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

[TheLand]

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.

That’s incredible and sad at the same time. I can already imagine the amount of kibir we would have had if that was the case. Does that also mean we probably wouldn’t have moved south to Somalia?

 

[Shimbiris]

That’s incredible and sad at the same time. I can already imagine the amount of kibir we would have had if that was the case. Does that also mean we probably wouldn’t have moved south to Somalia?

I think the Cushites in Egypt just stayed there and got absorbed. But who knows how many may have been pushed south. But it does seem apparent that the old original AA trio after Omotic left early were Cushitic-Semitic-Berber that appear to form a node. Semito-Berber then split and further split from each other with one going east and the other West and partly staying put perhaps whilst Cushitic remained until it was absorbed by the younger Egyptian branch.

To be honest, it's very blatant that Pre-dynastic and early Dynastic Egyptians are our forebears. Study Egyptian Y-DNA enough and you'll be shook at all the E-M78s, E-V22 (dominant Saho subclade) and so on.

These guys were Horners' paternal forebears and from looking at the old craniofacial studies and how nearly identical Somalis look to the Naqadan samples, I'd say all the "Natufian" and "IBM" we show in G25 is pretty much Pre-Egyptian speaking Egyptians who intermixed heavily with likely Nilo-Saharans in Sudan then came down to the Horn in waves.

 

[Maakhri2024]

@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

The cushitic / Somali word (culus علس ) is related to Hebrew word עמס (camas عمس ) .
L ↔ M ,
ʿls (cls ) ↔ ʿms (cms ) .
ʿms ( ع-م-س ) =ʿls ( ع-ل-س ) .

hebrew word עמס means : (noun) : load , burden .
(verb) :to load, carry, to carry a load .

Camoos the prophet ( عاموس النبي ) = culus / Culusow .

Amos (prophet) = Camoos the prophet​

Amos (/ˈeɪməs/; Hebrew: עָמוֹס ( camoos عاموس) – ʿĀmōs) was one of the Twelve Minor Prophets of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament.

 

[Midas]

I think the Cushites in Egypt just stayed there and got absorbed. But who knows how many may have been pushed south. But it does seem apparent that the old original AA trio after Omotic left early were Cushitic-Semitic-Berber that appear to form a node. Semito-Berber then split and further split from each other with one going east and the other West and partly staying put perhaps whilst Cushitic remained until it was absorbed by the younger Egyptian branch.

To be honest, it's very blatant that Pre-dynastic and early Dynastic Egyptians are our forebears. Study Egyptian Y-DNA enough and you'll be shook at all the E-M78s, E-V22 (dominant Saho subclade) and so on.

These guys were Horners' paternal forebears and from looking at the old craniofacial studies and how nearly identical Somalis look to the Naqadan samples, I'd say all the "Natufian" and "IBM" we show in G25 is pretty much Pre-Egyptian speaking Egyptians who intermixed heavily with likely Nilo-Saharans in Sudan then came down to the Horn in waves.

One thing that's confused me about the Nilo-Saharan component is that Shouldn't we have some west african ancestry then ? Since all Nilo-Saharan seem to have a west african component?

 

[Maakhri2024]

@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.

I think the word ( khn or kaahin) is related to animal sacrifice / slaughtering animals .
h ↔ w ,
khn ↔ kwn ,
kaahin ↔ kawaanle .
q ↔ k ,
y ↔ h ,
khn ↔ kwn are related to the somali word : qal (qalay ) or the somali word gooy / gooyin .

gooy verb means: to cut (down ~ off ~ up) .

A priest ( kaahin / kawaanle ) is a person who slaughters and sacrifices animals to the god .

kawaan verb. butcher , cut up (an animal),
kawaanle noun. butcher

 

[Maakhri2024]

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

Do you remember the prophet Moses when he escaped from Egypt after killing the Egyptian man, he fled east to the land of the nomads called
Midian / Midyan ( Medjai ) , where Moses spent forty years and married a woman from this nomadic people of Midian / Midyan ( Medjai ) !!!!

When Moses first came to the land of this nomadic people of Midian/Midyan, he encountered the girls of Shuaib / Jethro waiting for their turn to water their flocks after the shepherds finished their turn to water their flocks, then Moses helped the girls to water their flocks.

 

[NidarNidar]

One thing that's confused me about the Nilo-Saharan component is that Shouldn't we have some west african ancestry then ? Since all Nilo-Saharan seem to have a west african component?

