Tuesday, September 16, 2008

The possibility that Ancient Egyptian was a regional Lingua Franca...

Often times, people discuss how lower Nile Valley polities united with the Upper Nile Valley ones, with the initiative coming largely from upper Nile Valley ruling elites; yet, it almost never comes up or crosses the mind, that these discrete polities might have well very likely spoke distinctive dialects, if not language types altogether, as well. This would mean that there would have been a common language to facilitate trade during the pre-dynastic era, and a common language to effectively unify all the previously discrete autonomous Nile Valley polities under one national language. This language would have no doubt, functioned as a regional lingua franca; the same could be said of the regions south of Egypt, which contemporary Egyptologists have a habit of generically referring to as "Nubia".

The questions that ought to come to mind, should be for example, as follows:

  • Did pre-dynastic Lower Egyptians "originally" speak the same languages as their pre-dynastic Upper Egyptian counterparts?
  • Did the pre-dynastic Lower Egyptian polities amongst themselves speak a single language, or was there only a single pre-dynastic Lower Egyptian polity [which would seem very unlikely, given the different archaeological complexes of the so-designated regions] with a single language? As for predynastic Upper Egypt, it is well known that not a single polity existed therein at the time; so, did these polities speak the same language, or did they adopt a sub-regional lingua franca in Upper Egypt, all the way to parts of northern Sudan?
  • Did Egypt, upon unification, take the language of the dominant ruling elites as the regional lingua franca, which would become Egyptic, or was this simply developed by the merging of language elements from all the regions brought under unity? The same scenario can be played in Kush, where Kushitic/Meroetic language would serve as the regional lingua franca. This was a polity, as can be seen from artistic impressions, to be quite diverse. Could something like what happened in Ethiopia, and elsewhere in Africa, i.e. West Africa and South Africa, have happened in these regions, with Amarinya becoming a sort of lingua franca for the various groups with their distinctive tongues?


Consider for example, the following recap on at least one observation made about predynastic developments in lower and upper Egyptian regions:

With some emphasis placed on language…

Relevant reading from Keita and Boyce, Genetics, Egypt, And History: Interpreting Geographical Patterns Of Y Chromosome Variation, 2005:

“Later there is some movement into Africa after the domestication of plants and Ovacaprines, which happened in the Near East nearly 2000 years before it occurred in Egypt (Hassan 1988, Wetterstrom 1993). Early Neolithic levels in northern Egypt contain the Levantine domesticates, and show some influence in material culture as well (Kobusiewicz 1992). Ovacaprines appear in the western desert before the Nile valley proper (Wendorf and Schild 2001). However, it is significant that ancient Egyptian words for the major Near Eastern domesticates - Sheep, goat, barley, and wheat - are not loans from either Semitic, Sumerian, or Indo-European. This argues against a mass settler colonization (at replacement levels) of the Nile valley from the Near East at this time. This is in contrast with some words for domesticates in some early Semitic languages, which are likely Sumerian loan words (Diakonoff 1981).

This evidence indicates that northern Nile valley peoples apparently incorporated the Near Eastern domesticates into a Nilotic foraging subsistence tradition **on their own terms** (Wetterstrom 1993). There was apparently no “Neolithic revolution” brought by settler colonization, but a gradual process of neolithicization (Midant-Reynes 2000).

(Also some of those emigrating may have been carrying Haplotype V, descendents of earlier migrants from the Nile valley, given the postulated “Mesolithic” time of the M35 lineage emigration). It is more probable that the current VII and VIII frequencies, greatest in northern Egypt, reflect in the main (but not solely) movements during the Islamic period (Nebel et al. 2002), when some deliberate settlement of Arab tribes was done in Africa, and the effects of polygamy. There must also have been some impact of Near Easterners who settled in the delta at various times in ancient Egypt (Gardiner 1961). More recent movements, in the last two centuries, must not be forgotten in this assessment.

And Continued! Keita and Boyce, on the peopling of the Nile Valley…

“Archeological data, or the absence of it, have been interpreted as suggesting a population hiatus in the settlement of the Nile Valley between Epipaleolithic and the Neolithic/predynastic, but this apparent lack could be due to material now being covered over by the Nile (see Connor and Marks 1986, Midant-Reynes 2000, for a discussion). Analogous to events in the Atacama Desert in Chile (Nunez et al. 2002), a moister more inhabitable eastern Sahara gained more human population in the late Pleistocene-early Holocene (Wendorf and Schild 1980, Hassan 1988, Wndorf and Schild 2001). If the hiatus was real then perhaps many Nile populations became Saharan.

