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Semitic   /səmˈɪtɪk/   Listen
Semitic

noun
1.
A major branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family.



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"Semitic" Quotes from Famous Books



... time, through study of the cartouches of other inscriptions, Champollion had made out almost the complete alphabet, and the "riddle of the Sphinx" was practically solved. He proved that the Egyptians had developed a relatively complete alphabet (mostly neglecting the vowels, as early Semitic alphabets did also) centuries before the Phoenicians were heard of in history. What relation this alphabet bore to the Phoenician we shall have occasion to ask in another connection; for the moment it suffices to know that those strange pictures of the Egyptian ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... an almost white skin, the texture of which would excite envy in the heart of many a European beauty. The features had nothing in common with the coarse negro type which prevailed in the forest and over the grass-lands, but rather inclined towards a Semitic type. Thick lips were the exception, not the rule, and a broad flat nose was also a rarity. The only sign of barbarity was in the hair which, when the head was not clean shaven, was allowed to grow straight out in every direction, giving a very wild ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... years, and at the same time Professor of Hebrew in Howard University for colored people in that city. He here acquired a national fame as a scholar, orator and thinker. During this pastorate he pursued the study of the Semitic languages in the school of correspondence of Dr. W. R. Harper, then at Yale University. When he resigned his positions at Washington, he became for one year a Field Secretary of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal church, retaining ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... party, small though it be, in the Reichstag, while the party of the Centre, of the Conservatives and the Agrarians, is frankly anti-semitic as well. No Jew can become an officer in the army, no Jew is admitted to one of the German corps in the universities, no Jew can hold office of importance in the state, and I presume that no unbaptized Jew is received at court. I am bound to record my personal preference ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... in the cushioned and carpeted ranks of the stone podium—the lower portion of the amphitheatre—mingled with Greeks and Egyptians, sat thousands of splendidly dressed men and women with strongly-marked Semitic features: members of the wealthy Jewish community, whose venerable head, the Alabarch, a dignified patriarch in Greek dress, sat with the chief members of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... towards them with a soft, cat-like tread. He was of medium height and slim build. His head disproportionately large; his right ear standing out, in proof that it had long been used as a pen-rest; his nose pronounced and Semitic in outline; his eyes, big, projecting and yellowish brown; his chin, retreating; his complexion, ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell

... Semitic arch of her eye-brows. Her face belonged to the type formed from all eternity for ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair

... visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo-European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism. But nothing more strongly ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... his desire to defend his charges against the injurious effect of a judgment which had been pronounced by a noted authority. M. Renan had put forth, among the many theories which distinguish his celebrated work on the Semitic languages, one which seemed to M. Cuoq as mischievous as it was unfounded. M. Renan held that no races were capable of civilization except such as have now attained it; and that these comprised only the Aryan, the Semitic, and the Chinese. This opinion was enforced by a reference ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale

... instances—the lecturer named Byron—as high as 150. The number in the chart for the Aryans—Sanskrit-speaking Indians, the Greeks and Romans, the Goths, Kelts, Slavs, and their progeny—was 92, and for the Semitic peoples 88. The Aryans were credited with a due balance between the dynamical and statical energy of their intellect, to which they owed nearly all the great inventions and discoveries, and with all the systematic development ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various

... descended upon the rivers, and, about 5000 B.C., set up the early cities of Mesopotamia. As in the case of Egypt, again, more tribes were attracted to the fertile region, and by about 4000 B.C. we find that Semitic tribes from the north have superseded the Sumerians, ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... and as she looked down at the ring she thought that instead of "Peace be with thee," the Semitic characters must surely mean, "Disquiet seize thee!" for they had shivered the beautiful calm of her girlish nature, and thrust into her mind ideas unknown until that day. Going to her own room, she opened her books, but ere she could fix her ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... and passed into a long room, in which were some fifteen or twenty people. Most of them were sitting round a chemin de fer table; a few were standing at the sideboard eating sandwiches. A dark-haired, dark-eyed, sallow-faced man, a trifle corpulent, undeniably Semitic, who seemed to be in charge of the place, came up and shook hands with ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... of its origin has exercised the minds of many nations beside the Hebrews, and an especial interest attaches to the solution arrived at by those nations who were near neighbours of the Hebrews and came of the same great Semitic stock. ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder

