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). 

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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 the South and Southeast of Egyptian’s new home.

(Some Afroasiatic prehistory-into-history: a visualization.)

Some aspects of this scenario have been outlined elsewhere. For example, one recent musing that is self-described as “entirely speculative” (Stauder 2023: 118) involves a background of wandering peoples during more favorable climate eras, settlement towards the Nile during times of aridification, and a linguistic expansion from the base of the Naqada culture (116-118). But, this similar scenario was issued with extreme caution, emphasizing the diversity of languages present (116, 117, 118) and citing a lack of “positive evidence” for identifying the language of the Naqada culture as necessarily Egyptian or even Afroasiatic (118).

Thinking back into the prehistory of Afroasiatic languages is of course difficult. The bulk of necessary research still lies in the necessary branches (e.g. the approach endorsed for Egyptian by Almansa-Villatoro and Štubňová Nigrelli 2023: 14). Furthermore, only narrow forays meaningfully link branches at a high level of detail (e.g. van Putten 2024 on the nature of the adjectives that fed into Berber and Semitic). Thus, any macro-analyses (e.g. Wilson 2020) are unavoidably the most tentative and delicate of all, although such studies are incredibly important and incredibly necessary work that can push thinking forward not only for such reconstructions, but also for research within the individual branches.

In that spirit of issuing “big picture” preliminary hypotheses for collegial discussion – even when ideas are wrong, they can spark new questions and inspire better thinking! – this more-specific scenario has been sketched out, under the position that Egyptian and other Afroasiatic verbal systems may contain underappreciated traces of these long-ago branch relations and movements.

So, what is the evidence for this tentative scenario?

Quite concretely, the thinking flows from the recent reanalysis of Ancient Egyptian for auxiliary verbs (Mihalyfy 2024a; 2024c-d), with its grounding found in an array of positions around 3 verb forms, as well as some more-minor related information.

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#1 – The Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation:

First, although thoroughgoing consideration of the latest and best statement of this position has been unfortunately neglected in some current scholarship (e.g. Bubenik 2017: 133, 141-143, 150-151, 213; Stauder 2023: 105, 122; Souag 2023: 306, 315), the oldest verbal layer of Egyptian – that is, the sDm=f or “suffix conjugation” – seems like it should be identified with what can be called “the East Cushitic second suffix conjugation,” which is found in places like Somali (Banti 2001, revising the thinking of Banti 1987; see also Yoshino 2014).

For positing a common ancestor, important shared peculiarities with Egyptian include this verb form’s resemblance to possessive suffixes, and its lack of marking on the 3^rd person when preceding nominal subjects [11/20/24 edit] (Banti 2001: 15-16, updating Banti 1987: 155-157; see also Yoshino 2014, and pace Wilson 2020: 65-67 and 277-279). In regards to possessive suffixes, it cannot be emphasized enough that the recent reconstruction of the Egyptian 1^st person plural as /nu/ on the basis of Egyptian-internal evidence (Mihalyfy 2023; 2024b) even further increases the resemblance of the Egyptian pronominal marking to that of East Cushitic; having been posited without any awareness of these other forms or this entire issue, this resonant line of entirely independent research thus might even be seen as further corroboration of the fundamental correctness of others’ prior decision to historically connect these forms.

In an important but seemingly unnoticed implication of the best analysis staking out this position of a common morphological ancestor (Banti 2001), too, it seems that the East Cushitic evidence may indicate a relative chronology of Afroasiatic verbal evolution. Namely, in regards to the much-noted issue of the innovative or conservative nature of the prefix conjugation (e.g. Gragg 2019: 34-36 and 43, Wilson 2020: 50-59, and Stauder 2023: 113-114, 118-119), East Cushitic evidence might identify the prefix conjugation of Berber-Semitic-Cushitic as an innovation that took place subsequent to the presence of the Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation. For, beyond the Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation’s chronologically-deep presence in the oldest attested layers of Egyptian, it seems important that several East Cushitic languages show signs of the prefix conjugation and its derivatives replacing the Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation. First, “Somali more frequently uses a new compound form for the affirmative non-past of these verbs, with an invariable stem followed by the P[refix]C[onjugation] affirmative non-past of ah ‘be’” (Banti 2001: 7; italics added). Second, “[t]he personal endings of the [Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation] also occur in Saho-‘Afar and in Burji in a number of past tenses of verbs that have P[refix]C[onjugation] or [the suffix conjugation largely thought to descend from the Prefix Conjugation] in their non-past tenses” (Banti 2001: 9). Thus, both of these distributional observations seem to indicate that the prefix conjugation is a more-recent development, since the prefix conjugation is a more-vital and even explicitly “new” competitor with the Somali affirmative non-past, and since (presumably) the prefix conjugation and its derivatives crowded out the previously-existing forms in Saho-‘Afar and Burji and left them stranded in the past tense (cf. the observation of Bybee et al. 1994: 147-148, that development of a new progressive tense can begin absorbing usages and leave previously-existing forms with a stranded distribution). If correctly analyzed, this implicit directionality of verbal evolution in East Cushitic would thus begin to meet the call for “more evidence, and better criteria, for being able to determine which putative diagnostic features, such as the prefix conjugation, are in fact shared innovations, as opposed to inherited archaisms, yielding classic coherent isoglosses” (Gragg 2019: 43).

