Rainy weekend thread: I wanted to write a thread to connect to the fierce debate on Twitter regarding Arab identity, the Arabian Peninsula, and its relationship to the languages we call Arabic today. This is twitter, so it will naturally be bit superficial but I include a biblio.

Let’s begin with this question: how did the Peninsula become “Arab”? Islamic-period sources contain many fantastic tales on the origins of the Arabs. Most equate Arab identity with speaking the Arabic language. There are conflicting accounts.

In the Akhbar al-Yaman attributed to ‘Ubayd b. Shariya, the tutor of the Umayyad king Mu’awiyah, Arabic was first spoken by "Ya’rub", who was the son of Qahtan, in Yemen. Ya’rub literally means ‘he arabs’ – a clearly invented figure.

The famous antiquarian Hisham b. al-Kalbi (d. 819 CE) offers a different account. He suggests that the Amlekites (عمليق) were the first to speak Arabic. They migrated from Babylon to the Peninsula in ancient times, and then God made the inhabitants of the Peninsula understand it.

These mythological accounts reflect attitudes about the origins of the Arabs in Abbasid times, where all ancient things Arabian came from Yemen or the deepest deserts of the Peninsula. But how well do they correspond to the epigraphic and archaeological data?

The first Arab (in recorded history) was called gindibu (lit. locust). He was a member of a coalition of eleven kings, including Ahab of Israel and Hadadezer of Damascus, who stood against Assyrian expansion westward at the battle of Qarqar in northern Syria (853 BCE).

The Mesopotamians referred to most of their enemies in northwest Arabia as Arabs. In the Esarhaddon prism, Dumah (Dumat al-Jandal) is called the ‘strong city of the Arabs’. Sennacherib conquered it and took into captivity its queen, Iskallatu. http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=291290&partId=1

Here is a wall relief depicting combat between the Arab(ian)s and Assyrians: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?partid=1&assetid=106509001&objectid=366819

Arabs are also said to have lived in walled cities in southern Babylon, and they were present in the northern Sinai as well, at least as early as the 8th c. BCE, and in the area of the Hawran.

The great Arabian epigraphist, M.C.A. Macdonald, correctly points out that the Mesopotamians had a word for nomad, and this was not what they called the inhabitants of NW Peninsula. He therefore argues that ‘Arab must originate as a term of self-identification.

The Greek’s first contact with the Peninsula was its northwestern corner and the Sinai. There they met people they called Arabs. Macdonald brilliantly reconstructions Herodotus’ map of the Middle East.

All the evidence we have looked at so far situates a people called ‘Arabs’ in the southern Levant and Northwest Arabia, as far west as the Sinai. Were these Arabs the tip of the iceberg? Was the entire landmass between the Red Sea and the Gulf ethnically Arab and Arabic speaking?

We have no evidence that the inhabitants of the Peninsula regarded it as a single landmass. Nor do we have any evidence that they saw themselves belonging to single ethnic group called Arab. The ancient inhabitants of Yemen certainly did not.

Yemen was divided into four kingdoms, each with its own language. When they used the term ʿArab or ʾʿrb it always referred to outsiders, and it is unclear if it has any ethnic connotation at all. Moreover, the Peninsula showed a lot of linguistic diversity - not homogeneous.

So how did the idea of an ‘Arab’ Peninsula emerge? Macdonald gives us a solution – product of Greek geography. When the Greeks learned of landmass btwn the Red Sea and Gulf via Alexander’s naval expeditions, the entire landmass took the name its known part – Arabia

He states: " if “the promontory belonged to Arabia”, then the whole landmass must be “Arabia” and, by the circular argument, all its inhabitants must be “Arabians”. Thus it was that the concept of the “Arabian Peninsula” was born. "

In other words, an indigenous name of NW Arabia/S.Levant was misapplied to the entire landmass connected to it to the south and east. And by circular logic, all the peoples in this new ‘Arabia’ were called Arabs, even if they never regarded themselves as such.

Where does the term ‘Arab come from? It is impossible to know for sure, but there are many theories. A popular one relates it to the root ‘-b-r, which gives the name of the Hebrew language. The best explanation IMO is a derivation from the root ġ-r-b ‘west’ > ‘westerners’.

This makes sense geographically. The name wouldn’t have originated in Arabic; it was a term used by outsiders to refer to the land/people/language, comparable to the term Amorite < Mar.tu ‘westerner’. But it must have been adopted by the people it referred to early on.

Now for the language: it is in the original Arabia (NW Peninsula/S. Levant), and not the expanded Greek definition, that we find the attestations of the Arabic language (see thread: https://twitter.com/Safaitic/status/1000445841637892102).

The use of “Arabic” for the name of the language is attested as well. In the Genesis Rabbah, Rabbi Levi uses vocabulary from ‘Arabia’ (i.e. east of the Jordan) to elucidate the meaning of rare Hebrew words.

Uranius states that Μωτω /mōto/ means 'place of death' in ‘the Arabic language’. Epiphanius (4th c. CE) explains how in Elusa (in the Negev), pagans praise a virgin goddess in arabike dialektos ‘an Arabic dialect’. There are many more examples. Elusa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haluza 

The first attestation of the name of the Arabic language in the Arabic language occurs in the Qur’an, where it is referred to as lisān ʿarabiyy. And the language of the Qur’an is in fact a form of Arabic closely related to north; the text is written in late Nabataean script.

In conclusion, the inalienable connection between the terms Arab and Arabic with the entire Peninsula between the Red Sea and Gulf and its nomads is the result of Greek geography and Abbasid-era mythology. It is not supported by the epigraphy and archaeology.

Bibliography: great source book on the term 'Arab' in antiquity: https://www.amazon.com/Arabs-Antiquity-Assyrians-Umayyads-Monograph/dp/0700716793 and Macdonald's article on Greeks and Arabia https://www.academia.edu/4593009/Arabians_Arabias_and_the_Greeks_Contact_and_Perceptions also Webb on Islamic-period Arabness: https://www.amazon.com/Imagining-Arabs-Arab-Identity-Islam/dp/1474408265

And again, please forgive typos and infelicities -- always tweeting in haste :-).