In the first millennium BC, the alphabet spread much further, giving us a picture not just of Canaanite, but also of Aramaic, Old South Arabian, and early Ge’ez. Ugaritic was a West Semitic language, fairly closely related to, and part of the same general language family as the tongues of the Amorites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Moabites, Edomites, Ammonites, Amalekites and Israelites. The earliest positively proven historical attestation of any Semitic people comes from 30th century BC Mesopotamia, with the East Semitic-speaking peoples of the Kish civilization,[8][9] entering the region originally dominated by the people of Sumer (who spoke a language isolate). In the oldest cuneiform sources (c. 2400–c. After the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (between 615 and 599 BC) and the succeeding short lived Neo-Babylonian Empire (615–539 BC) the Semitic speaking peoples lost control of the Near East to the Persian Achaemenid Empire (539–332 BC). See the bottom of each page for copyright information. Blench even wonders whether the highly divergent Gurage languages indicate an origin in Ethiopia (with the rest of Ethiopic Semitic a later back migration). These were the lands of the Edomites, Moabites, Hebrews (Israelites/Judaeans/Samaritans), Ammonites and Amalekites, all of whom spoke closely related west Semitic Canaanite languages. However, the Persians had spent centuries under Assyrian domination and influence, and despite being Indo-European speakers, they retained the Imperial Aramaic of the Assyrian empire as the lingua franca of their own empire, and many of the Semitic nations of the region (such as Assyria, Babylonia, Israel, Judah, Aramea, Canaan and Phoenicia) continued to exist as geo-political entities, albeit as occupied satrapies of the Achaemenid Empire. The Western Aramaic of the Arameans themselves is now almost extinct, with only a few thousand speakers extant in and around Ma'loula in western Syria. Some of these ancient peoples (such as the Jews , Assyrians , Mandaeans , Samaritans and Mhallami ) continue to exist in the region as indigenous peoples in Israel, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey. In the oldest cuneiform sources (c. 2400–c. Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples were Western Asian people who lived throughout the ancient Near East, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa from the third millennium BC until the end of antiquity. Fattovich, Rodolfo, “Akkälä Guzay” in Uhlig, Siegbert, ed. The Amorites were an ancient Semitic-speaking people from ancient Syria who also occupied large parts of southern Mesopotamia from the 21st century BC to the end of the 17th century BC. Killebrew, Ann E. (2013), “The Philistines and Other “Sea Peoples” in Text and Archaeology”. 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