Alexander wrote

> Do I understand you right? You mean that Ghassulian culture
> represents the Proto-Semites, the ancestor of _all_ known Semitic
> tribes? In other words, these tribes were so successful in the
> Bronze Age due to the Mediterranean form of agriculture
> (particularly, using olive for oil and grape wine as the
> main alcoholic drinks)?

Alexander, it would appear that (by my understanding of the evidence
(James Melaart in his "Ancient Near East" gives a good summary), that
the Proto-Semitic culture first appeared in Sinai and the Negev circa
6,000 BCE, as a hunter gatherer culture that replaced Pre-Pottery
Neolithic IIIC and came from the Egyptian Eastern Desert. It quickly
adopted domestication of ovicaprids (sheep and goats) becoming the
first nomadic pastoral culture in the region. This would appear to
be the period that Semitic split between Northern and Southern sub-
groups. It was the Minhatta culture of the Northern group, that
began to settle again into settled farming. Fusing with the Amuq
culture of the area around Byblos (the Amuq culture was a post
pottery tradition but it developed immediately from the preceeding
Pre-Pottery cultures of the region), it greated the Ghassulian
culture.

The Ghassulian culture was, as you have suggested Alexander, the
culture of wine bibbing, olive growing mixed farmers, growing grain
on the slops and transhumance pastorage on the hill tops, with
horticulture, wine and olives along the valley bottoms. This seems
to have been the period that saw the split between North Eastern
(Proto Akkadian) and North Western (Pre-Proot-Canaanite) language
groups (at least according to David Ussishkin, who has done some fine
work at Ein Gedi. Y. Garfinkel has also written on the Ghassulian at
Jericho. The typesite at Teleilat el Ghassul, a Palestinian site
north east of the Dead Sea, has four Chalcolithic layers and of the
fifth and fourth millennium BCE, and was a settlement consisted of
simple mud-brick houses, irregular in plan, built on stone
foundations. Some walls were decorated with remarkable painted wall
plaster; the motifs include geometric designs and representations of
stylized dragons, human figures and hirds, fruit trees and a sailing
boat with oars. Burials were in cists, made of stone slabs and
covered by stone cairns. It would appear that the Ghassulian culture
was the first in Palestine to benefit from what Andrew
Sherratt's "secondary products revolution".

You might also like to get hold of Healey, J.F. Review of: Sass, B.
(1991) Studia Alphabetica: on the Origin and Early History of the
Northwest Semitic, South Semitc and Greek Alphabet. Freiburg and
Gottingen. LEVANT XXV (1993) 228-229.

Regards

John