It was a splinter group, there was nothing as Nilotes back then, the EA hg component was a splinter group that probably lived alongside the Nile as hunter-gathers, E-V12(E-V32)/E-V22 Cushites heavily intermarried with them, this is why you'll find A/B within cushites as some of the men were absorbed, while pre-dynastic Egyptian married more levant women.

There is some dodgy selective sampling going on in those digs in Egypt, the older wall reliefs clearly show people who look Cushitic, this was probably due to early mixing between groups but as time went by, you can see the levant influence show through the maternal line.

 

[Midas]

It was a splinter group, there was nothing as Nilotes back then, the EA hg component was a splinter group that probably lived alongside the Nile as hunter-gathers, E-V12(E-V32)/E-V22 Cushites heavily intermarried with them, this is why you'll find A/B within cushites as some of the men were absorbed, while pre-dynastic Egyptian married more levant women.

There is some dodgy selective sampling going on in those digs in Egypt, the older wall reliefs clearly show people who look Cushitic, this was probably due to early mixing between groups but as time went by, you can see the levant influence show through the maternal line.

Yeah it's obvious that there are discrepancies in the sampling. I mean proto semetic dates back to 4500 b.c . People in the Levant and arabia were clearly speaking something before semetic. Yet all of them were absorbed and no traces remain.

But on the EA hunter gathers . the fact that they have no west african ancestry means that in late predynastic/early dynastic eygpt maybe around 3000 b.c . West african ancestry hadn't entered the nile Valley. But that isn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things consider how far back proto nioltiic and our splinter group spilt from ancestral east african. It seems odd that even as recently as 3000 b.c that west african ancestry wasn't present in the region.

 

[Shimbiris]

One thing that's confused me about the Nilo-Saharan component is that Shouldn't we have some west african ancestry then ? Since all Nilo-Saharan seem to have a west african component?

Why are you assuming that Nilo-Saharans today would be identical genetically to NS people from like 5,000-10,000ybp? Are you identical to Cushites from that time period? To be honest, the amount of Yoruba-like admixture in Dinkas isn't even that high in the big scheme things. Not even above 1/4th of their ancestry or even at 1/4th, if I'm not mistaken. Even less if you look at groups like the Gumuz.

And contrary to @NidarNidar, I think we probably really are descended from NS speakers simply because it's absolutely clear NS speakers were deep into Sudan and making contact with Cushites as far back 9,000 years ago. Ehret firmly established that even before the split with NC, Cushites were making contact with Saharan speakers. I think it's perfectly possible that Sudan was always an NS-Cushitic dancing ground and that they're the source of our dominant non-Eurasian component and our Y-DNA A-M13 as well most of our L markers.

The idea that our SSA comes from some splinter HG group makes little sense. Look at how low Mota type ancestry is among modern Cushites and Ethiosemites:


That's what likely would have happened if we were descended from Sudanese HGs, not being as much as 50% or more Dinka-like. Our SSA ancestors were probably NS speaking pastoralists themselves, hence why they were able to demographically compete with Cushites and eventually even linguistically overtake them in Upper Nubia as well as Lower Nubia to some extent in time.

If they were HGs our pastoral and agro-pastoral ancestors would have likely outnumbered them so much that we'd likely be overwhelmingly MENA today.

 

[Midas]

Why are you assuming that Nilo-Saharans today would be identical genetically to NS people from like 5,000-10,000ybp? Are you identical to Cushites from that time period? To be honest, the amount of Yoruba-like admixture in Dinkas isn't even that high in the big scheme things. Not even above 1/4th of their ancestry or even at 1/4th, if I'm not mistaken. Even less if you look at groups like the Gumuz.

And contrary to @NidarNidar, I think we probably really are descended from NS speakers simply because it's absolutely clear NS speakers were deep into Sudan and making contact with Cushites as far back 9,000 years ago. Ehret firmly established that even before the split with NC, Cushites were making contact with Saharan speakers. I think it's perfectly possible that Sudan was always an NS-Cushitic dancing ground and that they're the source of our dominant non-Eurasian component and our Y-DNA A-M13 as well most of our L markers.