To think even more deeply, the semantics of the underlying Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation verb form is a bit uncertain, but it may lie in the imperfective or aspectually neutral realm. For, in Egyptian it seems opposed to perfective forms – that is, it contrasts with the mysterious “linguistic remnant” of the “perfective”  sDm-t=f and its auxiliary verb replacement of the sDm n=f (Loprieno 1995: 78). Likewise, the assembled East Cushitic evidence from Somali and Saho-‘Afar (Banti 2001: 12-13) seems a little more unruly than its current label of “verbs of state” (12) – for instance, do verbs tagged as “be (copula)” and “hate, dislike” match this categorization as much as do the verbs tagged “be white,” “be cold”, and “be divided” (13)? Likewise, the state-indicating forms that existed later in Egyptian’s history (Banti 2001: 16-18; Yoshino 2014) do not fully reflect the wide-ranging earlier usage in Egyptian (something partially acknowledged by Banti 2001: 16 in his statement that “[i]n Old Egyptian most tenses and moods were inflected according to the… Egyptian suffix conjugation,” with a corresponding listing of usage from “unmarked aorist” and “perfect” to “wishes” and “events expected to occur”). In this vein, the major specific example of the Coptic adjectival verbs (Banti 2001: 17) has been shown to be a marginal and idiosyncratic transformation of N-stems coming out of a reanalysis-and-extension of the passive (Mihalyfy 2023; 2024b). So, it does not seem like these later developments can be read back into the earlier side of Egyptian in order to support a more-original sense in the realm of the “verbs of state” evaluation of the East Cushitic evidence (Banti 2001: 12). Instead, one wonders if other verbal innovations – for example, of perfective forms in Egyptian – forced whatever the sense of the more-original form was more towards a certain aspect, perhaps even in opposite directions in different branches.

All that said, it currently seems correct to posit deep within Afroasiatic the nominal origin of the Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation, perhaps emerging from converbs used as the main verbs of certain independent clauses and expanding from certain more-original verbal categories into still others (Yoshino 2014).

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#2 – The Berber-Semitic-Cushitic prefix conjugation:

Second, as has already been stated in relation to the nature and time-depth of the Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation, the issue of whether the Berber-Semitic-Cushitic prefix conjugation is an innovation or an archaism lost elsewhere (e.g. Gragg 2019: 34-36 and 43, Wilson 2020: 53-54, and Stauder 2023: 113-114, 118-119) perhaps should be resolved in favor of the innovation position (pace Wilson 2020: 53-54).

Besides the time-depth of the Egyptian forms and the potential signs of directionality in East Cushitic, the morphological layering of the prefix conjugation onto already-syncopated derived stems like the S-stem in Semitic (Wilson 2020: 189-119) could likewise point towards the innovation position with the prefix conjugation as a separate word, and it thus seems like a hypothesis worth consideration (p.c., Hava Bas-Idis).

(Here, one might also note that if the derived stems are presumed early, their early attestation in combination with the Egyptian suffix conjugation is noteworthy, and would suggest that both derived stems and the Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation go more deeply into Afroasiatic than the Berber-Semitic-Cushitic prefix conjugation.)

