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Before 15,000 BCE

Before 15,000 BCE: (The Language Relationships of Ancient Egyptian — Egyptian Belonging to the Afrasian Language Family, Proto-Afrasian Diverging Initially i…

African

Before 15,000 BCE: (The Language Relationships of Ancient Egyptian — Egyptian Belonging to the Afrasian Language Family, Proto-Afrasian Diverging Initially into Proto-Omotic and Proto-Erythraic, Proto-Erythraic Diverging into Proto-Cushitic and Proto-North Erythraic, Proto-North Erythraic Diverging into Pre-Proto-Semitic and Proto-Boreafrasian, and Proto-Boreafrasian Giving Rise to the Ancestral Line from Which Ancient Egyptian Along with the Chadic and Amazigh Subgroups Would Subsequently Evolve): To begin the linguistic and cultural historical excavation of the very-deep-time story of Egypt, Ehret sets out the language relationships of ancient Egyptian. Ancient Egyptian belonged to the Afrasian (Afroasiatic) language family. The primary question is chronological: when did the particular early Afrasian language directly ancestral to ancient Egyptian come to be spoken in the areas around and along the Egyptian Nile? Answering that question requires first answering two others: where does ancient Egyptian fit in the family tree of the Afrasian language family, and where were the languages of the family spoken at different earlier points along the lines of linguistic descent? The most recent findings show that the proto-Afrasian language diverged initially into two daughter languages: proto-Omotic and proto-Erythraic. Proto-Erythraic in turn diverged into proto-Cushitic and proto-North Erythraic. Still later, proto-North Erythraic itself diverged into pre-proto-Semitic — distantly ancestral to the much later Semitic languages — and proto-Boreafrasian. It is this second daughter language, proto-Boreafrasian, that gave rise to the ancestral line of descent out of which the ancient Egyptian language, as well as the Chadic and Amazigh (Berber) subgroups, would subsequently evolve. The family tree of languages, in other words, places Egyptian not as a sister of Semitic but as a cousin, and places the entire family’s center of gravity deep in Africa — in the Horn, along the Nile, across the Sahara. Egyptian did not arrive in Africa from the Levant. It grew up in Africa alongside its Cushitic and Omotic relatives, and only later did one branch, pre-proto-Semitic, carry the family’s genes northeastward out of the continent into southwestern Asia.

Source HT-EHAA-000280, HT-EHAA-000281, HT-EHAA-000282