The idea that our SSA comes from some splinter HG group makes little sense. Look at how low Mota type ancestry is among modern Cushites and Ethiosemites:


That's what likely would have happened if we were descended from Sudanese HGs, not being as much as 50% or more Dinka-like. Our SSA ancestors were probably NS speaking pastoralists themselves, hence why they were able to demographically compete with Cushites and eventually even linguistically overtake them in Upper Nubia as well as Lower Nubia to some extent in time.

If they were HGs our pastoral and agro-pastoral ancestors would have likely outnumbered them so much that we'd likely be overwhelmingly MENA today.

It was less that I thought they were identical. But more that I assumed the west african ancestry we find in Ns speakers goes deep and would have been present in the region millenia before we left.

To be honest I'm so confused about how this works. Up until recently my assumption was that we were like 90%+ cushitic and that early cushtic people looked roughly like what people in the horn of africa do now with Somalis being the closest approximation. With the possible migration of leavantines to the Nile causing the region to shift more eurasian.

 

[Shimbiris]

@Samu

What's funny about the post? Did I err somewhere?

It was less that I thought they were identical. But more that I assumed the west african ancestry we find in Ns speakers goes deep and would have been present in the region millenia before we left.

To be honest I'm so confused about how this works. Up until recently my assumption was that we were like 90%+ cushitic and that early cushtic people looked roughly like what people in the horn of africa do now with Somalis being the closest approximation. With the possible migration of leavantines to the Nile causing the region to shift more eurasian.

I don't think the West-African admixture is new, no. You can kinda tell through Sudani aDNA (Y-DNA and mtDNA) that the earlier Sudanese people in places as far north as Wadi Halfa seemed a more pure "Nilotic" strain.

Then what seems to have happened—from the picture the physical anthropology and uniparental ancient DNA paint—is that waves of E-M35 carrying people from the North who were basically somewhere on the admixture cline between Neolithic Anatolians (most of our Eurasian mtDNA markers) and Ancestral North-Africans ("SSA" M35 source in Maghreb) came in from Egypt and intermixed with them to create the earliest Cushites of the region whom we can probably safely tie to the Ta-Seti culture and the later Wawat, Medjay and Kerma cultures:

 

[Maakhri2024]

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

The uniliteral phonogram "𓅓" in Egyptian hieroglyphs represents
the sound " m " and is depicted as an owl .

in Somali we call an owl ( guumeys ) .
m ↔ g ,
j is german y ,


so “ medjai / medjay ” will become “ gedjai / gedjay ”.

medjai / medjay → gedjai / gedjay → geeddi .

---------------------------------------------------------------------

d ↔ sh ,
-ka / -ga Somali masculine definite suffix .
-ga ↔ n / m .

medjai / medjay + -ga ( meedyaan ) → gedjai / gedjay + -ga → gaashaani .

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Midian (/ˈmɪdiən/; Hebrew: מִדְיָן Mīḏyān; Arabic: مَدْيَن, romanized: Madyan; Ancient Greek: Μαδιάμ, Madiam;[a] Taymanitic: 𐪃𐪕𐪚𐪌 MDYN).

d ↔ s ,
MDYN ( Meedyaan ) = GSYN ( Geesiyaal ) .
Geesi : a hero , a brave man .
Geesiyaal : heroes , brave men .
-------------------------------------------------------------

MDYN ( Midyaan ) = GDYN ( Geeddiyaal ) .
geeddi : a traveler .
Geeddiyaal : travelers .​

 

[Step a side]

@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:



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.

1) So we started our migration from the Nile towards the Horn and Great Lake regions around 1500 BCE? It makes sense because it’s around this time when we see the earliest pastoralists in Kenya/Tanzania which includes our E-Z813 relative Cole I8874

Table - PMC

How food production first entered eastern Africa ~5000 years ago and the extent to which people moved with livestock is unclear. We present genome-wide data from 41 individuals associated with Later Stone Age, Pastoral Neolithic (PN), and Iron Age ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

haplotree.info - ancientdna.info. Map based on All Ancient DNA v. 2.07.26.

haplotree.info - ancientdna.info. Map based on All Ancient DNA v. 2.07.26.

2) If LEC were on the Nile (Lower Nubia) back in the days then who were the Puntites that traded with the Egyptians on the Red Sea? Were they HEC? South Cushites?

 

[Abdirazaq]

I think the Cushites in Egypt just stayed there and got absorbed. But who knows how many may have been pushed south. But it does seem apparent that the old original AA trio after Omotic left early were Cushitic-Semitic-Berber that appear to form a node. Semito-Berber then split and further split from each other with one going east and the other West and partly staying put perhaps whilst Cushitic remained until it was absorbed by the younger Egyptian branch.

