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.

 

[TheLand]

@Araabi @Shimbiris I guess you guys didn’t fully read through this document. One of the names of the women listed on the sarcophagus is speculated to be related to the cushitic word ‘culus’(heavy). It reminded me of the name ‘Culusow’ and I could not stop laughing

 

[Shimbiris]

@Araabi @Shimbiris I guess you guys didn’t fully read through this document. One of the names of the women listed on the sarcophagus is speculated to be related to the cushitic word ‘culus’(heavy). It reminded me of the name ‘Culusow’ and I could not stop laughing
View attachment 354049

 

[TheLand]

Apparently ‘culus’ means heavyweight or respected person in Cushitic. Her name would be the equivalent of ‘cuslaayad’

 

[TheLand]

@Shimbiris @Maakhri2024 Interestingly, one of the other names mentioned in this document has a Cushitic root of khn or kahan as they speculate. Apparently it means to love. They say it is not in the east cushitic branch but the speculated forms of it contains a name that is strikingly similar to the Somali name ‘Kaahin’. I always wondered what it meant, and perhaps this is a possible answer.

 

[TheLand]

Here they seem to be connecting lowland East Cushitic and perhaps Beja (Cushitic in general) with the land of Punt.

 

[Shimbiris]

Here they seem to be connecting lowland East Cushitic and perhaps Beja (Cushitic in general) with the land of Punt.
View attachment 354051

I think ultimately what he's noticing is that the Wawat (C-Group) and Kerman cultures along the Nile were East Cushites around this time. ~2500-1500 BCE, I would say. Whereas the Medjay (Pan-Grave) culture of Atbai and the Red Sea Hills, in my opinion, was probably always North-Cushitic speaking.

What eventually then happened was East Cushites got overtaken in Upper and Lower Nubia overtime, like they supposedly were in Egypt by Egyptian speakers, by waves of NS speakers and North Cushitic speakers where Lower Nubia became NC and later an NC-NS mix and Upper Nubia became principally NS speaking, unless Meroitic wasn't NS then the NS dominance took a bit more time.

Those who weren't assimilated were pushed southwards into the Horn sometime after ~1500 BCE and before 200 BCE (contact between Somali speakers and ancient Yemenis) and brought with them new agro-pastoral techniques and technology, some new ancestry, Y-DNA Z813 among Somalis and who knows what other clades, and a whole whammy of Egyptian cultural influences including FGM.

That's my current thinking anyway.

I think it's interesting that the affinities in that name seem Lowland East Cushitic (LEC) leaning. May very well have been the case that Wawat was mostly LEC and Kerma was mostly HEC given the substratum in Nobiin being HEC.

 

[TheLand]

For some strange reason these Cushites seemed to have high status at that time in Egypt too, not just Medjai ‘desert police’

 

[TheLand]

I think ultimately what he's noticing is that the Wawat (C-Group) and Kerman cultures along the Nile were East Cushites around this time. ~2500-1500 BCE, I would say. Whereas the Medjay (Pan-Grave) culture of Atbai and the Red Sea Hills, in my opinion, was probably always North-Cushitic speaking.

What eventually then happened was East Cushites got overtaken in Upper and Lower Nubia overtime, like they supposedly were in Egypt by Egyptian speakers, by waves of NS speakers and North Cushitic speakers where Lower Nubia became NC and later an NC-NS mix and Upper Nubia became principally NS speaking, unless Meroitic wasn't NS then the NS dominance took a bit more time.

Those who weren't assimilated were pushed southwards into the Horn sometime after ~1500 BCE and before 200 BCE (contact between Somali speakers and ancient Yemenis) and brought with them new agro-pastoral techniques and technology, some new ancestry, Y-DNA Z813 among Somalis and who knows what other clades, and a whole whammy of Egyptian cultural influences including FGM.

That's my current thinking anyway.

I think it's interesting that the affinities in that name seem Lowland East Cushitic (LEC) leaning. May very well have been the case that Wawat was mostly LEC and Kerma was mostly HEC given the substratum in Nobiin being HEC.

I think they are also clearly saying ‘Medjay’ didn’t just mean todays ‘Beja’ since a lot of these names are east Cushitic as you say but not necessarily found in Beja. Of course, it’s also possible that Beja today is not as ‘pure’ of a Cushitic language due to its contacts with other cultures which is also postulated by the authors. Apparently they recreated pro-cushitic root words that they expected to find in Beja but they were not there, indicating something may have changed the language.

 

[Midas]

For some strange reason these Cushites seemed to have high status at that time in Egypt too, not just Medjai ‘desert police’
View attachment 354052

Fascinating. It seems like this "land of the gods" moniker" might have more to it than symbolism from punt being the source of incense

 

[TheLand]

Fascinating. It seems like this "land of the gods" moniker" might have more to it than symbolism from punt being the source of incense

As in, the role that these Cushites seem to play in Egyptian society?

 

[Shimbiris]

I think they are also clearly saying ‘Medjay’ didn’t just mean todays ‘Beja’ since a lot of these names are east Cushitic as you say but not necessarily found in Beja. Of course, it’s also possible that Beja today is not as ‘pure’ of a Cushitic language due to its contacts with other cultures which is also postulated by the authors. Apparently they recreated pro-cushitic root words that they expected to find in Beja but they were not there, indicating something may have changed the language.

I know Medjay didn't just mean Atbai/Beja people. Just prefer it to Pan-Grave as a name for that culture because, originally, the AEs used it to describe people specifically from Atbai. C-Group and Pan-Grave sound like such technical and lame names. I prefer Wawat and Medjay, though I admit something better than Medjay maybe in order. Why does Kerma get to have all the spice?

 

[TheLand]

I know Medjay didn't just mean Atbai/Beja people. Just prefer it to Pan-Grave as a name for that culture because, originally, the AEs used it to describe people specifically from Atbai. C-Group and Pan-Grave sound like such technical and lame names. I prefer Wawat and Medjay, though I admit something better than Medjay maybe in order. Why does Kerma get to have all the spice?

Do we even know what Medjay mean etymologically? It seems to mean desert dweller perhaps - I wonder if it has a similar root to the Somali ‘miiyi’…

 

[Shimbiris]

Do we even know what Medjay mean etymologically? It seems to mean desert dweller perhaps - I wonder if it has a similar root to the Somali ‘miiyi’…

That would be wild if so. Sequel to my Futuh post someday; "A Re-reading of Ancient Egyptian texts: Medjay as Reer Miyi" kekekkekeke.

 

[TheLand]

That would be wild if so. Sequel to my Futuh post someday; "A Re-reading of Ancient Egyptian texts: Medjay as Reer Miyi" kekekkekeke.

Another interesting tidbit…incredible

 

[Midas]

As in, the role that these Cushites seem to play in Egyptian society?

Yeah seems like they might have had a significant role.

 

[Midas]

I'm still pinning my hopes on the fact that Somalis likley had writing in the preislamic period. And given the fact that writing has always belongs to our relegious class in somali society and that we've never really had some large bureaucratic state makes it more likely that any manuscripts we find will either be relegious or literary in nature instead of some tax receipt. It's also unlikely to be Christian since Christianity didn't seem to be widespread in somalia. Well finally know if there's some connection between cushtic relegious beliefs and anicnet eygpt or if they preserved any historical memories of it.

 

[Shimbiris]

Another interesting tidbit…incredible
View attachment 354053

It's kind of weird to think that if the Egyptian speakers hadn't encroached upon and usurped the prior EC speakers, an East Cushitic language would have been among the earliest two recorded languages in Human history alongside Sumerian.