(Cushitic ≠ Kush — The Crucial Disambiguation That “Cushitic” Spelled with a Capital C as a Language Branch Name Has Nothing to Do with the Ancient Kingdom o…

(Cushitic ≠ Kush — The Crucial Disambiguation That “Cushitic” Spelled with a Capital C as a Language Branch Name Has Nothing to Do with the Ancient Kingdom of Kush Spelled with a K, the People of Kush Having Spoken Not a Cushitic Language but Rather Meroitic Which Belonged to the Nilo-Saharan Family Not the Afrasian Family, Historians and Linguists Having Gotten Stuck with This Misleading Name Because of Mistaken Notions of Nineteenth-Century Scholars): “Cushitic” in this context, spelled with a capital C, has nothing to do with the ancient kingdom Kush, spelled with a K. The people of Kush spoke not a Cushitic language but rather Meroitic, which belonged not to the Afrasian (Afroasiatic) language family but to the quite distinct Nilo-Saharan family. Historians and linguists unfortunately got stuck with this misleading name because of the mistaken notions of nineteenth-century scholarly investigators, and the name then got too deeply embedded in the literature to be easily gotten rid of. This disambiguation is essential for anyone navigating the linguistic landscape of northeastern Africa. The coincidence of names has caused generations of confusion, with readers and even some scholars assuming that the Cushitic-speaking peoples of the Horn of Africa were somehow the descendants or linguistic heirs of the ancient kingdom of Kush. They were not. Kush — the Napata-Meroë Empire — was a Nilo-Saharan-speaking state. The Cushitic branch of the Afrasian language family originated in the Horn of Africa, far southeast of Kush’s heartlands. The two names share nothing but an accident of nineteenth-century nomenclature, and the failure to clarify this distinction has muddied scholarly discussion of both the Meroitic Empire and the Cushitic-speaking peoples for over a century.