Hamites

HAMITES. - The "ethnographic table" in Gen. 10, after listing the three sons of Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth, resumes in reverse order and lists the sons born to them after the flood and their descendants. The H. represent the largest group. Ham (v.) has four sons: Cush, Mizraim, Put, Canaan (Gen. 10:6, 20). Cush in turn has five: Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, Sabteca. Before listing the sons of Mizraim, the "table" announces the descendants of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan, then returns to Cush. Then it resumes: "Cush however begot Nimrod," and expands on him and the kingdom he founded in southern Mesopotamia. Then, passing to Mizraim, it lists his six sons, among them Casluhim, from whom it says the Philistines were derived, and lastly the Caphtorim. Of the third son, Put, no descendants are given. Of the fourth, eleven are listed; the principal ones are: Sidon the firstborn, Heth, Jebusite, Amorite.

If it is relatively easy to explain the principal names, for others such difficulties arise that the proposed identifications remain mere hypotheses. With the majority of interpreters, Cush is identified with Ethiopia. Indeed his descendants are spread rather in southern, western and eastern Arabia, and important historico-ethnological relations existed between the two countries. Seba (Hebrew Sébhā'), on the other hand, the first of the sons of Cush, is placed by some in Ethiopia, between the White Nile and the Blue Nile, by others in Nubia, and by still others is identified with Sheba (Hebrew Sébhā'), son of Raamah, whose seat is certainly to be placed in southern Arabia; but different sources would require admitting another Sheba further north. Dedan, the second son of Raamah, mentioned in South Arabian inscriptions, has been identified with the modern el-'Olà, in the land of Midian. Nimrod (v.) is either only a mediate descendant of the sons of Cush, or what concerns him (Gen. 10:8-12) is a later addition (so thinks, e.g., Heinisch).

The seats of the sons of Mizraim are arranged along the coast of the Mediterranean, from Tripolitania in the west, the Ludim, as far as the southern shore of Palestine, the Philistines. Even this mention of the Philistines and the Caphtorim would be, according to Heinisch, a later addition (the third son of Ham, Put, is to be placed on the western shore of the Red Sea and Somalia). The identifications of the principal descendants of Canaan present no difficulties (Sidon, Heth, other tribes and peoples known from Palestine or Syria).

The criterion used by the sacred author in this cataloguing was not solely ethnographic, since it would not be explained how he came to include in the Hamitic family the Canaanites, the Phoenicians and the Semitic Amorites, and, still less, the Japhetic Hittites. The geographical position of the peoples and their cultural and political relations must also have had an influence. The latter would explain the encroachment of the H. into the zone of the Palestinian Semites. Today ethnology, following the anthropological criterion, considers as Hamitic the type represented by non-Negro populations of northern and eastern Africa, not historically immigrated from Arabia or Europe. One distinguishes a Neotic type, similar to the Mediterranean type, and an Ethiopic one, characteristic of East Africa. The various Hamitic populations are now distributed in two branches: northern (Berbers, Tibbu, Hausa)

and eastern (Egyptians, Beja east of the Nile, Abyssinians, Danakil, Somalis, Galla). The languages spoken by these populations are partly Hamitic, partly Nilotic or Bantu. The linguistic unity, like the ethnographic one, has been broken by various crossings.

Giorgio Castellino