Later, stimulated by mid-Holocene droughts, migration from the Sahara contributed population to the Nile Valley (Hassan 1988, Kobusiewicz 1992, Wendorf and Schild 1980, 2001); the predynastic of upper Egypt and later Neolithic in lower Egypt show clear Saharan affinities. A striking increase e of pastoralists’ hearths are found in the Nile valley dating to between 5000-4000 BCE (Hassan 1988). Saharan Nilo-Saharan speakers may have been initial domesticators of African cattle found in the Sahara (see Ehret 2000, Wendorf et. Al. 1987). Hence there was a Saharan “Neolithic” with evidence for domesticated cattle before they appear in the Nile valley (Wendorf et al. 2001). If modern data can be used, there is no reason to think that the peoples drawn into the Sahara in the earlier periods were likely to have been biologically or linguistically uniform.

…A dynamic diachronic interaction consisting of the fusion, fissioning, and perhaps “extinction” of populations, with a decrease in overall numbers as the environment eroded, can easily be envisioned in the heterogenous landscape of the eastern Saharan expanse, with its oases and Wadis, that formed a reticulated pattern of habitats. This fragile and changing region with the Nile Valley in the early to mid-Holocene can be further envisioned as holding a population whose subdivisions maintained some distinctiveness, but did exchange genes. Groups would have been distributed in settlements based on resources, but likely had contacts based on artifact variation (Wendorf and Schild 2001). Similar pottery can be found over extensive areas. Transhumance between the Nile valley and the Sahara would have provided east-west contact, even before the later migration largely emptied parts of the eastern Sahara.

Early speakers of Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic apparently interacted based on the evidence of loan words (Ehret, personal communication). Nilo-Saharan’s current range is roughly congruent with the so-called Saharo-Sudanese or Aqualithic culture associated with the less arid period (Wendorf and Schild 1980), and therefore cannot be seen as intrusive. Its speakers are found from the Nile to the Niger rivers in the Sahara and Sahel, and south into Kenya. The eastern Sahara was likely a micro--evolutionary processor and pump of populations, who may have developed various specific sociocultural (and linguistic) identities, but were genealogically “mixed” in terms of origins.

These identities may have further crystallized on the Nile, or fused with those of resident populations that were already differentiated. The genetic profile of the Nile Valley via the fusion of the Saharans and the indigenous peoples were likely established in the main long before the Middle Kingdom…

…Hoffman (1982) noted cattle burials in Hierakonpolis, the most important of predynastic upper Egyptian cities in the later predynastic. This custom might reflect Nubian cultural impact, a common cultural background, or the presence of Nubians...

Apparently, all these different groups would have found a way to communicate with each other.

Considering that there was an inter-trade network along the Nile Valley long before unification, another possibility is the idea of a 'trade language' being developed, and then developing into what would become Egyptic of Pharaonic Egypt.

Clyde Winters chimes in with this interesting note:

You are on to something.

It will be difficult to really elaborate this theme given our knowledge about Egyptian language. But the use of two different "cursive" scripts: Hieratic and Demotic, by two different ruling groups, may indicate that different languages and traditions of writing may have existed in Egypt in ancient times.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

MS: >>This would mean that there would have been a common language to facilitate trade during the pre-dynastic era, and a common language to effectively unify all the previously discrete autonomous Nile Valley polities under one national language.

Ancient Egyptian as a lingua franca sounds plausible to me, and such a national/regional language could have operated quite comfortably alongside local dialects. The dynastic era was ushered in by southern hegemons, and their frameworks could have operated with the communication supplied by that lingua franca. Genetic and skeletal evidence shows the linkages with Saharan and Nubian populations solidly in place, with little need for sweeping influxes of Near Easterners, "Hamites" or whatever non-African label of the moment is being used.

On the different dialects being used by the Upper Egyptian hegemons, the little info I am familar with shows some scholars in support of the matter of discrete polities.

.. material evidence indicates that the indigenous peoples evolved the state gradually, in a slowly phased process suggesting a degree of regional integration well before the 1st Dynasty. These phases involved the emergence of dispersed kingdoms both in Egypt (Kaiser and Dreyer 1982) and possibly in Nubia (Williams 1987), with some scholars suggesting up to ten indigenous rulers in place before the 1st Dynasty. (Kaiser and Dreyer 1982)[144] Such continuity confirms the forensic data of Zakrzewski (2007) and others noted above, and provides further evidence of the indigenous genesis of the pharaonic state. The continuity of this state was to be longer than any Asiatic or Western one.[145]

{info gleaned from
-- The Cambridge History of Africa: Volume 1, From the Earliest Times to c. 500 BC, (Cambridge University Press: 1982), Edited by J. Desmond Clark pp. 500-509,
-- John Gledhill, Barbara Bender, Mogens Trolle Larsen, (eds), State and Society: The Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and political centralization, (London: Taylor and Francis Group: 1998), pp. 192-214.}

Ten indigenous rulers in place and the subsequent consolidation and absorption of the north by the south would seem to suggest a measure of decentralization, yet with enough common elements to create and maintan cohesive dynastic regimes. Language would be a key element in this.


