Possible Linguistic Evidence for Egyptian’s Arrival from the West and Subsequent Absorption of Cushitic Speakers: A Tentative Reconstruction within Afroasiatic, Based on a Reanalysis of Ancient Egyptian for Auxiliary Verbs
This blogpost is part of an ongoing research project reanalyzing Ancient Egyptian for auxiliary verbs. It expands on ideas presented at the Sixth Annual Missouri Egyptological Symposium (21 September 2024), including contemplation of possible links to other Afroasiatic verb forms (a line of questioning by Signe Cohen). . . . A prehistoric scenario that bleeds a bit into historic times and begins to overlap with the dawn of Egyptian writing: Against a backdrop of hunter-gatherers and then herders wandering in a more-verdant climate, the 5 th millennium BCE aridification forced the linguistic ancestor of Ancient Egyptian into arriving from the West and setting up as what became the Naqada culture of Upper Egypt, a fateful development that would result in expansion into Lower Egypt, absorption of Cushitic-speaking peoples there, and a misleading geographical cleavage in a Berber-Semitic-Cushitic sub-branch of Afroasiatic, what with the remaining Cushitic peoples being stranded to