Furthermore, within this shared innovation of the Berber-Semitic-Cushitic prefix conjugation, it seems best to posit a split between Berber-Semitic and Cushitic based on innovative word order within Cushitic. VSO word order is found historically deep within Afroasiatic with both Semitic and Egyptian (Huehnergard 2019: 68-69; Loprieno 1995: 6-7, 91) and thus seems more-original (Diakonoff 1988: 111; Frajzyngier and Shay 2012: 13). In contrast, the prefix conjugation appears to have produced in Cushitic suffix-like auxiliaries following the lexical verb as an artifact of that branch’s distinctive SOV word order (i.e. the Colizza-Reinisch-Praetorius hypothesis as affirmed in Wilson 2020: 55, 82-83 and 290-291, and as outlined but disputed by Banti 2001: 21-43). Logically, then, Cushitic must have grouped with Berber and Semitic while the prefix conjugation was formed, and then subsequently taken on the different SOV word order from within which the prefix conjugation could become suffix-like auxiliaries.

In general – and without any significant bearing on the current hypothesis? – worthy of more discussion and consensus-building among specialists is the historical source of the prefix conjugation as found within the branches (e.g. the issues considered in Wilson 2020: 51, 53, 58-59), as is the prefix conjugation’s relation to any more-original word order shared among Berber-Semitic-Cushitic.

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#3 – Ancient Egyptian auxiliary verbs:

Third, within the “Anciently Simplifying Egyptian” working hypothesis in which Ancient Egyptian is viewed as an Afrikaans- and Old Chinese-like creolid, Ancient Egyptian auxiliary verbs (Mihalyfy 2024a) emerge from a large influx of adult speakers after the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt (Mihalyfy 2024c-d).

Although proceeding on other grounds and producing a compelling reading of evidence, this reanalysis for auxiliary verbs nevertheless has one very, very weird implication: it gives Ancient Egyptian a typologically-distinctive lexical-verb-then-auxiliary-verb word order, something that is very strange within a VSO language (Dryer 1992: 100-101, 128; 2009: 205-206). Thus, one is forced to wonder if this peculiar word order with Ancient Egyptian auxiliary verbs could have emerged from a calque used by a critical mass of Cushitic-speaking peoples whose languages were already displaying SOV word order, but whose prefix conjugation forms were still lexically transparent as self-standing verbs; only with such conditions in place could equivalent auxiliaries be sought out in the state-imposed and state-encouraged language of Egyptian, leading to this strange lexical-verb-then-auxiliary-verb word order found in a typically VSO language.

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To thus go step-by-step through a chronological scenario:

1) In the distant past, speakers of Afroasiatic languages likely came up out of towards the horn of Africa, and established themselves from Lake Chad through present-day Egypt, in the latter area likely interspersed with other language families and with much migrations back and forth by hunter-gatherers and later herdsmen, with more movement towards the Nile during times of aridification (cf. Gragg 2019: 43, Stauder 2023: 116, and general evidence from the linguistic diversity in Africa and the present-day distribution of Chadic).

2) The nominal verb form underlying the Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation was a deeper Afroasiatic inheritance across much or perhaps all of this area (i.e., the evidence for how this verb form was displaced within East Cushitic by the prefix conjugation and its transformations, and how it combines with the derived stems in Egyptian).

3) Prior to the 5th millennium BCE aridification (Hendrickx and Vermeersch 2000: 31), the Egyptian language was somewhere west of Nile-bound Upper Egypt, while Berber-Semitic-Cushitic were probably intermixed with other languages but were geographically in rough contact, probably in the vicinity of Lower Egypt. During this time of contact, Berber-Semitic-Cushitic innovated the common prefix conjugation (i.e., the evidence for directionality from East Cushitic and Semitic). The prefix conjugation then spread among them or spread with them as they entered new areas (Berber along the coast of North Africa, Semitic in the Arabian Peninsula, Cushitic in the area down the Nile and the along the Red Sea into the Horn of Africa).  The prefix conjugation likely eradicated or heavily disguised the verb form(s) that preceded it, except in the easternmost Cushitic languages at the edge of the innovation area (i.e., the fact that directionality evidence only seems to survive in East Cushitic, whereas the prefix conjugation is self-standing elsewhere due the high degree that it effaced its predecessor). The prefix conjugation was also in place when Cushitic underwent another innovation, to SOV word order (i.e., the condition necessary for the transformation of the prefix conjugations into suffix-like formants per the Colizza-Reinisch-Praetorius hypothesis), which subsequent innovation helped create a rough divide between the northern prefix conjugation branches of Berber-Semitic, and the southern branch of Cushitic.