MS: > Did the pre-dynastic Lower Egyptian polities amongst themselves speak a single language, or was there only a single pre-dynastic Lower Egyptian polity [which would seem very unlikely, given the different archaeological complexes of the so-designated regions] with a single language?

I have run into people who argue strenuously for a unified Lower/northern Egypt (aided by mysterious Mediterraneans or Near easterners) that went on to mingle and unite with the elites of the south. But you rightly cast doubt on that theory above. As the Cambridge Encyc of Africa notes: (The Cambridge History of Africa: Volume 1, From the Earliest Times to c. 500 BC, (Cambridge University Press: 1982), Edited by J. Desmond Clark pp. 500-509)

While not attempting to underestimate the contribution that Deltaic political and religious institutions made to those of a united Egypt, many Egyptologists now discount the idea that a united prehistoric kingdom of Lower Egypt ever existed."

and

"While communities such as Ma'adi appear to have played an important role in entrepots through which goods and ideas form south-west Asia filtered into the Nile Valley in later prehistoric times, the main cultural and political tradition that gave rise to the cultural pattern of Early Dynastic Egypt is to be found not in the north but in the south."

And yet some continue to insist on the "backwardness" of the "darker" south, and continue to downplay, distort or discount the Saharan/Sudanic heritage of Egypt.


This evidence indicates that northern Nile valley peoples apparently incorporated the Near Eastern domesticates into a Nilotic foraging subsistence tradition **on their own terms** (Wetterstrom 1993). There was apparently no “Neolithic revolution” brought by settler colonization, but a gradual process of neolithicization (Midant-Reynes 2000).

Agreed, and that is a good reference provided for others to use. It is important that this evidence-based conclusion be stated versus sweeping notions of outside settlers pouring into the Nile Valley bring Near Eastern domesticates with them. According to my limited reading of Christopher Ehret:

"the peoples of the steppes and grasslands to the immediate south of Egypt domesticated cattle, as early as 9000 to 8000 B.C. They included peoples from the Afro-Asiastic linguistic group and the second major African language family, Nilo-Saharan (Wendorf, Schild, Close 1984; Wendorf, et al. 1982). Thus the earliest domestic cattle may have come to Egypt from these southern neighbors, circa 6000 B.C., and not from the Middle East.[148] Pottery, another significant advance in material cultural may also have followed this pattern, initiatied "as early as 9000 B.C. by the Nilo-Saharans and Afrasians who lived to the south of Egypt. Soon thereafter, pots spread to Egyptian sites, almost 2,000 years before the first pottery was made in the Middle East."[149]

"Several notable early Egyptian crops came from Sudanic agriculture, independently invented between 7500 and 6000 B.C. by the Nilo-Saharan peoples (Ehret 1993:104-125). One such cultivated crop was the edible gourd. The botanical evidence is confirmed in this case by linguistics: Egyptian bdt, or "bed of gourds" (Late Egyptian bdt, "gourd; cucumber"), is a borrowing of the Nilo-Saharan word *bud, "edible gourd." Other early Egyptian crops of Sudanic origin included watermelons and castor beans."[150]


(info gleaned from: Christopher Ehret, "Ancient Egyptian as an African Language, Egypt as an African Culture," in Egypt in Africa, Theodore Celenko (ed), Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 25-27)

Mystery Solver said...

anonymous posts:

I have run into people who argue strenuously for a unified Lower/northern Egypt (aided by mysterious Mediterraneans or Near easterners) that went on to mingle and unite with the elites of the south. But you rightly cast doubt on that theory above. As the Cambridge Encyc of Africa notes: (The Cambridge History of Africa: Volume 1, From the Earliest Times to c. 500 BC, (Cambridge University Press: 1982), Edited by J. Desmond Clark pp. 500-509)

While not attempting to underestimate the contribution that Deltaic political and religious institutions made to those of a united Egypt, many Egyptologists now discount the idea that a united prehistoric kingdom of Lower Egypt ever existed."

and

"While communities such as Ma'adi appear to have played an important role in entrepots through which goods and ideas form south-west Asia filtered into the Nile Valley in later prehistoric times, the main cultural and political tradition that gave rise to the cultural pattern of Early Dynastic Egypt is to be found not in the north but in the south."


