Japhetites

Among Muslim historians, Japheth is usually regarded as the ancestor of the Gog and Magog tribes, and, at times, of the Turks, Khazars, and Slavs.

[9] Most modern writers accept Shem–Ham–Japheth as reflecting their birth order, but this is not always the case: Moses and Rachel also appear at the head of such lists despite explicit descriptions of them as younger siblings.

According to the Roman–Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews, I.VI.122 (Whiston): Japhet, the son of Noah, had seven sons: they inhabited so, that, beginning at the mountains Taurus and Amanus, they proceeded along Asia, as far as the river Tanais (Don), and along Europe to Cadiz; and settling themselves on the lands which they light upon, which none had inhabited before, they called the nations by their own names.Japheth (in Hebrew: Yā́p̄eṯ or Yép̄eṯ) may be a transliteration of the Greek Iapetos, the ancestor of the Hellenic peoples.

[12][13] His sons and grandsons associate him with the geographic area comprising the Aegean Sea, Greece, the Caucasus, and Anatolia: Ionia/Javan, Rhodes/Rodanim, Cyprus/Kittim, and other places in the Eastern Mediterranean region.

[15] This view accorded with the understanding of the origin of the Book of Genesis, which was seen as having been composed in stages beginning with the time of King Solomon, when the Philistines still existed (they vanished from history after the Assyrian conquest of Canaan).

70 AD, contains an expanded genealogy that is seemingly garbled from that of the Book of Genesis, and also different from the much later one found in the 17th-century Rabbinic text Sefer haYashar ("Book of Jasher"):[16] Some of the nations that various later writers (including Jerome and Isidore of Seville, as well as other traditional accounts) have attempted to describe as Japhetites are listed below: The Sefer haYashar ("Book of Jasher"), written by Talmudic rabbis in the 17th century (first printed in 1625), ostensibly based on an earlier edition of 1552, provides some new names for Japheth's grandchildren: The term "Caucasian" as a racial label for Europeans derives in part from the assumption that the tribe of Japheth developed its distinctive racial characteristics in the Caucasus area, having migrated there from Mount Ararat before populating the European continent.