Philippa, see Encyclopedia Britannica entry: Semite, name given in the 19th century to a member of any people who speak one of the Semitic languages, a family of languages spoken primarily in parts of western Asia and Africa. The term therefore came to include Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, Hebrews, some Ethiopians (including the Amhara and the Tigrayans), and Aramaean tribes. Although Mesopotamia, the western coast of the Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa have all been proposed as possible sites for the prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking populations, there remains no archaeological or scientific evidence of a common Semitic people. Because Semitic-speaking peoples do not share any traits aside from language, use of the term “Semite” to refer to the broad range of Semitic-speaking peoples has fallen out of favour.Or this, from Wikipedia: Semites, Semitic peoples or Semitic cultures is an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics. First used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen School of History, this biblical terminology for race was derived from Shem (Hebrew: שֵׁם), one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis, together with the parallel terms Hamites and Japhetites.
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