Ethnic groups in North Africa and Middle East without Arab conquests

What would have been the main ethnic groups in Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt and the Maghreb if Mohammed had never come along?
 
What would have been the main ethnic groups in Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt and the Maghreb if Mohammed had never come along?

Probably less arabized. Greek would survive in coastal cities, Syriac, Berber, Coptic will still be around. Just look at OTL languages.

Maybe the turkish migration will play out differently, with some turkish state in the Levant.
 
Probably less arabized. Greek would survive in coastal cities, Syriac, Berber, Coptic will still be around. Just look at OTL languages.

Maybe the turkish migration will play out differently, with some turkish state in the Levant.

Wouldn't Turkish migration butterfly away without Islam?

But Maghrebian area probably remain mostly Berber territory, but coastal areas might be Greek. But it is possible that OTL Coastal Morocco might be Visigothic majority.

Egypt would be Greco-Coptic.

Levant would be mostly Greek, depends can Byzantine keep area long enough.

Mesopotamia might be Persian, Aramaic or Greek. Depends who will owns that.
 
What would have been the main ethnic groups in Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt and the Maghreb if Mohammed had never come along?

Much of the Levant was heavily Hellenized before the Arabs invaded; Egypt had a Hellenic overclass ruling an "Egyptian" underclass (precisely what ethnicity Egyptians were at any point in time is apparently highly controversial); parts of the Maghreb, especially around Tunisia and coastal Algeria had been conquered by the Vandals and then retaken by Rome, other parts were mostly partially Latinized nomadic tribes; Mesopotamia was and had been under the Sassanids for a few hundred years, but I don't know how Persianized the people had become.

In time, I suspect that the Sassanids would have solidified their hold over Iraq and started a series of neverending comflicts with the Byzantines over Syria. The Maghreb probably continues to be somewhat disorganized tribes, with Rome's control waxing and waning with its power. The Levant was pretty solidly Christian and Greek-speaking for the most part, and will probably become a solid part of the Byzantine Empire - Antioch, for example, may become the second city of the Empire. Egypt will probably continue being Egypt, being one of the world's oldest civilizations and the breadbasket of the Mediterranean while never reaching much past the Nile valley and delta.
 
Wouldn't Turkish migration butterfly away without Islam?

As mentioned by others in another discussion, the Turkic peoples might perhaps convert to Nestorian Christianity. The same might happen with the Persians. Perhaps they afterwards would move towards India rather than to attack the Byzantines?
 
Mesopotamia would be Assyrian,Egypt Coptic and Greek, Maghreb'd stay Berber with the coasts Latinized and the Levant Syrian and Greek. The Turks'd probably go Nestorian ,Tengriism or like their Mongol cousins be a mix of both. And if Islam stayed out of the African Horn, they'd probably be a mix of Copt and Orthodox.
 
North Africa is most likely to be largely Berber (at the exception of Egypt), with diverse degree of Romanisation, with the Mauri/Africani/Romani divisions probably going to lives on.

Basically : from less to more importantly romanised Berbers, distinguished from coastal Romance populations.

Now, Byzantine Africa (strictly speaking) went trough an important cultural and political decline : it seems that Constantinople more or less cease to really care about the province in the late VIth century, more or less as remote lands of the Empire (in spite of its known prosperity).

Any Greek presence, ethnically speaking, would be fantasmagorical.

Maghreb is most likely to stay out of most post-classical Romanity, except some tiny isolated as Volubilis. While a Gothic influence is possible, without being likely (at the contrary, giving the difficulties Spain was undergoing : Gothic kings never really managed to go outside the peninsula, eventually) and to say nothing of a forseeable conquest.

It's more likely to see a really tiny Romance presence on Mediterranean Romance coast paying lip service to either Romans or Goths (if not both) and being entierly surrounded by not that much romanised Berbers.
 
Given the climate in the Maghreb, I imagine the rural population is thinly spread out and would likely not have as much influence. I'm imagining a Scotland situation where the language of the cities wins out.

In Egypt, it would seem the reverse is true. There's a tightly packed and numerous rural population along the Nile, so the Egyptian masses would linguistically win out over the Greek elite.
 
Egypt had a Hellenic overclass ruling an "Egyptian" underclass (precisely what ethnicity Egyptians were at any point in time is apparently highly controversial)

This is probably an oversimplification.

There almost certainly wasn't any serious ethnic distinction between rulers and ruled in late Roman Egypt in the way there was for the Ptolemies a millenium earlier. The lower classes spoke Egyptian, that's true, but the "middle" classes certainly also did, alongside Greek. The Coptic language (Coptic is an Arabic term, so strictly speaking anachronistic, but never mind) was heavily influenced by a thousand years of Greek, and was of course written in a Greek-derived alphabet.

Now, we have direct evidence that the "middle classes" (lawyers, village headmen, low level administrators etc) used both Greek and Coptic interchangeably in their dealings. The main administrative and clerical language was dominated by Greek, but with Coptic also being seen at a lower level. In short, there's nothing to suggest that there was any sort of clear-cut distinction (and certainly not a religious one) between "Greeks" and "Copts" at the time of the Arab conquest.
 
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