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is chapter revises C. Ehret, “social Transformation in the Early History of the Horn of Africa: Linguistic Clues to developments of the Period 500 bC to Ad 500,” in T. bayene (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, vol. 1 (Addis Ababa: institute of Ethiopian studies , 1988), 639–651; used by permission. 170 7 social Transformation in the Horn of Africa, 500 bCE to 500 CE e establishment of semitic languages in the Horn of Africa during the last millennium bCE accompanied a major set of social historical transformations. Languages new to an area do not displace other languages from use for trivial reasons of taste or fashion, but normally because the social formations associated with the new languages are spreading at the expense of previous social formations. e patterns of relationship among the Ethiosemitic languages show that two focal points of spread of the new tongues soon arose, the one much neglected by historians being in probably the upper Awash river watershed. e patterns of word borrowing in the languages require that the semitic speakers were initially a tiny minority and indicate that they added little if any new technological or agricultural knowledge to that already present on the south side of the red sea. e establishment and spread of Ethiosemitic languages among the populations of the Horn cannot be attributed thus to technological advantage. rather, it seems probable that the semitic speakers heldthekeygroundinthespreadofnewkindsofrelationsofproductionorexchange. bUiLdinG THE LinGUisTiC sTrATiGrAPHy e chronological framework for this reconstruction of early history in the northern Ethiopian Highlands is provided by the subclassification of the Ethiosemitic Social Transformation in the Horn of Africa 171 languages. e combined findings of morphological and lexical reconstruction support the scheme of relationships shown in figure 10. (e names of individual languages appear in boldface.) is classification rests on the work of robert Hetzron, who built his conclusions on identifying shared innovations in morphology.1 His results agree broadly, and oen in detail as well, with the evidence of lexicostatistics2 (see appendix 4) and shared lexical innovation (see appendix 5). From this evidence, plus that of loanwords and linguistic geography,3 it is possible to chart the early historical periods and locations of Ethiosemitic-speaking societies in the Horn of Africa. is history begins with the Proto-Ethiosemiticspeakingcommunity .4 eevidenceofloanwordsintheProto-Ethiosemiticlanguage allows us to resolve a number of issues in the history of the earliest Ethiosemiticspeaking community. is evidence helps us pinpoint the location of this society. it reveals something of the demographic impact of this new society on the northern Horn, and it gives us an indication of the length of time this society existed as a single societal grouping. 172 Chapter 7 LoCATinG And dATinG THE EArLiEsT ETHiosEMiTiC CoMMUniTiEs e Proto-Ethiosemitic language can be shown, by the simple application of the standard fewest-moves principle of linguistic-historical inference, to have come from the Arabian side of the red sea. All the rest of the semitic languages, at the earliest periods from which we have direct knowledge, were spoken in other parts of the Arabian Peninsula and farther north, in the Levant and Mesopotamia. e center of diversity of the deep branchings of semitic can be shown decisively to lie in the Levant, and the origin of semitic as a whole traced back to about 6,000 years ago in that region.5 e Ethiosemitic languages, in contrast, form a subgroup of one of the deep branches, south semitic. e origin region of the settlers who brought the Proto-Ethiosemitic language across the red sea can be pinned down even more closely, to yemen in particular. Proto-Ethiosemitic was a dialect of a language, or a cluster of closely related dialects, spoken in yemen in the late second and the first millennia bCE. is language is conventionally called Epigraphic south Arabian, from the fact that our documents in this language come from inscriptions. A major loanword set in the Proto-Ethiosemitic language reveals that the formative period of a distinct Proto-Ethiosemitic community took place on the African side of that sea. because the particular source language of the loanwords belonged to the Agäw branch of Cushitic (see appendix 5)—the ancient territories of which extended from the northern fringe of the Ethiopian Highlands south to Lake Tana— we can argue that the speakers of Proto-Ethiosemitic established their early settlements in the northern parts of the Ethiopian Highlands.6 is placement of the Proto-Ethiosemitic speakers is further con...

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