4) As a result of the 5^th millennium BCE aridification (Hendrickx and Vermeersch 2000: 31), the Egyptian language moved in from the West and settled in as the Naqada culture of Upper Egypt, forming an outpost that would separate the Cushitic languages from each other. Egyptian eventually absorbed the northern Cushitic portion alongside other peoples in that area during the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, leaving the remaining holders of the prefix conjugation in non-contiguous areas (i.e. the explanation for the typologically unusual word order with auxiliaries under the reanalysis for auxiliary verbs and the “Anciently Simplifying Egyptian” hypothesis, alongside the evidence from the present-day distribution of Berber-Semitic-Cushitic).

In total, then, one can partially envision a likely tree with Western Afroasiatic languages (Egyptian), then the Eastern Afroasiatic languages in northern (Berber-Semitic) and southern (Cushitic) branches (cf. Stauder 2023: 114-115). The expansion of Egyptian into Lower Egypt and the subsequent calquing that left signs of Cushitic in Egyptian would roughly match written evidence from the oldest Semitic languages and (unsurprisingly) put a terminus ante quem of ~3,000 BCE for the prefix conjugation to have been in place across Berber-Semitic-Cushitic. Even more than this, the Egyptian evidence for calques would give a terminus ante quem of ~3,000 BCE  for Cushitic to have developed its distinctive SOV word order. The Egyptian evidence for calques would also give an absolute date of ~3,000 BCE to the predecessors of the prefix conjugation-derived suffix-like formants being perceived as living and transparent verb forms, within those Cushitic speakers’ distinctive SOV linguistic structures.

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To close, some questions (beyond the standard question of saving an author from inadvertent and embarrassing mistakes!) –

~ Given the peculiarities of its resemblance to possessive morphology and its distinctive appearance with full nouns, do Berber and Semitic display any remnants of the nominal that presumably underlies the Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation and that was presumably very thoroughly replaced there by stuff like the prefix conjugation? Likewise, does anything in Chadic and Omotic display any counterpart to the nominal that presumably underlies the Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation? Note that evidence could be very subtle; for instance, it has been said that present-day Oromo appears to have a single postposition stemming from such verbs, despite otherwise not having them (Banti 2001: 7).

~ If the prefix conjugation is innovative, what were the bits and pieces that formed it, and where else do they surface in Afroasiatic? Such thinking (e.g. Wilson 2020: 51, 53, 58-59) deserves careful collation and discussion, including for people who work in other languages that do not seem to contain the prefix conjugation.

~ Why might have Cushitic languages acquired SOV word order? As has been noted elsewhere, “If an assumption is made that Proto-Afroasiatic had the verb in clause-initial position, an explanation should be found for why Cushitic and Omotic languages acquired verb-final default order” (Frajzyngier and Shay 2012: 13)

~ Could Egyptian somehow contain other traces of its move East to the Nile and its expansion during the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, and if so, what might these be?

~ What do we do with the unmentioned-in-this-analysis stative, including with its relative chronology to the nominal presumably underlying the Egyptian-East Cushitic suffix conjugation, its relative chronology with the derived stems, and its relative chronology to the prefix conjugation? If it’s a shared innovation with a common ancestor, how far back does it go and in which branches, and if it’s a parallel innovation like from reduced pronouns (p.c., Hava Bas-Idis), when and how did it start forming, and was there any mutual influence?

~ If anything in this scenario seems wrong, what seems wrong and why, and what more-plausible scenario would you offer as an alternative?

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David Mihalyfy is an independent scholar with a B.A. in Linguistics (Harvard, ’02) and a Ph.D. in the History of Christianity (UChicago ’17).

In a not uncommon scholarly trajectory, he first became interested in Afroasiatic historical linguistics because he happened to study one language (Coptic, for Christian texts), and soon realized the relative underdevelopment of diachronic knowledge in comparison to Indo-European languages.

He has presented at several Egyptological Symposiums of the American Research Center in Egypt’s Missouri Chapter, as well as remotely at the Egyptological Conference in Copenhagen. Several short articles from a larger project on the survival and transformation of Afroasiatic N-stems in Egyptian were recently published in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities.

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WORKS CITED.

M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and Silvia Štubňová Nigrelli, “Comparative Afroasiatic Linguistics and the Place of Ancient Egyptian Within the Phylum,” in M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and Silvia Štubňová Nigrelli (eds.), Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic: Rethinking the Origins (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2023), 3-18.

