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Presenting exerpts from Blench's 2010 paper. Any underscoring for emphasis is from myself.
Based on locations of old extinct Semitic and the apparent birthplace of spoken surviving Semitic languages, Blench sees the sub-phyla originating in the Levant or inland therefrom.
But he does so with a caveat overlooked by most others, Gurage in Ethiopia, which is otherwise unrelated to EthioSemitic and is more diverse and older than it.
The position of Gurage makes it impossible to dismiss Ethiopian origins for the very earliest forms of Semitic. Gurage enables a plausible scenario of bi-directional movement of the earliest forms of Semitic both up Nile to Ethiopia and down Nile on over to Sinai.
Probably the biggest booster for Ethiopian origins for all Semitic branches is Grover Hudson but Blench does not draw on Hudson's works for anything in this article.
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Abstract: The Semiticisation of the Arabian Peninsula and the problem of its reflection in the archaeological record
The Arabian Peninsula is entirely Semitic-speaking today, with Arabic dominant and the Modern South Arabian languages confined to a small area of the extreme south, along the coast of the Hadramaut, in Oman and on Socotra. However, Epigraphic South Arabian (Sabaean etc.) languages were once much more widespread and indeed their speakers migrated across the Red Sea to become the Ethio-Semitic languages. The Semitic languages are relatively well-attested compared with other branches of Afroasiatic and the lack of diversity within Modern South Arabian argues that their arrival cannot be of any great antiquity. Nonetheless, we have no clear idea of when Semitic languages became dominant in Arabia, nor by what mechanism the existing populations disappeared or were assimilated. The archaeology of Arabia and adjacent parts of Ethiopia has become significantly better known in the last few years and yet there is no clear correlate for this remarkable process. The paper examines the evidence and makes some proposals as to the nature and chronology of the semiticisation of the Arabian Peninsula, using principally lexical evidence from the Modern South Arabian languages.
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Semitic languages are part of the larger language phylum, Afroasiatic, which includes Berber, Ancient Egyptian and the languages of Ethiopia as well as the Chadic languages of Central Africa.
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The Semitic branch of Afroasiatic is well-known and described and has significant ancient attestations in the form of Eblaitic and other epigraphic languages of the Near East (Fronzaroli 1969; Ruibin 2008). By the standards of Afroasiatic, Semitic languages are extremely close to one another.
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Figure 2 shows the internal classification of Semitic, on which there is general agreement.
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One intriguing issue that remains unresolved is the position of the Gurage languages of Ethiopia; these are so different from Ethio-Semitic (i.e. Amharic etc.) and from each other that it is a real possibility that these are the relic Semitic languages, remaining in Ethiopia after the migration of the main core of Semites up the Nile (see for example lexical data in Leslau 1979).
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The South Semitic languages consist of three branches, Modern South Arabian (MSA), Epigraphic South Arabian (ESA) and Ethiosemitic. The MSA languages are a set of six languages, confined to a small area of the extreme south, along the coast of the Hadramaut, in Oman and on Socotra.
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The ESA languages are the so-called ‘Sabaean’ languages which are generally considered ancestral to modern South Semitic (Höfner 1943; Beeston 1984; Kogan & Korotayev 1997; Nebes & Stein 2004). These include Sabaean, Minaean and Qatabanian inscriptions and are generally dated to between the eighth century BC and the sixth century AD (Ricks 1982; Versteegh 2000).
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There is no real doubt that the ancestors of both epigraphic (ESA) and modern South Arabian (MSA) were languages spoken in the Near East rather than Ethiopia. But the date and processes whereby the speakers of these languages migrated and diversified are unknown. Apart from inscriptions that can be read, some contain evidence for completely unknown languages co-existing with ESA. Beeston (1981: 181) cites an inscription from Marib which begins in Sabaean but then switches to an unknown language. He mentions several other texts which have similar morphology (a final –k suffix) and which may represent an unknown non-Semitic language (or possibly a Nilo-Saharan language such as Kunama, for which such a feature would be typical).
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3. Evidence from ethnography and archaeology
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Semitic is a relatively late branching from Afroasiatic, as testified by the relative closeness of all Semitic languages. As a consequence, the dominance of Semitic in the Arabian peninsula is presumably comparatively recent. It must be the case that other quite different languages were spoken prior to Semiticisation several thousand years ago. There is no evidence as to the nature of these languages or their affiliation; ...
