Ancient World

Generations of Noah

The Generations of Noah, also called the Table of Nations or Origines Gentium, is a genealogy of the sons of Noah, according to the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 10:9), and their dispersion into many lands after the Flood, focusing on the major known societies. The term 'nations' to describe the descendants is a standard English translation of the Hebrew word goyim following the c. 400 CE Latin Vulgate's nationes, and does not have the same political connotations that the word entails today. The list of 70 names introduces for the first time several well-known ethnonyms and toponyms important to biblical geography, such as Noah's three sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, from which 18th-century German scholars at the Göttingen school of history derived the race terminology Semites, Hamites, and Japhetites. Certain of Noah's grandsons were also used for names of peoples: from Elam, Ashur, Aram, Cush, and Canaan were derived respectively the Elamites, Assyrians, Arameans, Cushites, and Canaanites. Likewise, from the sons of Canaan: Heth, Jebus, and Amorus were derived Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites. Further descendants of Noah include Eber (from Shem), the hunter-king Nimrod (from Cush). As Christianity spread across the Roman Empire, it carried the idea that all human peoples were descended from Noah. However, not all Mediterranean and Near Eastern peoples were covered in the biblical genealogy; Iranic peoples such as Persians, Indic people such as Mitanni, and other prominent early civilizations such as the Ancient Greeks, Macedonians, and Romans, Hurrians, Iberians, Illyrians, Kassites, and Sumerians are missing, as well as the Northern and Western European peoples important to the Late Roman and Medieval world, such as the Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, and Nordic peoples; nor were others of the world's peoples, such as Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, Turkic and Iranic peoples of Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Far East, and Australasia.

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See also

• ▸Himyar
• ▸Christianity in Vietnam
• ▸Devdaha

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