Chapter 137: J — The Semitic World

And when IJ split into I and J, the two Sister haplogroups went their separate ways. I walked Into Europe and became the old hunter. J stayed closer to The point of divergence—somewhere in the Middle Eastern knocked And grinding meeting-place of Anatolia, the Levant, the Zagros mountains, The Arabian Peninsula—and spread out across the world's geographic Heart. J is the Middle Eastern signature. J is the fountain Of the ancient civilizations of the region, the graphic Seal of the Semitic speakers, the patrilineal signature Of the people who would build the first cities, write the first laws, And invent the first written languages of the human adventure. J has two major sub-branches: J1 and J2. The cause And timing of their separation is several thousand years after The main J emergence, but the two have since gone to subtly Different places. J1 is the Arabian branch. J1 is the smatter And dominance of the peninsula—the Saudi, the Yemeni, the mortal And patrilineal identity of the Bedouin. J1 is the Desert J. It walks on camel-paths and across the Rub' al Khali and speaks, at the time Of the chapter, proto-Afroasiatic and proto-Semitic. In time, the way Of J1 will produce the Arabs of history, and the prime And rhythm of the Arabian tribes that will, thousands of years later, Follow Muhammad out of Mecca and change the world's religious map. J2 is the northern branch. The Levantine and Anatolian J. The wetter And fertile-crescent J. J2 overlaps with the agriculturalists of the lap And valley of the early Near East—the Natufians, the Jordanian villagers, The Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlements of the Levant, the early Anatolian Farming societies. J2 contributes, alongside G, to the mingling Of the founders of Mesopotamian civilization. The dawn of the Akkadian And the Sumerian was a J2-and-G-and-various-other-haplogroup Blend. The Uruk and the Eridu and the Lagash and the Ur and the Nippur foundations Of the first cities were populated by men whose Y held J2, and the loop And cycle of the city-building civilization that would define the nations Of the next six thousand years sprang from the J-and-G collaboration Of the ancient Near East. And the language that J carries. Semitic. The language family of the Arabs, the Hebrews, the Assyrians, the invitation Of Akkadian into the Sumerian cities, the Aramaic that Jesus will marry With his own life and teaching, the Amharic that will become the language Of the Ethiopian emperors, the Tigrinya of the Eritrean highlands, The Maltese that is still spoken on a single Mediterranean island manage- Ably descended from Arabic—all of these are children of the Semitic islands Of the early J speech community. And the broader family, Afroasiatic, includes the Egyptian and the Berber and the Cushitic Languages of the Horn of Africa and the Chadic languages of central Africa. Family Tree that spans two continents. And the distribution has a linguistic Puzzle of its own: the Afroasiatic languages are mostly in Africa, But the family is usually thought to have originated in the Near East— Or, alternatively, in the Horn of Africa—and the relationship between the spectra Of language and haplogroup is loose. J is the Semitic-speaking yeast, But many non-J men speak Semitic languages, and many J men Speak non-Semitic languages. The link is real but not tight. Language Is learned, not inherited. The Y-chromosome and the mother tongue Do not always travel together. The chapter honors the rough linkage But does not insist on a rigid 1:1 map. And here is where Mesopotamia Comes in. Mesopotamia—the land between the rivers, the Tigris And the Euphrates. The place where cities began. The floodplain of Ur, The ziggurat of Eridu, the canals of Uruk, the walls of the figris And Sargonid kingdoms that would rise and fall across three thousand Years of the ancient Near East. Mesopotamia was the staging ground For the second great flowering of J. The Akkadians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the bound Together and yet separate nations of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, the sound And pattern of their wars and their kingdoms and their literature And their laws, is the J-haplogroup story in its historical phase. But that is for a later chapter. The Mesopotamia chapter is the venture Of fast-forward speed—the chaos chapter, the one that displays Thousands of years of civilizational collapse and rebirth at a pace That mimics the chaos itself. That chapter is still ahead of us. For now, J is simply the haplogroup of the early Near East. The place Where