Afroasiatic
The Afroasiatic (AA) language family (Figure 10.3) contains six subgroups, of which Ancient Egyptian (or Coptic in historical times), Semitic, and Berber are agreed by most linguists to form a single node (Boreafrasian of Christopher Ehret 1995, with several phonological innovations). Chadic and Cushitic form separate subgroups, as does a poorly known and small language subgroup in southwestern Ethiopia, termed Omotic.3 The present-day widespread distribution of Semitic languages in North Africa does not reflect in situ descent directly from the earliest history of this family, since Arabic spread very widely after the seventh-century Arab conquests, and the ancestors of the more diverse Ethiopic languages (including Amharic), also in the Semitic subgroup, spread from Arabia during the second millennium BC (Ehret 2000).
Figure 10.2 Colin Renfrew's reconstruction of the Indo-European homeland in central Anatolia and the first expansions of Indo-European languages into Europe. From Renfrew 1999.
There are two quite separate bodies of opinion concerning AA prehistory. One school, for which linguists Christopher Ehret (1979, 1995, 2003), Lionel Bender (1982), and Roger Blench (1993, 1999) are perhaps the main proponents, favors a homeland in northeastern Africa on the grounds that five of the six AA subgroups (excluding Semitic) occur only in Africa, including those perceived to be the most ancient in phylogenetic terms. The precise location of the homeland varies a little according to author, oscillating through Ethiopia and Sudan toward the Red Sea coast, where live the Beja, apparently representing a very early linguistic split within the Cushitic subgroup. These linguists tend to regard early AA expansion as pre-agricultural, although not pre-herding in Ehret's view, thus perhaps to be equated with population spread into the eastern Sahara consequent upon the postglacial wetter climatic conditions after about 10,000 years ago. Ehret (2003), for instance, states that Cushitic, Chadic, Berber, and Semitic all have independently derived agricultural protovocabularies, but that Proto-Cushitic already had some cattle vocabulary at the time of its break-up, and thus may have had an incipient herding economy.
The other major school, composed mainly of Russian linguists, strongly favors a Southwest Asian and specifically Levant homeland. This opinion is based entirely on vocabulary reconstruction rather than the "center-of-gravity " assumptions of the Northeast Africa school. Apart from one rather isolated claim for an AA expansion out of the Levant during the Aurignacian over 30,000 years ago (McCall 1998), the core case for the Levant school is based on the following observations:
1.Glottochronological considerations, calibrated against data on ancient Egyptian and Semitic languages (Greenberg 1990:12), suggest that PAA is perhaps a little older than PIE (between 10,000 and 7000 BC).
2.The reconstructed vocabulary of PAA does not contain any specifically agricultural cognates, but it does include names for a number of plants and animals that are of Asian, not North African origin (sheep, goat, barley, chickpea, for instance: Blazek 1999; Militarev 2000, 2003). Militarev favors early agricultural correlations.
3.Proto-Semitic is of undoubted Levant origin and has a full agropastoral
vocabulary (Dolgopolsky 1993; Diakonoff 1998).
These observations do not form conclusive proof of a Levant origin for the whole AA family, and we seem to be sitting on a slightly unyielding fence. My suspicions, with Colin Renfrew (1991), are that PAA does indeed have a Levant rather than a Northeast African origin, but I have to admit that this view is based more on an understanding of the record of early Holocene population movement than of any absolute markers of linguistic phylogeny. The spread of Neolithic cultures from the Levant into Egypt at about 5500 BC, or perhaps before, combined with the possibility of a PPNB movement of caprovine herders down the western side of the Arabian Peninsula in the wetter conditions of the early Holocene, are suggestive of a bifurcatory movement of early farmers and pastoralists, with sheep, goats, wheat, and barley, into Africa by two routes:
1.Southern Levant into Egypt, leading eventually to further movement of early Berber languages and goat herding into the northern Sahara.
2.A separate movement, mainly pastoralist with sheep and goat herding rather than agriculture, through western Arabia and across to East Africa, leading to Cushitic, Chadic, and presumably Omotic.
Taking linguistic and archaeological evidence into consideration, it is also possible that the movement through Arabia occurred first, perhaps a millennium or more before that into Egypt. Linguistically, this would explain why Cushitic, Omotic, and Chadic are believed by many linguists to be deeper in a phylogenetic sense than the other families (unless there has been a great deal of contact-induced change, as in the case of the western Melanesian languages within Austronesian). It would also explain why the Egyptian Neolithic as known at present started after the PPNB, during the Pottery Neolithic.
This view of a Levant origin takes into account details of the archaeological record, of proto-vocabulary reconstruction, and of existing evidence for population movement during the early Holocene. The opposing view of an African origin is based on linguistic subgrouping data and has no archaeology
in support, unless one guess-links AA dispersal to the warmer and wetter climate of the Sahara in the early Holocene. But this, of course, cannot explain Semitic, which reveals no direct traces at all of an African origin, and it also runs up against the view, widely held, that the early NiloSaharan languages would be better candidates for a linkage with the early Holocene Saharan cattle herders. A Levant origin for AA fits the general picture better, as it is currently understood, than does an African origin. The testing of this hypothesis lies in the future - for instance in the archaeology of Ethiopia and the linguistics of the little-known Omotic subgroup.