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The archaeology of Arabia shows it to have been inhabited for as much as 100,000 years (Bailey 2009), presumably by foraging populations for the great majority of that period. The coast of Arabia was early populated by aceramic fisher-foragers and during the 5th millennium BP there are signs of sedentarisation, both on the Tihama Plain (Durrani 2005) and in Ras el Hamra region of Oman (Biagi & Nisbet 2006). No traces of such populations remain today, although fishing remains an important subsistence strategy among coastal Arabs and the Soqotri (Naumkin 1988; Naumkin & Porxomovskij 1981). It is likely that they were assimilated by the incoming South Arabians and the possibility is that sedentarisation and the elaborated material culture that marks this is a sign of these early interactions.
Although stone tools provide abundant evidence for early foragers, there are few clues to the ethnolinguistic identity of their users, as Semitic languages are now dominant in Arabia. There is surprisingly little substrate vocabulary in MSA languages, providing few clues to the pre-Semitic populations. However, one possibility presents itself.
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They were reputed to ‘not look like’ Bedouin and to have a deep knowledge of the desert. They have been identified with the Selappayu of the Akkadian records (Postgate 1987). One of the links with the foraging past was their use of ‘desert kites’, gazelle traps, which are attested as early as 7000 BC (Helms & Betts 1987; Alsharekh 2006), but which were still in use in the twentieth century. So the Solubba may have represented the last remaining traces of the pre-Islamic populations of Arabia. Unfortunately, there seems to be no recent information on whether any still survive and whether their technical vocabulary of hunting or dog-breeding includes any distinctive lexemes.
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Western Asia was an important centre for livestock domestication, with goats, sheep and cattle all first attested archaeologically in this region (Zeder 2008). Livestock began to filter down into the Peninsula by 6th or 7th millennium BC (McCorriston & Martin 2009). The initial evidence is for cattle, but sheep and goats and possibly domestic donkeys followed soon after. The earliest site with clear evidence of domestic cattle is Manayzah in Eastern Yemen, which is dated to 6000 BC (McCorriston & Martin 2009). Shortly afterwards the nearby site of Shi’b Keshiya (mid fifth millennium BC) provides evidence for ritual assemblages of cattle skulls, as well as co-associated ovicaprine herding and continuing extensive hunting.
Phenotypic characterisations of cattle provide some evidence for the strata of breed types entering the Peninsula. The cattle in Arabia today are of two distinctive types; humped zeboid cattle of Indian origin and short-horned taurines resembling those of mainland Africa (Blench 1993). Cattle kept by the Soqotri and Jibbali peoples preserved the archaic taurine breeds until recently. Long-horned taurines are also represented in Ethiopian rock-paintings of the earliest period, so these may well have once been present in Arabia. The presence of African taurines argues that for some period, Ethiopian-type languages such as Cushitic may well have been present on the Arabian mainland. But this cannot now be established for certain, ...
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To judge by the linguistic affiliations of MSA, its ancestral speakers came from the north and ultimately the Near East. After the appearance of written records in the mid 3rd millennium BC, the Semitic-speaking Akkadians and Amorites were entering Mesopotamia from the deserts to the west, and were probably already present in places such as Ebla in Syria. The ancestors of MSA speakers thus could hardly have been foragers and must have been either cultivators or pastoralists at this period.
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Can linguistics be used to establish the identity of early pastoralists and should we correlate speakers of MSA languages with herding economies? A promising approach is the reconstruction of animal names; if we can establish the livestock species that reconstruct in South Arabian this will provide clues to pastoral practice.
4. Livestock names in South Semitic
If a radical transformation of the subsistence patterns of the Arabian Peninsula took place with the arrival of livestock, by examining the main terms for livestock species in South Semitic languages it should be possible to establish whether the connections are with the Near East or across the Red Sea. The following tables bring together the main names for livestock species, in both ESA and MSA.
[See the online paper for those tables.]
Camel. ... a mid-third millennium date is often put forward (Vogt 1994). Certainly by this period finds of camels buried in proximity to human graves begin and rapidly become common. Inferring true domestication may be problematic, and this may be as late as the first millennium BC, but the camel clearly played an important role in subsistence from the earlier period.
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Commentary: ... Although camel culture appears to be of some antiquity in the Horn of Africa (Blench 2006) the lexicon of camel terms appears to be quite distinct and not to be borrowed across the Straits of Hormuz.
Donkey. The wild ass, Equus asinus africanus, is indigenous to the African continent and formerly a chain of races or subspecies spread from the Atlas mountains in Morocco eastwards to Nubia, down the Red Sea and probably as far as the border of present-day Northern Kenya (Groves 1986; Haltenorth & Diller 1980:109; Blench 2000). A very small population still survives in a remote part of Eritrea, while a related species, the onager, was once common in the Arabian Peninsula. The donkey was domesticated from the African wild ass and studies of donkey mtDNA have shown that the wild ass was domesticated at least twice, some 5-7000 years ago (Beja-Pereira et al. 2004). Donkeys were used in the early Near East and are attested in most early Semitic languages except Eblaitic.
