4000 BCE: (Linguistic and Ethnographic Reconstruction as Complement to Written Records: These Approaches Applying Also to Regions with Early Writing, Adding…

4000 BCE: (Linguistic and Ethnographic Reconstruction as Complement to Written Records: These Approaches Applying Also to Regions with Early Writing, Adding Nuance and Detail to What Often-Scant Written Records Reveal About the Social Cultural and Religious Milieus of Ancient Societies Including the Literate Ones, the Proto-Semitic Language Having Been Spoken Around 4000 BCE in the Syria-Palestine-Israel Region): These approaches apply beyond the regions late to literacy. For the regions of the world with early writing, the tools of linguistic and comparative ethnographic reconstruction, combined with those of archaeology, can add nuance and much detail to what the often-scant written records reveal about the social, cultural, and religious milieus of ancient societies. Ehret offers an example from the proto-Semitic language, shown in a recent study to have been spoken in the Syria-Palestine-Israel region around 4000 BCE. The point is methodological and far-reaching. The tools that Ehret has used throughout Ancient Africa: A Global History (comparative linguistics, reconstructed vocabularies, the principle of fewest moves, relict distributions, comparative ethnography) are not substitutes for written records. They are complements to them, and in many cases they reveal dimensions of ancient life that the written records cannot touch. Written records tell us about kings and conquests. Reconstructed vocabularies tell us about what people ate, how they organized their families, what they called their gods, and how they understood their relationship to the natural world. The first kind of evidence privileges political history. The second privileges cultural and social history. And it is in cultural and social history that Africa’s contributions to the human story are most visible, most consequential, and most systematically erased.