Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were speakers of Semitic languages who lived throughout the ancient Near East and later also North Africa, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Arabian Peninsula and Carthage from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity, with some, such as Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, Jews, Mandaeans, and Samaritans having a historical continuum into the present day.

Their languages are usually divided into three branches: East, Central and South Semitic languages. The oldest attested forms of Semitic date to the early to mid-3rd millennium BC (the Early Bronze Age) in Mesopotamia, the northwest Levant and southeast Anatolia.

Speakers of East Semitic include the people of the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, Assyria, Babylonia, the latter two of which eventually gradually switched to still spoken (by Assyrians and Mandeans) dialects of Akkadian influenced East Aramaic and perhaps Dilmun.

Central Semitic combines the Northwest Semitic languages and Arabic. Speakers of Northwest Semitic were the Canaanites (including the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Amorites, Edomites, Moabites and the Hebrews/Israelites), the Arameans and the Ugarites. Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew and Maltese remain spoken to this day.

South Semitic peoples included speakers of the Old South Arabian languages of states in the southern Arabian Peninsula such as Sheba, Magan, Ubar and possibly Meluhha, and the speakers of Modern South Arabian languages of Yemen, Oman and the Ethiopian Semitic languages.

There are several locations proposed as possible sites for prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking peoples: Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula, the Eastern Mediterranean, Eritrea and Ethiopia, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa.

A popular view claims that the Semitic languages originated in the Levant circa 3800 BC, and were later also introduced to the Horn of Africa—often associated with the southern Arabian peninsula—in approximately 800 BC, and to North Africa and southern Spain with the founding of Phoenician colonies such as ancient Carthage in the ninth century BC and Cádiz in the tenth century BC.

Some assign the arrival of Semitic speakers in the Horn of Africa to a much earlier date, circa 1300 to 1000 BC, and many scholars believe that Semitic originated from an offshoot of a still earlier language in North Africa, perhaps in the southeastern Sahara, and that the process of desertification may have caused its speakers to migrate in the fourth millennium BC—some southeast into what is now Eritrea and Ethiopia, and others northwest out of North Africa into Canaan, Syria and the Mesopotamian valley.