Commentary: [South Semitic terms for donkey] are almost unknown on the Ethiopian side of the Red Sea and may be late Arabic borrowings, although the Beja term for ‘zebra’ is perplexing and may be a recent application to a wild equid.
Cow, cattle. Cattle were domesticated twice, possibly three times, with the humped zeboids in India long separated from the humpless taurines of the Near East and North Africa (Loftus et al. 1994). Zebu were brought from India (possibly by sea) and cross-bred with taurines in both Arabia and East Africa, leaving only residual populations in isolated places without substantial introgression (Blench 1993). The zebu vanquished the humpless longhorns shown in rock-paintings in the Horn of Africa (e.g. Gutherz et al. 2003) and all but eliminated the humpless shorthorns which now survive only in residual populations in the Sheko valley in Ethiopia, among the Jibbali of Oman and on Soqotra island (Blench 1998). The long term presence of cattle on the African mainland opposite Arabia (for example at Nabta Playa where the wild status of the cattle is debated) means that we cannot be certain that an epigraphic citation refers to domestic cattle.
Goat. The goat, Capra hircus aegagrus, evolved 7 million years ago, but the first evidence of domestication is in the Euphrates river valley at Nevali Çori in Turkey at ca. 11,000 bp, with a possible second domestication shortly afterwards in the Zagros mountains in Iran.
Sheep. Ovis aries, were probably domesticated in Eastern Turkey by 11,000 bp (Zeder 2008). They can be divided into four main races; thin-tailed hair and wool sheep, fat-tailed and fat-rumped sheep (Blench 1993), but all these races derive from two maternal lines (as defined by mtDNA) in Central Asia (Hiendleder et al. 1998). The characteristic sheep of the Arabian peninsula is the fat-tailed sheep, mentioned in the Old Testament (Leviticus 3:9), where a sacrificial offering includes the tail fat of a sheep. Herodotos repeats the strange tale of the shepherds in Arabia who make carts to roll behind the sheep to prevent their tails from dragging on the ground.
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If one point merges clearly from the analysis of livestock names is that their connections are all to the Near East. Once late Arabic loanwords are discarded, Ethiosemitic livestock vocabulary is quite distinct from South Semitic and may point either to indigenous domestication (in the case of cattle and donkeys) or to diffusion from North Africa via the Nile Valley. The reason is almost certainly that the Ethiopian side of the Red Sea already had a parallel pastoral culture in place at a very early period and may even have exported some elements, such as taurine cattle, eastwards to Arabia. The seed agriculture of Ethiopia may have originated from the agricultural civilisations represented by ESA, but not the pastoral culture ancestral to MSA.
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The attractive environment in Arabia Felix also encourages settlement and crop production and speakers of a parallel branch of Semitic are also drawn south. These early cultivators speak the languages ancestral to Epigraphic South Arabian and look to the Near East for their crop repertoire. Around 3000 BP, speakers of ESA move west across the Red Sea and form the well-known kingdoms with whom the Egyptians traded (Boivin, Blench & Fuller 2009). They bring the plough and cereal agriculture to Ethiopia and also assimilate large areas of Cushitic and Omotic speaking peoples. Controversially, they may have encountered resident Semitic-speakers (the enset cultivating Gurage).
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It is proposed that this paper supplement the previously presented Islamic materials on Arabia and its populations' origins with evidence from the scientific disciplines of linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and zoology.
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Great on alTakruri so how is the study of Gurage of any importance to the origin of semetic.
You have brought up a good point about the gurage language. According to highland eritrean natives the gurage really come from eritrea a place called gura.
Many linguistic scholars fail to show the non-semetic words that have some how crept into arabic,hebrew,and aramaic as loan words of early origin.
I have always said from day one that Gurage,Tigrinia,Tigre,Sabean,Akkadian,Babylonian,Geez,Amharic,and Mahra are not fully Semetic languages they have Cushitic elements within them.
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quote:The attractive environment in Arabia Felix also encourages settlement and crop production and speakers of a parallel branch of Semitic are also drawn south. These early cultivators speak the languages ancestral to Epigraphic South Arabian and look to the Near East for their crop repertoire. Around 3000 BP, speakers of ESA move west across the Red Sea and form the well-known kingdoms with whom the Egyptians traded (Boivin, Blench & Fuller 2009). They bring the plough and cereal agriculture to Ethiopia and also assimilate large areas of Cushitic and Omotic speaking peoples. Controversially, they may have encountered resident Semitic-speakers (the enset cultivating Gurage).