... route they may have entered Egypt, bringing with them a civilization, which, like that of the other Semites, had been profoundly influenced and modified by that of the Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia. This Semitic-Sumerian culture, mingling with that of the Nilotes themselves, produced the civilization of Ancient Egypt as we ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... turbans and enormous whiskers, were beating the saint. In the interior of the Mollete doorway was represented the horrible martyrdom of the Child de la Guardia; that legend born at the same time in so many Catholic towns during the heat of anti-Semitic hatred, the sacrifice of the Christian child, stolen from his home by Jews of grim countenance, who crucified him in order to tear out his heart ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... decipherment of Euphratean cuneiforms leads to the conclusion that in many, if not all, cases the Greek myth has a Euphratean parallel, and so renders it probable that the Greek constellation system and the cognate legends are primarily of Semitic or even pre-Semitic origin. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... early Israelitish civilisation sets before us again and again in Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Esau and Jacob—the contrast of the wild and vagabond hunter and the "plain man, dwelling in tents." These types as they appear in the Bible have in them a characteristically Semitic element, but they have still more of our common humanity. We observe the two types among our own children, and it is a contrast that interests us all. Our affections perhaps go out to the romantic Esau rather than to his business-like brother; while at the same time we recognise that the ...
— George Borrow - A Sermon Preached in Norwich Cathedral on July 6, 1913 • Henry Charles Beeching

... maiden blame among the Hebrew mothers of Maida Vale, and to cut out Timmins. And of course it is as bad with the men. If young Isaacs wants to marry Miss Julia Timmins, I have no Rebecca to slip at him. The Semitic demand, though large and perhaps lucrative, cannot be met out of a ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... sphere of influence. These were the Medic and the Persian. A little earlier, a period of unrest in the Syrian and Arabian deserts, marked by intermittent intrusions of nomads into the western fringe-lands, had ended in the formation of new Semitic states in all parts of Syria from Shamal in the extreme north-west (perhaps even from Cilicia beyond Amanus) to Hamath, Damascus and Palestine. Finally there is this justification for not trying to push the history of the Asiatic East much behind 1000 B.C.—that nothing like ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth

... almost all. "I will clean your foul thoroughfares, and make your Devil's-cloaca of a world into a garden of Heaven," jabbers this Phantasm, itself a phosphorescence and unclean! The worst, it is written, comes from corruption of the best:—Semitic forms now lying putrescent, dead and still unburied, this phosphorescence rises. I say sometimes, such a blockhead Idol, and miserable White Mumbo-jumbo, fashioned out of deciduous sticks and cast clothes, out of extinct cants ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... the force now and then gives rise to, or affords opportunity for, queer happenings. Occasionally it enables one to meet emergencies in the best possible fashion. While I was Police Commissioner an anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin, Rector Ahlwardt, came over to New York to preach a crusade against the Jews. Many of the New York Jews were much excited and asked me to prevent him from speaking and not to give him police ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... Bible of the great Tribe of Flatfoot, not for artists like you and myself. And speaking of programs, please read what Wells says in his first volume of Outline of History, on David, Solomon, Moses. It will delight your anti-semitic soul. ... ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... century and events as recent as the close of the South African War and the accession of President Roosevelt. Professor Charles C. Torrey, Ph.D., of Yale University, has placed in my hands notes of his own on Oriental History, a portion of history with which, as well as with the Semitic languages, he is conversant. It will not be for lack of painstaking if any part of the new edition fails, within the limits of its plan, to correspond to the present state of ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... the poem entitled 'A Litany' the Lord God discourses with Biblical sternness to His people, who tremble before Him, and threatens them with 'the inevitable Hell,' while the people implore mercy—a strange excursion into the Semitic desert out of the flowery field of paganism. And another poem is a pathetic rendering of the story of St. Dorothy, a Christian martyr. It is true that he looks back with aesthetic regret to the triumph of Christianity over the picturesque polytheism, and that perhaps the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... The ancient Jews, for example, in prohibiting the eating of swine's flesh, were as far as possible removed in their thought from any connection with dietetics. They were simply following the well-known savage custom that the totem of a tribe is sacred. The pig was a totem with many of the Semitic tribes, and must not, therefore, be eaten.[74] It was not an unclean animal, in the modern sense, it was a 'holy' animal. With the Syrians the dove was so holy that even to touch it made a man 'unclean' for a whole day. No North American Indian will eat of the flesh of an animal ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... story of the man and the woman in Genesis 3 a chapter from the life of a certain man and woman, or a faithful reflection of universal human experience? Most of the elements which are found in the story may likewise be traced in earlier Semitic traditions. The aim of the prophet who has given us the story was, according to the view of certain interpreters, to present in vivid, concrete form the origin, nature, and consequences of sin. This method of ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks

