Hamiticadj.n.

1827 J. Conder Mod. Traveller: Egypt, Nubia, & Abyssinia I. 3 The Asiatic Cush or Ethiopia, Shinar or Sennaar, Sabaea, and Canaan or Palestine, were also possessed by the Chamitic tribes.

1835 Wesleyan-Methodist Mag. Dec. 907/1 Although it was in Mesopotamia that the first cities were formed, and the first empires founded, yet they were of Hamitic origin.

1877 J. W. Dawson Origin of World xii. 260 The Semitic and Hamitic mythologies are derived from the primeval cherubic worship of Eden.

1930 C. G. Seligman Races of Afr. v. 124 The early history of the Somali is obscure; that they are essentially Hamitic is certain.

1989 R. Littlewood & M. Lipsedge Aliens & Alienists (ed. 2) ii. 53 The ‘Hamitic’ hunting peoples of East Africa were considered superior to the agricultural ‘Bantu’.

2006 P. Rusesabagina & T. Zoellner Ordinary Man ii. 23 What came to be called the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ carried a surprising amount of weight in the late nineteenth century, just as the great powers were preparing to carve up Africa into colonies.

1839 Brit. Critic July 69 Greek, a Japhetic language, was thrown into the neighbourhood of Coptic, an Hamitic language, and, were it not beside the subject, might be shown to have been influenced by it.

1860 F. W. Farrar Ess. Origin Lang. 215 The Egyptian language belongs then to a Chamitic family.

1972 P. Ladefoged et al. Lang. in Uganda ii. 34 The Bahima..are said to have been a cattle keeping people who migrated from somewhere up in the North... At that time the Bahima were probably speaking a Nilotic or Hamitic language; but very little trace of this remains in their present speech.

2000 A. Charles tr. A. Firmin Equality of Human Races v. 120 The inflectional or amalgamating languages, such as the Indo-European, Semitic, and Hamitic languages.

1862 Jrnl. Royal Asiatic Soc. 19 196 I think that the tribes who spoke Hamitic called the king by one name, and the Semitic tribes by the other.

1886 Encycl. Brit. XXI. 642/2 Some of the most indispensable words in the Semitic vocabulary..are found in Hamitic also.

1948 A. L. Kroeber Anthropol. (rev. ed.) 214 Hamitic and Semitic, named after sons of Noah, probably derive from a common source, in which case there would only be the Hamitic–Semitic family to be reckoned with.

1988 Canad. Jrnl. Linguistics 33 79 The term ‘Nostratic’ originated at the turn of this century..for a family comprising Indo-European, Semitic-Egyptian, Hamitic, Uralic, Altaic, [etc.].

1923 G. W. Murray Eng.-Nubian Dict. Introd. p. ix In the case of Nubian, the process of Hamiticization has gone so far that it has borrowed Hamitic personal-endings for its verb, Hamitic case-endings for its noun, and possesses a vocabulary largely Hamitic.

1975 J. Bynon & T. Bynon Hamito-Semitica 490 This historical process, which we may call ‘second stage Hamiticization’, parallels what may be termed ‘first stage Semiticization’.