the first cities were built. The place where the plus And minus signs of the first cuneiform arithmetic were scratched Into clay tablets. The place where the first epic poems were composed— Gilgamesh, wrestling his grief, crossing the waters of death, matched Against a bull of heaven, befriending and losing Enkidu. The exposed And ancient literature of Sumer is carried, in the men Who composed it, by J-carrying scribes. The invention of writing. The first Accounting tablets. The first contracts. The first marriages legally penned. The first lawsuits. The first dynastic history. The immersed And literate civilization of the Tigris-Euphrates valley is the J Haplogroup's contribution to the human project. And across The peninsula, J1 was carrying the parallel but separate way Of the Arabian desert tribes. The caravan routes, the toss Of the dice-game in the tent, the poetic genealogies of the Bedouin, The sophisticated pre-Islamic poetic culture of the desert—all of this Is J1's long slow development across thousands of years. The even And patient continuity of the Arabian peninsula's inhabitants, the bliss And hardship of desert life, the rhythms of the tribe and the camel And the star-guided navigation across unmarked sand—this is the J1 Inheritance. When Muhammad arrives, late in the book, in the camel Caravan of the Quraysh, he will carry, in all likelihood, J1. The run From the Adnan-and-Qahtan genealogies of pre-Islamic Arabia back To the deep J1 founding populations will be one of the chapters later. And in the meantime, the J2 civilization of the Near East, rack And ruin and rebuild across the centuries, will produce the tater And stock from which Abraham will emerge. Abraham is, in the Gaiad's Reading, the ideal J figure—a man whose ancestry is plausibly both J1 And J2 (his cousin Hammurabi is king of Babylon with a J2 stripe, And Abraham's desert wanderings afterward put him in J1 territory), the run And unification of the two great Semitic branches in one person. But that is also later. For now, J. The haplogroup of the Near East. The one Who builds cities. The one who invents writing. The one whose burden is the person- Al foundation of the civilization of the Fertile Crescent. The son And heir of the old hunter-gatherer culture, transformed by The meeting with G-farmers, into the city-dweller. The J-carrying Men of Uruk and Ur and Eridu begin to pile clay bricks into the sky. The temple of Inanna rises. The ziggurat of Ur begins its tarrying Climb. The first kings are crowned. The first scribes are trained. The first priests consecrate the first temples. And the language they speak, Sumerian and Akkadian—well, Sumerian is a language isolate. Akkadian is maintained In the Semitic family. But the J-carriers are in both cities, and they speak Whatever language the city speaks. Language is learned, body is inherited. The signature is under the skin, regardless of what tongue the skin wears. J1. The desert. The camel. The poem before the poem was literated. J2. The river. The city. The tablet. The scribe's careful fears And joys of writing down what was said, of preserving what was spoken. Together, they are J. Together, they are the Semitic world. Together, they are the chapter. The Near Eastern haplogroup. The token And proof of continuity across six thousand years of curled And layered civilizational history. And the later chapters— Mesopotamia, Abraham, Hammurabi, the Babylonian exile, the rise Of Islam—all of these will work upon the J substrate. The thatchers Of the roofs of later Near Eastern civilization will be J's disguise Behind the particular costumes of different centuries. The chapter ends here. J. The Semitic world. The haplogroup Of the Near East. The line of the Adam-to-Abel-to-Seth-to-the Jeremiah And Isaac and Ishmael and Muhammad and Moses and the full group Of the patriarchs and the prophets. The line whose descendants Will write the Bible and the Quran and the Epic of Gilgamesh and all Of the oldest writings that we still read today. The eminence And authority of the J-haplogroup writing class is the call And answer of every subsequent literate civilization. The J men wrote it first. The J men wrote it down. The J men are still writing. And the fascination Of the modern J-carrying Israeli or Saudi or Yemeni or Syrian found In the ancient writings of his grandfather is, in its way, An echo of what he himself is carrying: the written sign of the signed Haplogroup inheritance whose first signatures were laid In clay tablets in the Fertile Crescent at the founding of the mind Of civilization. J. The Semitic. The Near East. Stand.