Giorgio Banti, “Evidence for a Second Type of Suffix Conjugation in Cushitic,” in H. Jungraithmayr and W.W. Müller (eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Hamito-Semitic Congress (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1987), 123-168.

------, “New Perspectives on the Cushitic Verbal System,” Berkeley Linguistics Society 27 (2001): 1-48.

Vit Bubenik, Development of Tense/Aspect in Semitic in the Context of Afro-Asiatic Languages (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2017).

Joan Bybee, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca, The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

I.M. Diakonoff, Afrasian Languages (Moscow: Nauka, 1988)

Matthew S. Dryer, “The Greenbergian Word Order Correlations,” Language  68.1 (1992): 81-138.

------, “The Branching Direction Theory of Word Order Correlations Revisited,” in Sergio Scalise, Elisabetta Magni, and Antonietta Bisetto (eds.), Universals of Language Today (Berlin: Springer, 2009), 185-207.

Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Erin Shay, “Introduction,” in Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Erin Shay (eds.), The Afroasiatic Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1-17.

Gene Gragg, “Semitic and Afro-Asiatic,” in John Huehnergard and Na‘ama Pat-El (eds.), The Semitic Languages, 2^nd ed., 22-48 (London: Routledge, 2019).

Stan Hendrickx and Pierre Vermeersch, “Prehistory: From the Palaeolithic to the Badarian Culture (c.700,000-4000 BC),” in Ian Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 16-40.

John Huehnergard, “Proto-Semitic,” in John Huehnergard and Na‘ama Pat-El (eds.), The Semitic Languages, 2^nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2019), 49-79.

Antonio Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

David Mihalyfy, “A Productive Survival of Afroasiatic N-Stems in Egyptian: Preliminaries for a New Paradigm” (manuscript submitted for peer review as of 1 August 2023).

------, “Twelve Theses Redescribing Ancient Egyptian for Auxiliary Verbs,” Workshop for Egyptian Historical Linguistics (13 April 2024), available at https://egyptianhistoricallinguistics.blogspot.com/2024/04/twelve-theses-redescribing-ancient.html.

------, “Transformed Afroasiatic N-stems Characterize Egyptian through Coptic: Seven Takeaways from the New Paradigm,” Workshop for Egyptian Historical Linguistics (26 June 2024), available at https://egyptianhistoricallinguistics.blogspot.com/2024/06/transformed-afroasiatic-n-stems.html.

------, “‘So, Ancient Egyptian’s Actually a Lot Like English…’: A Case for Analyzing Some ‘Suffix Conjugation’ as Auxiliary Verbs like ‘Can,’ ‘Will,’ and ‘Have’” (21 September 2024 presentation in Columbia, Missouri, at the Sixth Annual Missouri Egyptological Symposium of the American Research in Egypt - Missouri Chapter), available at https://www.academia.edu/124165780/_So_Ancient_Egyptian_s_Actually_a_Lot_Like_English_A_Case_for_Analyzing_Some_Suffix_Conjugation_as_Auxiliary_Verbs_like_Can_Will_and_Have_.

------, “Egyptian Auxiliary Verbs as an Effect of Early State Formation?: Some Incipient Speculations on ‘Anciently Simplifying Egyptian’ and ‘Shallower Egyptian, Shallower Afroasiatic’ Hypotheses,” Workshop for Egyptian Historical Linguistics (13 November 2024), available at https://egyptianhistoricallinguistics.blogspot.com/2024/11/egyptian-auxiliary-verbs-as-effect-of.html.

Lameen Souag, “Restructured or Archaic? The Hunt for Shared Morphological Innovation Involving Egyptian,” in M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and Silvia Štubňová Nigrelli (eds.), Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic: Rethinking the Origins (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2023), 303-318

Andréas Stauder, “Egyptian Morphology in Afroasiatic Perspective,” in M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and Silvia Štubňová Nigrelli (eds.), Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic: Rethinking the Origins (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2023), 53-136.

Marijn van Putten, “The Berbero-Semitic adjective,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 87 (2024): 51-67.

David Wilson, “A Concatenative Analysis of Diachronic Afro-Asiatic Morphology” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2020).

Hiroshi Yoshino, “Some linguistic evidence supporting the participle origin of the sḏm-f verb-form” (revised version of an October 2014 presentation in Tokyo, at the 56^th Annual Conference of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan), available at https://www.academia.edu/14589888/_Poster_Some_linguistic_evidence_supporting_the_participle_origin_of_the_sDm_f_verb_form.