Lost Tribes
- noun
:
Tribus Perdidas
- The Lost Tribes of Israel were said to have been exiled by the Assyrians in 720 BC.
- the ten Lost Tribes
- the Lost Tribes of Israel
Examples
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The ancestry of the Moundbuilders was speculated to be everyone from the Lost Tribes of Israel to wandering Phoenicians, but almost always people with an Old World heritage, and almost always racially white.
Academic text (2006) -
He was a descendant of Aaron Luis Levy Montezinos, a distant uncle who discovered the Ten Lost Tribes in South America, and "Menashe Ben-Israel himself wrote a book about him titled Hope of Israel."
Fiction book (1994) -
Many theories exist about the whereabouts of the Lost Tribes of Israel after their exile.
-
Some historians believe that the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel may still be found today.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is compositionally clear — 'lost' + 'tribes' straightforwardly yields 'tribes that cannot be found,' so a B1 learner who knows the constituents can infer the general meaning. However, the capitalized fixed term refers to a specific historical/religious referent (the ten tribes of Israel) whose detailed background is culturally specific and not predictable from the words alone, so full understanding requires prior knowledge.
Etymology
Lost Tribes comes from a Bible and history story about ten groups of people from Israel who were taken away by the Assyrians long ago. Because they never came back, people called them Lost, meaning 'missing', Tribes, so today Lost Tribes means those groups that people do not know what happened to.
