Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were people who lived throughout the ancient Near East, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity. Their languages are usually divided into three branches: East, Central and South Semitic languages. The Proto-Semitic language was likely spoken in the 4th millennium BC, and the oldest attested forms of Semitic date to the mid-3rd millennium BC (the Early Bronze Age). Speakers of East Semitic include the people of the Akkadian Empire, Assyria and Babylonia. Central Semitic combines the Northwest Semitic languages and Arabic. Speakers of Northwest Semitic were the Canaanites (including the Phoenicians and the Hebrews) and the Arameans. South Semitic peoples include the speakers of Modern South Arabian languages and Ethiopian Semitic languages. Origins There are several locations proposed as possible sites for prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking peoples: Mesopotamia, the Levant, Eastern Mediterranean, Ethiopia the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Some view that the Semitic originated in the Levant circa 3800 BC, and was later also introduced to the Horn of Africa in approximately 800 BC from the southern Arabian peninsula, and to North Africa and southern Spain with the founding of Phoenician colonies such as ancient Carthage in the ninth century BC and Cádiz in the tenth century BC. Some assign the arrival of Semitic speakers in the Horn of Africa to a much earlier date and many scholars now think that Semitic originated from an offshoot of a still earlier language in North Africa perhaps in the southeastern Sahara and it might have been the process desertization that forced its inhabitants to migrate in the fourth millennium BC some southeast into what is now Ethiopia, others northwest out of Africa into Canaan, Syria and the Mesopotamian valley The Semitic family is a member of the larger Afroasiatic family, all of whose other five or more branches have their origin in North Africa or the Maghreb. Largely for this reason, the ancestors of Proto-Semitic speakers were originally believed by some to have first arrived in the Middle East from North Africa, possibly as part of the operation of the Saharan pump, around the late Neolithic. Diakonoff sees Semitic originating between the Nile Delta and Canaan as the northernmost branch of Afroasiatic. Blench even wonders whether the highly divergent Gurage languages indicate an origin in Ethiopia (with the rest of