The progeny of Shem in the biblical Table of Nations (Genesis 10) is well documented in the region of the Ur of Chaldees from where the great patriarch Abraham departed to then trek actually south into the land of Canaan, where he met Melchizedek in the city of Salem. The name Ur of Chaldees means city of the Kaldu, the city of the Assyrian (Assur) pantheon of pagan gods, the Kaldis, that city known as Urfa, the ruins of which are on the upper Euphrates on the Turkish border, Urfa named after Arphaxad, a son of Shem, and Assur was another son of patriarch Shem, worshpped by the Assyrians as a god, but just a man, the tablets of the Genesis account not passed down through him but through Arphaxad.
And the grandfather of Abraham was Nahor, the land of Aram-Naharaim his abode, there too of the upper Euphrates of northern Syrian and the southeastern border of Turkey, not far from the Mountains of Ararat where Noah’s Ark had landed ten generations before Abraham, that region of the upper Fertile Crescent where too Abraham’s brother Harran built his great overland trade city, all in the region of the Japhethite Aram, Paddan Aram, the biblcial Fields of Aram, whose sons ‘though, Uz, Hul, Gather, and Mash, had moved east, Uz to later known Uzbekistan, where the spiritual and physical troubles of Job would become legendary.
So the land of Abraham’s early years as popularly opined was not Sumer in southern Mesopotamia where was the ancient city of Ur, also known as Uruk or Erech, for there was not worhipped the pagan Assyrian pantheon of gods. Abraham came from Ur of Chaldees, Urfa, the land Arphaxad, Nahor, and Harran, as well as the japhethite Aram, father of the Aramaic language which would be spoken throughout the region in the centuries to come, even in the Holy Land. Abraham met Melchizedek in Salem (then also called Ur u’ salim and later Jerusalem), which was named after Salah, a son of Arphaxad (city Arpad), and according to Jewish tradition that King of Righteousness, Melchizedek, was Shem, who of course lived long, over four hundred years after the Flood of Noah’s day. See the big picture here http://genesisveracityfoundation.com.