Unbelievably absent minded of recent research. I must say that the Gurage idea is rather interesting but it's hard to simply gloss over clearly discredited ideas that are being promoted here. Does anyone bother to explore the mechanism by which a foreign group comes in, supplants an indigenous language, and builds their kingdoms for them?
In any event, no one ever addresses the epigraphic anomalies in Ethiopia it seems except the archaeologists. For instance:
quote:"There is no real doubt that the ancestors of both epigraphic (ESA) and modernn South Arabian (MSA) were languages spoken in the Near East rather than Ethiopia. But the date and processes whereby the speakers of these languages migrated and diversified are unknown. Apart from inscriptions that can be read, some contain evidence for completely unknown languages co-existing with ESA. Beeston (1981: 181) cites an inscription from Marib which begins in Sabaean but then switches to an unknown language. He mentions several other texts which have similar morphology (a final –k suffix) and which may represent an unknown non-Semitic language (or possibly a Nilo-Saharan language such as Kunama, for which such a feature would be typical)."
So he associates this unknown language possibly with Nilo-Saharan (which indeed is rather progressive) but can't bring himself to study the proto-Ge'ez inscriptions of pre-Askumite ESA and perhaps speculate that it might have belonged to something like Gurage (not necessarily Gurage)? Would a mingling of Sabaen and another Ethio-Semitic language not quickly create a new Semitic dialect [pidgin?] that would so quickly manifest its self in ESA?
Also, am I reading that correctly or does his dendrogram show Ethio-Semitic as deriving directly from MSA and not ESA (which is a sister group)? If so, then why associate the introduction of Ethio-Semitic with ESA?
Edit: Ok. Ehret (2011) tried to address this, stating that differences in dialect are to be expected if the south Arabian traders came from the coast and themselves had a different dialect than mainlanders in Yemen. He further states that archaic speech forms are often retained in written speech where they are not in oral.
^What I believe Ehret clearly over looks here is that these grammatical differences were found in epigraphic inscriptions that were from the same region of the Horn (Ethiopian highlands)! Some in pure Sabaean, and some already distinct from pure Sabaean and the distinct inscriptions are royal (pure Sabaen inscriptions are not) and are actually older than the pure Sabaen. Phillipson (2010).
^As alluded to though, I find it very interesting that Blench is willing to suggest that Nilo-Saharan may have been spoken across the red sea prior to Semitic expansion from the North.
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This in my opinion, is bad science used to form a pre-determined conclusion:
quote:Historical evidence points to a north-south spread of Semitic in Ethiopia. The Amharic term for plow, maräša, has been borrowed into all the main languages of Ethiopia. Barnett canvasses the idea of introductions of the plow from Arabia or Egypt 3,000–4,000 BP (Barnett, 1999: 24), but the linguistic evidence suggests a more recent date.
^See, this is when linguists like Ehret get into trouble with archaeologists. Linguistic reconstruction of population movements/cultural exchange is secondary to the reconstruction and analysis of the language its self. The former is what population geneticists and archaeologists do. Linguists are supposed to supplement them when applicable, not supersede their authority. Hence why Keita exerts the same caution:
quote:Circular reasoning in syntheses involving multiple disciplines has to be avoided. The criteria and methods for a given discipline usually have to be given equal weight, and their results should be considered independently before an effort at synthesis is made. For example, a hypothesis about the place of origin of a language family or phylum must be based on linguistic evidence and methods, not on DNA or craniofacial patterns. Likewise the place of origin of a particular genetic variant or lineage has to be based on genetic data, principles, and models, not on archaeological data. The locale of origin of a particular culture or archaeological industry is subject to analyses based on methods and theory that are specific to the relevant disciplines. The only exception to these “rules” is if a calculated date of origin of a genetic variant found in a given locale predates the existence of people in that place. Although the notion of population ties together both biology and culture broadly conceived, it cannot be claimed that continuity in one necessarily means continuity in another. If the question is about physical population migration, then the same conclusion reached from every discipline independently would seem to best support the claim (Rouse 1986). However, it cannot be said absolutely that there was no movement if all lines of evidence do not point in the same direction.
---Keita (2010)
^In Ehret's new book he even claims that the early proto-Ethio-Semitic speakers were not cultivators and that the indigenous Ethiopians owed little/nothing to these traders in terms of agricultural innovation. He says that the language was likely adopted by local Agaw as a lingua franca for trade across the Red Sea, with the Agaw absorbing the immigrant settlers and sustaining contacts across the Red Sea through marital relationships and language.