To be honest, it's very blatant that Pre-dynastic and early Dynastic Egyptians are our forebears. Study Egyptian Y-DNA enough and you'll be shook at all the E-M78s, E-V22 (dominant Saho subclade) and so on.

These guys were Horners' paternal forebears and from looking at the old craniofacial studies and how nearly identical Somalis look to the Naqadan samples, I'd say all the "Natufian" and "IBM" we show in G25 is pretty much Pre-Egyptian speaking Egyptians who intermixed heavily with likely Nilo-Saharans in Sudan then came down to the Horn in waves.

If Cushitic really was originally part of the Nile languages, then at what point does Nubian related acestreal languages come into the picture? Were they always there fighting for dominance with the cushitic languages? Did they arrive in the Nile after new kingdom Egypt dominated the Kushites? Or maybe sometime during the napata and meroitic periods making the languages spoken at that time period ancestrally Nubian languages, or maybe the oldest attested language in the Nubian language family (Old Nubian) is the first one to arrive into the Nile.

Also where did the Nubian languages originate if they came after cushitic languages? Further south down the Nile? Or from the western deserts? It all seems so incomprehensive and incongruent when studying the Nile languages and their origins, there needs to be more researchers working on this mystery to reveal the truth.

 

[Thegoodshepherd]

@Shimbiris Given that we can safely assume that Kerma was Cushitic (Kadruka), why can't we presume continuity down to the Kingdom of Kush/Meroe?

 

[Abdirazaq]

@Shimbiris Given that we can safely assume that Kerma was Cushitic (Kadruka), why can't we presume continuity down to the Kingdom of Kush/Meroe?

Probably due to there being a big time gap and no clear connections. Karma kingdom ends roughly 1500 BCE with the Egyptians taking over for 500 years, after that we get a quite period 1000-800 BCE but an new powerful kingdom emerges which lasts from roughly 800 BCE to 300 AD, this new powerful kingdom doesn't have clear connections to Kerma so its not clear if they're the exact same people, it could be direct descendants, a cousin population or a completely different group of people, hence you can't assume this new Kingdoms tounge was cushitic if Kerma was indeed Cushitic too.

You also have the attested Old Nubian language from 700 AD and onwards, essentially being the oldest attested language from the Nile reigon below Egypt, this naturally leads to conclusions that the meroitic language was also related to Old Nubian but the evidence isn't conclusive for that yet, the meroitic language is barely deciphered, maybe AI can crack the code in the future.

 

[Thegoodshepherd]

Probably due to there being a big time gap and no clear connections. Karma kingdom ends roughly 1500 BCE with the Egyptians taking over for 500 years, after that we get a quite period 1000-800 BCE but an new powerful kingdom emerges which lasts from roughly 800 BCE to 300 AD, this new powerful kingdom doesn't have clear connections to Kerma so its not clear if they're the exact same people, it could be direct descendants, a cousin population or a completely different group of people, hence you can't assume this new Kingdoms tounge was cushitic if Kerma was indeed Cushitic too.

You also have the attested Old Nubian language from 700 AD and onwards, essentially being the oldest attested language from the Nile reigon below Egypt, this naturally leads to conclusions that the meroitic language was also related to Old Nubian but the evidence isn't conclusive for that yet, the meroitic language is barely deciphered, maybe AI can crack the code in the future.

It’s a ~700 year gap. Quite long but short enough that I think the Bayesian assumption should be continuity. Assume continuity and if there is evidence to the contrary move away from that.

I find it strange that we are assuming that there was a massive discontinuity in the 700 years with no evidence.

 

[Abdirazaq]

It’s a ~700 year gap. Quite long but short enough that I think the Bayesian assumption should be continuity. Assume continuity and if there is evidence to the contrary move away from that.

I find it strange that we are assuming that there was a massive discontinuity in the 700 years with no evidence.

Sure, but then you have to ask the question as when Nubian languages arrived into the Nile region.

 

[Midas]

700 years is actually more than enough time for change to happen. Espciaally when it was way easier to replace people since no real empire existed. i mean Look at how many groups existed in europe in the year 400.a.d to 1100 a.d . That dont exist anymore
( khazars,bulgars, peckchengs,avars, huns,goths)