... answer and came down the steps within to open the door, the lady in the chariot turned to her impatient companion and said in a pleasant but yet decided voice, "You forget, Paaker, that you are back again in Egypt, and that here you have to deal not with the wild Schasu,—[A Semitic race of robbers in the cast of Egypt.]—but with friendly priests of whom we have to solicit a favor. We have always had to lament your roughness, which seems to me very ill-suited to the unusual circumstances under which we ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... and short of money, as the Maticza Society, which had given up all hope of driving me away from the estate, would not furnish them with more funds. Now they had reunited to a last desperate method, and their candidate was about to unfold the anti-Semitic flag, in this way driving all intelligent, Liberal voters—or those at least who assumed the name, and all the Jews with their money, influence, and keenness—straight into our arms, so that our success was undoubted. In order to silence all accusations ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai

... constitution of man, whereby what once was harmless has become injurious, when the necessity for it is removed; moreover, according to the evidence contained in this book, the races of mankind cannot be traced backward to a single pair. But, taking the three great divisions, the Semitic, the Hamitish, and the Japetic, as derived from Shem, Ham, and Japhet, the various Allophyllian and American aborigines would appear to have existed, and to have been spread over the world before the above nations overran it. On the other hand, supposing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... rejoiced in him and gloried in his power when he thundered and lightened on Sinai. Few stories in man's spiritual history are so interesting as the record of the way in which this mountain-god, for the first time, so far as we know, in Semitic history, left his settled shrine, traveled with his people in the holy Ark, became acclimated in Canaan, and, gradually absorbing the functions of the old baals of the land, extended his sovereignty ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... bird would stand dazed. Then a ball was trundled at it to compel it to rise. Grey breast feathers strewed the whole inclosure, in places quite thickly, like a carpet. As for the crowd at the tables inside the Casino, it was largely Semitic. On the road between Monte Carlo and ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... in Spanish in 1800, and contained specimens of more than three hundred languages, with the grammars of more than forty. It should be said to his credit that Hervas dared point out with especial care the limits of the Semitic family of languages, and declared, as a result of his enormous studies, that the various languages of mankind could not have been derived ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... the Greeks and Romans, of a Golden Age, corresponds in a manner to the Garden of Eden of Semitic belief. There may be some truth in it. Captain Speke, while exploring the sources of the Nile, discovered in central Africa a negro tribe uncontaminated by European traders, and as innocent of guile as the antelopes upon their own plains; and this suggests to us that all families and races ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... treasures preserved in the library of Ashurbanipal and in the archives of the Babylonian temples were a number of tablets and fragments of tablets which recorded the efforts made by Semitic scribes to render Sumerian words and phrases into Semitic. A large number of these are concerned with legal subjects. A fairly complete list of those now in the Kouyunjik Collections of the British Museum will be found ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns