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I believe knowing who pre-Semitic speakers in Arabia is just as important in knowing where Semitic originated and how it got in Arabia.
"There is no real doubt that the ancestors of both epigraphic (ESA) and modernn South Arabian (MSA) were languages spoken in the Near East rather than Ethiopia. But the date and processes whereby the speakers of these languages migrated and diversified are unknown. Apart from inscriptions that can be read, some contain evidence for completely unknown languages co-existing with ESA. Beeston (1981: 181) cites an inscription from Marib which begins in Sabaean but then switches to an unknown language. He mentions several other texts which have similar morphology (a final –k suffix) and which may represent an unknown non-Semitic language (or possibly a Nilo-Saharan language such as Kunama, for which such a feature would be typical)."
Very fascinating, and I may add this is the first I've heard of this-- a non-Semitic language found in Saba. I agree with Sundjata that this author quite progressive for suggesting the early presence of another African language in Arabia that's not Afrasian. What about one that is?
quote:Originally posted by alTakruri: Western Asia was an important centre for livestock domestication, with goats, sheep and cattle all first attested archaeologically in this region (Zeder 2008). Livestock began to filter down into the Peninsula by 6th or 7th millennium BC (McCorriston & Martin 2009). The initial evidence is for cattle, but sheep and goats and possibly domestic donkeys followed soon after. The earliest site with clear evidence of domestic cattle is Manayzah in Eastern Yemen, which is dated to 6000 BC (McCorriston & Martin 2009). Shortly afterwards the nearby site of Shi’b Keshiya (mid fifth millennium BC) provides evidence for ritual assemblages of cattle skulls, as well as co-associated ovicaprine herding and continuing extensive hunting.
The earliest cattle culture in Arabia is known as the Circum-Arabian Nomadic Pastoral Complex or CANPC dubbed by archaeologist Jaris Yurins. Some scholars claim the ancestors of the CANPC to be the Harifians who settled northwest Arabia from Egypt during the Mesolithic.
quote:Phenotypic characterizations of cattle provide some evidence for the strata of breed types entering the Peninsula. The cattle in Arabia today are of two distinctive types; humped zeboid cattle of Indian origin and short-horned taurines resembling those of mainland Africa (Blench 1993). Cattle kept by the Soqotri and Jibbali peoples preserved the archaic taurine breeds until recently. Long-horned taurines are also represented in Ethiopian rock-paintings of the earliest period, so these may well have once been present in Arabia. The presence of African taurines argues that for some period, Ethiopian-type languages such as Cushitic may well have been present on the Arabian mainland. But this cannot now be established for certain, ...
If Nilo-Saharan could possibly have been spoken in Arabia I don't see why not Cushitic.
They were reputed to ‘not look like’ Bedouin and to have a deep knowledge of the desert. They have been identified with the Selappayu of the Akkadian records (Postgate 1987). One of the links with the foraging past was their use of ‘desert kites’, gazelle traps, which are attested as early as 7000 BC (Helms & Betts 1987; Alsharekh 2006), but which were still in use in the twentieth century. So the Solubba may have represented the last remaining traces of the pre-Islamic populations of Arabia. Unfortunately, there seems to be no recent information on whether any still survive and whether their technical vocabulary of hunting or dog-breeding includes any distinctive lexemes.
The Solubba are known as a low-status or outcast group in Arab society similar to the Akhdam and Sibyan peoples. I sometimes think that their black appearance may have something to do with their status but pictures and info I get from Dana and others of other black Arab groups with higher positions seem to discount that. The main factor in being an outcast tribe is having no ancestry from any of the alleged Arab ancestors either Adnan or Qahtan. These peoples are looked down on for simply having no 'Arab' ancestry however this certainly does no mean they are not Arabian, as all the evidence seems to point to them being very early residents of the Arabian peninsula.
This makes me think of all Arab legends and lore of "Perished Arabs" or Al-Ba'ida. This thread is a good place for Dana to lend us her knowledge of pre-Islamic Arabs like the Ad, Thamud, etc. who built early complexes in Arabia and the early archaeology of the region.
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This thread is for the scientific disciplines not more recountings of folklore. There are already countless threads of Muslim versions on pre-Islam Arabia.
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^ My point was about how much has science verified about the Arabian past and its folklore. What does the archaeology tell us? I myself am not familiar with ancient Arabian history other than the kingdoms of Arabia Felix.
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Do you have anything more on the Solubba? Appearance, etc?
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