History of the Arabs

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The history of the Arabs is recorded to have begun in the mid-9th century BCE, corresponding with the earliest known attestation of Old Arabic. Arab ancestry according to tradition in Islam holds that Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael, who was the son of the Hebrew patriarch Abraham and his Egyptian concubine Hagar. The Syrian Desert, which includes an extension of the Arabian Peninsula, is the home of the first attested "Arab" groups, as well as other defined Arab groups that spread in the land and existed for millennia. Before the expansion of the Rashidun Caliphate (632–661) during the early Muslim conquests, the word "Arab" referred to any of the largely nomadic or settled Arab tribes in the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and Upper and Lower Mesopotamia. Today, "Arab" refers to a variety of large numbers of people whose native regions form the Arab world due to Arab migrations and the concurrent spread of the Arabic language throughout the region, namely the Levant and the Maghreb...

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