It would make sense that one of the factors that contributed to "southern" ruling elites extending their authority over to lower Egyptian regions, is the relatively quicker consolidation of political power in the "south" than those in the northern and delta regions of Egyptian territory, prior to any potential campaign to either militarily and/or political consolidate entire Egyptian regions from the northern sections through to the southern counterparts under a central political authority. Upper Egyptian polities would have been in a better position to consolidate possibly due to common ancestries and/or through politically expedient unions, and/or due to relative wealth they amassed from being strategically positioned geographically in between the more northerly Egyptian regions that had better access to extra-Nile Valley regions near the Mediterranean sea and across the Red Sea, as well as the resource-rich complexes further south, beyond what would become Dynatic Egypt's southern "Ta-Seti" nome.

Anonymous said...

Upper Egyptian polities would have been in a better position to consolidate possibly due to common ancestries and/or through politically expedient unions, and/or due to relative wealth they amassed from being strategically positioned geographically in between the more northerly Egyptian regions that had better access to extra-Nile Valley regions near the Mediterranean sea and across the Red Sea, as well as the resource-rich complexes further south, beyond what would become Dynatic Egypt's southern "Ta-Seti" nome.

I think what you say here gives a more complete picture, including the matter of shared ancestries. If the PN2 clades you mention elsewhere, combined with the skeletal evidence, plus the cultural links are viewed as a whole, then you have a solid indigenous basis for more efficient consolidation of the south.

Furthermore this matter of strategic positioning needs to be looked at more I think. Some argue that the southerners' drive for hegemony was encouraged by a desire to control trade with the southern Levant and Mesopotamia. This seems reasonable to me, but only as one of a long list of reasons on the table. The other side of the equation that you mention, the rich resources of Nubia, the Sudan, Libya, etc would seem to add balance to any Medicentrist thinking.

I know many folks are baffled at southern dominance. You can almost hear them thinking "This should not be. By all rights, it should be a north-south thing, Mediterraneans, Mesopotamians and such sweeping down from the north to civilize the darker natives.."

I suppose that is why there is so much effort to define the peoples of the Horn like Ethiopians as "whites with black skin" to use the words of Cavalli-Sforza's 1964 Encyclopedia Britannica reference. Only then can some "make sense" of this southern thing...

From what I read there seems to have been extensive trade contacts between Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt, making me wonder if the extension of southern hegemony was not connected so much with a drive for Mesopotamian trade goods, than with a pursuit of new markets for "southern" products and raw materials. In other words, all that gold, obsidian, cattle and other product needed outlets, and were themsleves being pushed north by Upper Egyptian officials, migrants, farmers, traders etc..

Hence, to put it badly, a drive for southern "market share" may have played a greater role in this movement over and above a southern desire for assorted Levantine trade. Of course such a drive north would touch trade networks with Mesopotamia, and both wouldinteract with one another.

Neverthtless, given the development of indigenous Egyptian technology and skills, I find your view more balanced in its appreciation of the resources on hand, including those of the south. Many general history books spend a lot of time talking about trade objects from say Palestine, when indigenous craftsmen were quite busy producing distinctive art and everyday products from the resources of the south.

The excavations of German archaeologist Gunter Dreyer (1999) at Predynastic Abydos for example unearthed obsidian bowls, a material traced to the nearby Sudan or Ethiopia. Excavations at Hierakonpolis by archaeologist Renee Friedman (1998) also demonstrates ritual masks similar to those used further south of Egypt, and significant amounts of obsidian, also traced to Ethiopian quarry sites.**

Usually assorted items from Mesopotamia receive much play, with "tropical" products receiving passing mention in connection with "distant" Nubia.

---------
**John Gledhill, Barbara Bender, Mogens Trolle Larsen, (eds), State and Society: The Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and political centralization, (London: Taylor and Francis Group: 1998), pp. 192-214;
also Vivian Davies and Renee Friedman, Egypt Uncovered, (Stewart Tabori & Chang: 1998), pp. 5-87

Mystery Solver said...

anonymous writes:

I think what you say here gives a more complete picture, including the matter of shared ancestries. If the PN2 clades you mention elsewhere, combined with the skeletal evidence, plus the cultural links are viewed as a whole, then you have a solid indigenous basis for more efficient consolidation of the south.

It is fairly safe to say that economics -- exercising control over strategic trade routes and flow of strategic resources -- had an influential role to play in the desire to unify 'Lower Egyptian' and 'Upper Egyptian' territories under one central authority. Please know that when I say "shared ancestries", I'm referring to fairly recent [perhaps just a few] generational close family connections, as opposed to relatively distant common recent ancestry [dating to the thousands]. PN2 clade still appears to be predominant even in today's northern Egyptians, performing the function of representing relics of the original northern Egyptian populations. In this respect, they still show close relationship with their southern Egyptian brethren, notwithstanding greater infusion of foreign migration brought to bear on them.