... even by Jerrold, and was expressive no doubt of the general feeling of the day. Mark Lemon certainly did nothing to temper the flood of merciless derision which Punch for a while poured upon the whole house of Israel, and some of Brooks's verses are to this day quoted with keen relish in anti-Semitic circles. In his campaign against the sweaters in the early 'Forties a picture appeared in the Almanac for 1845 in which such an employer was represented by Leech as a Jew of aldermanic proportions, rich and bloated in appearance and of monstrous ostentation and ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... B. Dennys, in his "Folk-Lore of China, and its Affinities with that of the Aryan and Semitic Races," p. 134, cites a legend of the cave Kwang-sio-foo in Kiang-si, which reflects part of the tale of Ali Baba: There was in the neighbourhood a poor herdsman named Chang, his sole surviving relative being a grandmother with whom he lived. One ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... Elephantine, Kneph, Anuka, Sati, and Hak. In most instances the names of the gods are Egyptian; thus, Ptah meant 'the opener'; Amen, 'the concealed'; Ra, 'the sun or day'; Athor, 'the house of Horus';' but some few, especially of later times, were introduced from Semitic sources, as Bal or Baal, Astaruta or Astarte, Khen or Kiun, Respu or Reseph. Besides the principal gods, several inferior or parhedral gods, sometimes personifications of the faculties, senses, and other objects, are introduced into ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR

... even. Racially and lingually, it belongs to the North. Historically and psychologically, it belongs to the South. Economically and politically, it lives very much in the present. Socially and esthetically, it has always been strongly swayed by tradition. The anti-Semitic movement, which formed such a characteristic feature of Viennese life during the last few decades, must be regarded as the last stand of vanishing social traditions against a growing pressure ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler

... more than a mere coincidence that as all the Semitic tribes worshipped the goddess Isis, so—the Japanese worshipped, for supreme being, the goddess of the Sun? Thus, here again there would seem to have been some path of communication other than that via China between Japan and the west of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... Sarah had a little of the good Semitic instinct in their make-up. The old gentleman must be managed; the dowry was too valuable to let slip. They needed the money in their business, and had even planned just what they would do with it. They were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... arrangements of those figures of Buddhas and Bodhisatvas which were to remain unchanged in the plastic formulas of China and Japan. Meanwhile conflicting influences continued to be felt. Sometimes the Indian types prevailed, as at Khotan, at others there were Semitic types and elements originating in Asia Minor, such as were found at Miran, and at length, as at Tun-huang, types that ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci

... engaged in the tracking of fables to their native lairs. Here, in Zabara, we have an earlier instance than was previously known in Europe, of an intertwined series of fables and witticisms, partly Indian, partly Greek, partly Semitic, in origin, welded together by the Hebrew poet by means of a framework. The use of the framework by a writer in Europe in the year 1200 is itself noteworthy. And when it is remembered what the framework is, it becomes ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams

... Yorkers of Hebraic origin, whose Semitic qualities are of the highest ethical type, made the play for partial equality, for partial recognition, for partial honor for the Negro. Joel Spingarn suggested and propagated the idea of a military training camp for Negroes, where they might receive instruction in all ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... presence of a large hooligan section which is found in almost every Russian town of any size, the open disfavour shown towards the Jews by the Government, and the secret intrigues and incitement of the police, and you get a train of circumstances which lead inevitably to those violent anti-Semitic explosions, known as pogroms, which have stained the pages of modern Russian history. The revolutionary movement has complicated matters still further; for Jews are naturally to be found in the revolutionary ranks, and the bureaucracy and ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... and that is European and not Oriental. As illustrating their lack of intuitive decorative art, one need only refer to the architecture of the first, second, and third Temple buildings, which apparently reflected Babylonian and Semitic influences on an early Chaldean type. The embroideries mentioned by different writers, from Moses to Josephus, appear to have had always a Babylonian, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... and the larger, more obtuse characters, somewhat like our government broad arrows, and called arrow-heads. The names are rather unfortunate, as both forms are wedge-like and both resemble arrow-heads. The script reads from left to right, like our own writing, and unlike that of the Semitic peoples and the primitive Greeks; and the rule for the placing of the characters is that all the 'wedges' point to the right or downwards and the arrow-head forms are open towards the right. But if you look at this photograph you will see that all the wedges point upwards ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman

... subject is made reluctantly, as it would be highly interesting to determine that sign language on this continent came from a particular stock, and to ascertain that stock. Such research would be similar to that into the Aryan and Semitic sources to which many modern languages have been traced backwards from existing varieties, and if there appear to be existing varieties in signs their roots may still be found to be sui generis. The possibility that the discrepancy between ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... afternoon succeeding Cassy's visit to his slippery floor. The day was radiant, a day not of spring, or of summer, but of both. Above was a sky of silk wadded with films of white cotton. From below there ascended a metallic roar, an odour of gasoline—the litanies and incense of the temple, Semitic and Lampsacene, that New York long ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... exalted and purified the Messianic idea to suit his sublime purposes of human regeneration. The times and circumstances in which the Old Testament Scriptures appeared, the manners, usages, civilization, intellectual and moral stage of the Semitic race combine to give them a lower position than that of the New Testament books which arose out of a more developed perception of the relations between God and men. Spiritual apprehension had got beyond Jewish particularism, ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson

... front of a cabin. Over the door was the legend "Pathans, No. 1." The door was shut fast. The colonel was annoyed. He opened the door, and four tall figures, with strongly Semitic features and bearded like the pard, stood up and saluted. The colonel made a mental note of the closed door; he looked at the porthole—it was also closed. The Pathan loves a good "fug," especially in a European winter, and the colonel had had trouble with his patients ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... academy, their inward purpose was ever the same; and that was to cherish the memory, and, if possible, to secure the restoration of the Roman Republic, and to expel from the Aryan settlement of Romulus the creeds and sovereignty of what they styled the Semitic invasion. ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli

... for us in the AEschylean Prometheus, stands midway betwixt both, yet is distinct in kind from either. With the Hebrew or purer Semitic, it assumes an X Y Z,—(I take these letters in their algebraic application)—an indeterminate 'Elohim', antecedent to the matter of the world, [Greek: hulae akosmos]—no less than to the [Greek: hulae kekosmaemenae.] ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... bronze-hued figure was tall and perfect in its proportions; while her face had little in common with that of the ordinary native girl, showing as it did strong traces of the ancestral Arabian or Semitic blood. It was oval in shape, with delicate aquiline features, arched eyebrows, a full mouth, that drooped a little at the corners, tiny ears, behind which the wavy coal-black hair hung down to the shoulders, and the very loveliest pair of dark and liquid eyes that it is possible ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard

... in Egypt there lived a Pharaoh named Khyan who was of Semitic extraction; and there is some reason to suppose that he ruled from Baghdad to the Sudan, he and his fathers having created a great Egyptian Empire by the aid of foreign troops. Egypt's connection with Asia during the Hyksos rule is not clearly defined, but the very fact that these foreign kings ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall

... consisted of part of the Egyptian state archives in the times of the two kings Amenophis III. and IV. Thus the first of the many startling discoveries that were to follow in such rapid succession was made in the recognition that about 1400 B.C. the Semitic speech of Babylon served as the language of diplomacy in ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr

... Britannic delusion that a man who has been elevated to that highest degree in our barbaric rank-system must acquire at the same time a nobler type of physique and countenance, exactly as a Jew changes his Semitic features for the European shape on ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen

... pillars which were common in front of Semitic temples and which stood before the temple at Jerusalem ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... thus divided into more than one kingdom, that the first Chaldaean empire of which we know was formed by the military skill of Sargon of Akkad. Sargon was of Semitic origin, but his birth seems to have been obscure. His father, Itti-Bel, is not given the title of king, and the later legends which gathered around his name declared that his mother was of low degree, that his ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce

... Dizzy in personal appearance? If I had not known the fact, I do not think that I should have recognized him as one of the ancient race of Israel. His profile was not the least what we in England consider Semitic. He might have been a Spaniard or an Italian, but he certainly was not a Briton. He was rather tall than short, but slightly bowed, except when he drew himself up for the more effective delivery of some shrewd blow. His complexion was extremely pale, and the pallor was made more conspicuous ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... Dak., as in I. E. languages, occupy a subordinate position, having about the same scope as in Latin and Greek. Words apparently related to these are rare in N. A. languages, but frequent in S. A., African, Malay Polynesian and Turanian languages. The Semitic aba, etc., is perhaps related. The base ana, nana (Dak. ina), though not very much used in I E languages appears to be more widely distributed than ...
— The Dakotan Languages, and Their Relations to Other Languages • Andrew Woods Williamson

... up the river bearing his name, in 1609;' and among other tribes similar traditions are retained. In the wrong-headedness and persistence of idea, the Indians entirely resemble the Oriental branches of the great Semitic family; and the evidence shews that originally they crossed over from Asia at Behring's Strait, a voyage still performed in canoes to the present day. One of the titles of Montezuma was Lord of the ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various

... the nascent civilization of these Egyptians of the Neolithic, or late Stone Age, was overthrown by the invading hosts of a more highly civilized race which probably came from the East, and which may have been of a Semitic stock. The presumption is that this invading people brought with it a knowledge of the arts of war and peace, developed or adopted in its old home. The introduction of these arts served to bridge somewhat ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... two performances, material traces remained for years in the settings of other spectacular operas. The scenes were all reproductions of the Paris models and exquisitely painted; the costumes were gorgeous to a degree. Mlle. Brval's beauty (Semitic, as became the character) shone radiant in the part of the heroine, and she sang and acted with an intensity that in its supreme moments was positively uplifting. Flaubert's brilliant novel supplied the material out of which "Salammb" was constructed. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... nomad shepherd, to that of the sedentary husbandman, rooted to the soil by the pains he has taken to improve its capabilities, and by the homestead he has reared at the border of his fields. In the tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis we have an echo of the earliest traditions preserved by the Semitic race of their distant origin. "And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there."[29] The land of SHINAR is the Hebrew name of what we ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... girls" wore smart little tailor costumes. Three young girls, evidently of the lower middle class of coloured society, for they were cheaply dressed, had all the little airs and graces and mannerisms of the typical American girl. In one corner a sleek mulatto with a Semitic profile sat in the recognized attitude of the banker in church; filling his corner comfortably and setting a worthy example to the less ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... suggested that the name Ishtar has been derived from Semitic roots implying "she who waters," ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... extremist. He was sent to the Tower for his support of the resolution against "tonnage and poundage," in 1629. His History of Tythes (1618) was suppressed at the demand of the bishops. His De Diis Syriis (1617) is still esteemed a classic on Semitic mythology. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... the Italian type of to-day finds its dominant ancestral type in the ancient Latin. As for the culture, the civilization of Rome, this is even more true. It has suffered a complete transformation, partly by natural growth, partly by absorption of totally alien elements, such as a Semitic religion, and certain Teutonic governmental and social customs; but the process was not one of extinction, but one of growth and transformation, both from within and by the accretion of outside elements. In France and Spain the inheritance of Latin blood is small; ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... Plato and Kant—I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life, not for this life only, but a transfigured and eternal life—again I should ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... rather lean, dispirited turkeys (which had not the satisfaction of their American kindred in being fattened for the sacrifice, for in Europe all turkeys are served lean), these Moors had an allure impossible to any Occidental race. It was greater even than that of their Semitic brethren, who had a market farther up in the town, and showed that a Jewish market could be much filthier than a' Moorish market without being more picturesque. Into the web of Oriental life were wrought the dapper figures of the red-coated, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... are right there, my friend," he said. "Sue wrote 'The Wandering Jew' the first time—as a novel, merely; but I wrote him much better—as a satire on the anti-Semitic movement." ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... helped him. How? Apparently by being with him. Is not that friendship? In the same chapter (Luke 22:15) we find an utterance that reveals the depth of his feeling for his friends: "With desire I have desired (a Greek rendering of a Semitic intensive) to eat this Passover with you before I suffer." They are to help him again by being with him, and he has longed for it, he says. The Gospel of John sums up the whole story in a beautiful sentence: "Jesus, ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover

... this white memorial is sculptured in bas-relief the profile of the head of a Semitic Sphinx, round whose mute lips flickers in a faint sardonic smile ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... us the word must be used. They are, the Slavs of eastern Europe, the Teutons of middle Europe, the English of Great Britain and America, the Romance nations of Southern and Western Europe, the Negroes of Africa and America, the Semitic people of Western Asia and Northern Africa, the Hindoos of Central Asia and the Mongolians of Eastern Asia. There are, of course, other minor race groups, as the American Indians, the Esquimaux and the South Sea Islanders; these larger races, too, are ...
— The Conservation of Races - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 2 • W. E. Burghardt Du Bois

... GREEK ALPHABET.—The names, number, order, and forms of the primitive Greek alphabet attest its Semitic origin. Of the many inscriptions which remain, the earliest has been discovered, not in Greece, but upon the colossal portrait statues carved by Rameses the Great, in front of the stupendous cave temple at Abou-Simbel, at the time when the Hebrews were still in Egyptian bondage. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... also, he contended, be always remembered that the Semitic records are of an 'essentially Oriental, figurative, poetical cast,' and that it is therefore wholly erroneous to suppose that every word can be construed with the precision of an Act of Parliament or of a ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... hemisphere. That the Jews were among the last to admit the immortality of the soul was doubtless due to the fact that, because of their long enslavement, they did not emerge from semi-savagery so soon as did the other divisions of the great semitic family. Furthermore, for a long period after their emancipation the Jews seem to have received the rewards of their peculiar virtues here on earth and were little inclined to defer their happiness to the hereafter—were amply able to punish their enemies and had no occasion ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... All-Mother, Asia, claimed Africa again for her own and blew a cloud of Semitic Mohammedanism all across North Africa, veiling the dark continent from Europe for a thousand years and converting vast masses of the blacks to Islam. The Portuguese began to raise the veil in the fifteenth ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois

... have regarded the life of Abraham differently. He has been viewed as a chieftain of the Amorites (q.v.), as the head of a great Semitic migration from Mesopotamia; or, since Ur and Haran were seats of Moon-worship, he has been identified with a moon-god. From the character of the literary evidence and the locale of the stories it has been held ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... the Exodus from Egypt. It has so much, both of form and meaning, in common with the systems of kindred nations as to prove it to be part of the heritage naturally derived by all of them from their Semitic forefathers. And the new element brought into the traditional religion of Israel at Sinai was just that on which Jeremiah lays stress—the ethical, which in time purified the ritual of sacrifice and burnt-offering but had nothing to do with the ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... very dear and kind to-night," she had answered, "how could I have helped being happy? And He"—she meant the Semitic actor-manager, whom she romantically adored; whose thick, flabby features and pale gooseberry orbs, thickly outlined in blue pencil, eyebrowed with brown grease-paint; whose long, shapeless body, eloquent, expressive hands, and legs that were very good as legs go, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... a sardonic and unnecessary paradox hurled at him across the impassable distances she created about herself. Her entrancement had increased—her eyes rested upon a Semitic violinist who swayed his shoulders to the rhythm ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... language, but from the unexamined customs of the Greeks, Romans, northerns, Indians, and Persians. We know more about the development of sacrifice now that Professor Robertson Smith has dealt with the Semitic part of the evidence. Without resting on the fact that the occurrence of human sacrifice in a country occupied by Aryan-speaking people does not, of itself alone, imply that the rite was Aryan, it is far more important to point out that among the higher races "the feeling that the ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... negroes, that is, they are an aboriginal people, improved by contact with Islamism, and capable of self-development afterwards; but the Moors never ruled them, nor mingled with their blood. Their features are African, in the popular sense of that word, without one Semitic trace. Awakened intelligence beams through frank and pleasing countenances, and lifts, without effacing, the primitive type. Undoubtedly, their ancestors sprang into being on sites where an improved posterity reside. But ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... to multiply instances of German penetration: I have but given the skeleton of this German monster that has fastened itself with tentacles and suckers on every branch of Turkish industry. There is none round which it has not cast its feelers—no Semitic moneylender ever obtained a surer hold on his victim. In matters naval, military, educational, legal, industrial, financial, Germany has a strangle-hold. Turkey's life is already crushed out of her, and, as we have seen, it has been crushed out of her by the benevolent Kultur-mongers, who, among ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson

... had really forgotten, or whether he had chosen the most effective moment will never be known; certain it is that the Semitic instinct for drama was gratified within him as he drew a little folded white paper out of his waistcoat pocket, amid the keen ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... thick-lipped, short-statured Mongol race in Central Asia, displaced by the Babylonians and Assyrians, who were Semitic. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... with an appreciative eye, as he bowed in greeting, and invited her to a seat. The lawyer was a man of fine physique, with a splendid face of the best Semitic type, in which were large, dark, sparkling eyes—eyes a Lombroso perhaps might have judged rather too closely set. As a matter of fact, Harris had suffered a flagrant injustice in his own life from a suspicion of wrong-doing ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... shocking to look at: small, mean, bald, Semitic and nervous, with large ears which curved outwards from his head like leaves, and cheeks blue from much shaving. He was said to hide behind his anxious manner an acuteness that was diabolic, and to have earned ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens

... to be added that in consequence of the publication of the Jewish Protocol and other documents pointing to revolutionary and anarchical Semitic activities, noses will be worn straighter and a la Grecque, and for similar reasons feet will be shorter and with more uplift in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various

... you think?" he said, musingly. "Somewhat Semitic in physiognomy, you notice; that comes from the almond-shaped eyes and the abnormally high arch of the brows. Would you know her in the actual flesh—say, on Broadway? Brunette, of course, jet-black hair banded a la Merode over the ears, a little droop at the corners of her mouth. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen

... the allowed progenitors of the Armaeians or Syrians, the Israelites or Hebrews, and the northern or Joktanian Arabs. The languages, physical type, and moral characteristics of these races were well known: they all belonged evidently to a single family the family known to ethnologists as the Semitic. Again, the manners and customs, especially the religious customs, of the Assyrians connected then plainly with the Syrians and Phoenicians, with whose practices they were closely allied. Further ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson

... is the last privilege of the real story-teller. That the author has thrown aside his proclivities for Romanism as he showed them in 'Sibyl,' no more disturbs us than the eccentricities of his politics. We do not quite give him our faith when he is most in earnest, talking Semitic Arianism on ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Semitic original lying in the background of this piece, has always been considerable. Those who have maintained Greek as the original language, have generally spoken a little less confidently with regard to this than with regard to its two companion pieces. So Bissell writes (p. 443), ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney

... In 1881, an anti-semitic movement was felt in Germany; that is, an outburst of hatred for the Jews broke out, which spread to Russia. It is not generally known that of all the Jews in the world, four fifths live in Russia in the southwest, in an area of 356,681 square miles. ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen

... Barada River, and advancing into the land of Ham—in Bashan—where all the chief towns fell. This serves to make clear the treachery of Aziru's letters which follow. The Amorite advance on the Phoenician coast was contemporary, and extended to Tyre. It appears, however, that the Amorites were a Semitic people, while the names of the Hittites ...
— Egyptian Literature



Words linked to "Semitic" :   Arabic, Afroasiatic, Arabic language, Hamito-Semitic, Semitic deity, Semitic-speaking, Amharic, Canaanitic, Afroasiatic language, Afrasian, Aramaic, Afrasian language, anti-semitic, Canaanitic language, Akkadian, Malti, Maltese, Ethiopian language, Maltese language, Afro-Asiatic



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