ResearchGate: Beja and Cushitic Languages in Middle Egyptian Texts. Nile Cushitic is East Cushitic

[Nilotic]

Did they not inherit any old aloadian court tradition? The way sennar is described with this new merchant elite emerging and how welathy it is makes me wonder what the hell happned to the old aloadian elite ? View attachment 353940

The Funj didn't even seem to mention let alone show regard for the preceding kingdoms or their traditions. I'll have to read up further on the Funj, but I've been almost entirely fixated on the history of my kin -- the Nilotes...

..I was pleased to find out that my people kept the Turks at bay for half a century; that we defeated the British and expelled them from the South -- before their eventual return; and defeated the so called Mahdists after they attempted to enslave the Dinka.



I'll do research on other Nilo-Saharan groups

 

[Shimbiris]

@Xareen

My apologies, walaalkiis. I was pretty absurdly sleep deprived last night and not thinking straight. I got several of the dates weirdly mixed up.

Meroitic is far too late of course to be anything we were associated with as I pointed out last night given that Somalis' ancestors would have been along the Somali coast by at least ~200 BCE.

~300 BCE is Meroitic's earliest attestation and its presence probably predates that by at least a few hundred years since before that Nubians were utilizing AE for writing and keeping their own language a spoken one. I personally think Meroitic is to be associated with the whole of the Kushite Period but who knows. Is it Cushitic? Maybe. Wouldn't be surprised if not. Like I said, the very small number of words we do have appear Cushitic but it's entirely possible they're just hold overs from the era prior and they were NS speakers like the later Nobiin who usurped them.

I think you are in fact on the money and the Nile Cushitic / EC presence is to be associated with cultures such as the C-Group, Pan-Grave and Kerma. In fact, I'd say these cultures' timelines like up the best because whenever I run models all the post-Neolithic MENA in Somalis and other Horners seems very much Yemeni-related and not Ancient Egyptian meaning our ancestors were, if they still were, experiencing gene flow from Egypt at a time prior to it becoming significantly Iran-Chalcolithic admixed which mostly dates to around Middle and New Kingdoms:

I've been told by some academics in the know that I'm in contact with that Old Kingdom samples basically look ancient "North-African" with very little if any Iran-Chalcolithic type ancestry but also very little SSA (proto-Nilotic). I take this to mean they probably looked like some population on a continuum between Iberomaurusians and Natufians. So there would probably be a fair amount of "SSA" type ancestry in them but just the "Ancestral North African" kind that makes Iberomaurusians cluster like pseudo-Horners and is found all over the prehistoric Middle East like in Neolithic Anatolians to some degree (10%, I hear). But all in all I'd be surprised if any Ancient Egyptians outside of Upper Egyptians from areas bordering Lower Nubia like Aswan and Luxor were anything more than 10-20% "SSA" in total. I really can't wait to see these Old Kingdom samples, though. The way they're described... they may prove an excellent proxy for Horners' non-Arabian MENA side.

Copt-like folks seem to start appearing during the Middle Kingdom when these academics say you start seeing a fair amount of "BedouinB" type ancestry (better represented by Jordan-Early-Bronze-Age samples) setting in which probably marks large scale influxes of Semites like the Hyksos intermixing with the previous Egyptians.

Also, I really wouldn't make too much of how Masris looked in those murals. I get the sense that Ancient Egyptians were propagandists and exaggerated physical types to differentiate political groups:



Besides, we have depictions like this from some of the earliest dynasties:

View attachment 215225

Circa 2613–2494 BCE​

View attachment 215226

Circa 2600-2400 BCE​

Look incredibly like modern Egyptians, to be honest.

But anyway, we're not unrelated to Ancient Egyptians. Like half of our prehistoric ancestry seems to come from prehistoric Egypt, we're Afro-Asiatic speakers like them and seem to share many historical customs and cultural features with them such as even the unfortunate practice of FGM and our early Cushitic speaking ancestors also seem to have had some early trade contact with them, not to mention the last 2000-3,000 years of extensive trade contact. For whatever it's also worth, our Cushitic cousins the Beja/North-Cushites have been rolling with these guys for a long, long time doing anything from serving as an early elite force in the Egyptian military (Medjay) to at some point even having a Beja/Blemmye King apparently ruling over Luxor and seeming to be the predominant force in Lower Nubia:



Geeljires should satisfy themselves at that and not indulge in Hotepism.

And given that Egypt only begins to conquer and possibly colonize Nubia during the New Kingdom, the dates line-up too well with when the C-Group, Pan-Grave and Kerma periods all conclude at around 1500 BCE. And it's between this time and before it that evidence of a presence in Nubia shows itself like our E-Z813 (~2300 BCE), cultural influences from Egypt like FGM (~1900 BCE) and the supposed substrate in AE (pre-3000 BCE).

I think by the Kushite Period all the ECs who are in the Horn now's ancestors were probably gone. If Meroitic or anything along the Nile, Eastern Desert and red sea hills was EC after 1500-1000 BCE, then these are now extinct groups we most likely have no ancestral links to. That's my current thinking anyway.

The final needed piece of the puzzle is having a firm understanding of the timing for East-Cushitic diversification like when LEC and HEC formed as distinct subbranches so that we understand the time-frame for HEC to have possibly been along the Nile. Ehret told me ages ago that EC unity goes back to about 2000 BCE. I think Somali-Oromo unity by 1000 BCE (not sure on this one and if I'm misremembering) and if that's true then it doesn't, for now, shake things up too much as it means HEC formed sometime between 1000 BCE and 2000 BCE, right in the middle of that general C-Group, Kerma and Pan-Grave time-period.

 

[Shimbiris]

@TheLand

Waryaa, read my latest post. I was on some shit (bad sleep) when I was We-Wuz Meroitics-ing. Kekekekeke.