Source: SEMITES (originally Shemites) (Jewish Encyclopedia) 1906 A.D.
From the source, “Formerly, on account of certain animal names common to all the Semitic tongues, it was held by Hommel and others that the Semites separated from the Aryans in the high table-lands of Turkestan and wandered to Babylonia, whence they spread over the Arabian Peninsula and Syria. This view is now generally abandoned, most scholars agreeing that Arabia was the cradle-land of the Semites, while North Africa was that of the united Hamito-Semitic race, and that the Semites in prehistoric times separated from their kinsmen and migrated to Arabia, where their special racial characteristics and the distinguishing features of their languages were developed, and whence they were distributed over other Semitic countries. The life of the Hamites and the Semites in North Africa and Arabia developed in a desert country dotted with occasional oases. The hard conditions of life forced them, long before the dawn of history, from savagery into a barbarism in which the cultivation of the date-palm was a prominent feature. The family was loosely organized; descent was reckoned through the mother; and the most influential divinity was a goddess of fertility, the marks of whose cult are deeply embedded in the civilization of all the Semites. This deity was known in South Arabia as “Athtar”; in Abyssinia, as “Ashtar”; in Mesopotamia, as “Ishtar”; among the Arameans as “Atar”; and among the Canaanites and Phenicians as “Ashtart”; in the Masoretic text of the Old Testament the name is perverted to “Ashtoreth.” This cult profoundly influenced even the religion of Israel. Like kinship of language, it is a mark of the kinship of the Semitic races. Its development and elimination constitute the story of Semitic evolution. Traces of a similar civilization and religion are found among the Hamites (Maspero, “Dawn of Civilization,” pp. 51 et seq.); and in both peoples it was due to the influence of oasis life (comp. Ashtoreth)…Archeological investigation has in recent years revealed in southwestern Arabia, the most fertile portion of the peninsula, the presence of a high degree of civilization as early as the thirteenth century B.C. This civilization centered in the cities of Ma’in and Saba, and has left a large number of inscriptions written in a dialect which differs considerably from that of northern Arabia (comp. Hommel, “Süd-Arabische Chrestomathie,” Munich, 1893). From southern Arabia emigrants crossed the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and established a colony in Africa, which in time not only became independent, but even conquered a part of the mother country (comp. Glaser, l.c.; idem, “Die Abessinier in Arabien und Afrika”). These Semites are known as Ethiopians or Abyssinians. Their earliest inscriptions are written in the language and script of southern Arabia. By 115 B.C. the old kingdom of Saba had been overthrown and the kingdom of Saba and Raidan established on its ruins. This Kingdom lay in part in Africa. About 380 C.E. there arose in Africa the kingdom of Aksum; and about the same time the Sabean script gave place in Abyssinia to the Ge’ez script, which still prevails in that country (comp. D. H. Müller, “Epigraphische Denkmäler aus Abessinien,” Vienna, 1894; Bent, “Sacred City of the Ethiopians,” 1893).”
This source confirms yet again Africanity of Shem and close ties between Ham and Shem.
This source confirms that in proto-Shemitic-Hamitic cultures a heavy emphasis was placed on women which could have led to the rise of the ancient Libyan Amazons and other groups of Amazons such as those in the Americas.
and then