[nzeid]

All this talk of soup making me wonder if these are Arabic/ME derivatives.

Then again there are like 10 different ways to refer to soup in the various dialects.

[wongarsu]

The wikipedia article traces it to Persian, which formed it as a compound of words from different East Iranian languages. So you are on the money with Middle Eastern. From there it spread to the Balkan via Ottoman Turkish, and also from Persian to dialectal Arabic, which would explain the occurrences in Northern Africa, and maybe even Spain