Before 15,000 BCE: (The Afrasian Root *netl’- and the Egyptian Word ntr — A Very Old Afrasian Root Word Denoting a Deity Traceable Back to Proto-Erythraic, t…

Before 15,000 BCE: (The Afrasian Root *netl’- and the Egyptian Word ntr — A Very Old Afrasian Root Word Denoting a Deity Traceable Back to Proto-Erythraic, the Ancient Egyptian Word for God ntr Being a Direct Reflex of This Root, the Somewhat Different Usages Across Later Afrasian-Speaking Societies Making the Original Specific Referent Not Immediately Self-Evident, but Comparative Ethnographic Evidence Providing a Strong Hint Through a Relict Distribution of a Particular Kind of Belief System): The deep-time lexicon of belief among Afrasian-speaking peoples included a very old root word, *netl’-, that denoted a deity of some kind. The ancient Egyptian word for god, ntr, is a direct reflex of this old root word. The word cannot be traced all the way back to proto-Afrasian, but it can be traced as far as one of the two primary daughter languages of proto-Afrasian: proto-Erythraic. Because of the somewhat different usages of this word in different Afrasian-speaking societies of later ages, it is not immediately self-evident what specific kind of deity the word originally applied to. But the comparative ethnographic evidence provides a strong hint: one particular kind of belief system occurs with a relict distribution among Afrasian speakers. Consider what this means. The word that ancient Egyptians used for “god” — ntr, written in hieroglyphs with the flag-on-a-pole determinative, spoken in temples from Memphis to Thebes — is not a word the Egyptians invented. It is a word they inherited from proto-Erythraic, a language spoken in the Horn of Africa before any Afrasian speaker had ever set foot in the Nile Valley. When an Egyptian priest invoked a ntr, he was using a word whose roots lay in the Ethiopian Highlands, a word that had traveled northward along the Red Sea Hills in the mouths of grain harvesters, a word that was already ancient by the time the first pyramid was conceived. The religious vocabulary of ancient Egypt did not come from the Levant. It came from Africa, carried in the same linguistic package that carried the words for grain, for grinding stones, for flat bread. The sacred and the subsistence traveled together.