became the ancestors of various Middle Eastern ethnic groups, including his grandson Jacob, later renamed Israel, his 12 sons became the ancestors of the 12 types of Israel. Israel and his sons moved to Egypt, where the descendants were eventually enslaved by the Egyptians until Moses led them out of Egypt. They monitored in the desert for 40 years and then conquered Israel. They lived there for 300 years until they were united by King Saul. He was a bad king, so God sent David to take his place. David sent Solomon to his place when he died. After Solomon's death, the kingdom split into two halves, the northern kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah and the south. The northern kingdom was eventually wiped out by the Assyrians, and the kingdom of Judah spent while as a vessel to Assyria, then to Babylon, and then they revolted, then Babylon crushed and revolted, then they all fled to the city of Babylon. I'll just let you guys hash out in the comments to what extent, if any, the Bible can be considered a reliable historical source. After all, flamores means more audience participation, means YouTube's algorithm likes me more, means more views for me. Unfortunately for me, the Bible and the archaeological record are mostly in agreement following the Babylonian exile. After the Babylonians destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, many of the inhabitants of Judah were deported and fled to various parts of the Babylonian empire, particularly the city of Babylon itself. This period of Jewish history is known as the Babylonian exile, and it was during this period that the Jews probably started writing down their history and beliefs for the first time. It therefore marks the beginning of Jewish history, which means you'll have to wait till the next video to find out what happens next. See you then!