Axumite civilisation
It is only with the Naqada II and III periods that any evidence of incursions of people from South West Asia can be distinguished. Possibly, the first irrigation and the first hieroglyphs. By then agricultural Egyptian Neolithic cultures had a long tradition of their own. Although earlier links can be shown to have existed between Badarian and the Western Desert, and even with Merimde and the Fayyum, there are no clear early links back into Palestine or Syria. To the north Afro-Asiatic languages are presumed to have crossed with the Neolithic revolution into Egypt, spreading from there into North Africa, and the Sudan, and thence across the Sahara to the area of Lake Chad. The early Bronze Age Proto-Indo-European religion (itself reconstructed), and the attested early Semitic gods would be presumed continuations of certain traditions of the late Neolithic. All six of the Afro-Asiatic families are found in the African continent, only one is found in the Middle East.
Afro-Asiatic linguistic diversity is far greater in Africa than it is in the Middle East by the ancient idea of the Mediterranean as the "sea in the middle" or the western Red Sea coast and the Sahara. Ancient Greek had a tonal pattern wherein, in isolated words, exactly one mora (unit of sound) was high, and the others low. The term mora, meaning "period of time" comes from Latin which was also used to translate the Greek word chronos (time) in its metrical sense. Tonal patterns vary widely across languages. In Europe, only Norwegian, Swedish, Scottish Gaelic, the Limburgish language (according to some a dialect of Dutch), Lithuanian, Serbian, Croatian, and some dialects of Slovenian possess tonality. Chinese is perhaps the most well-known of Tonal languages. Semitic speakers crossed from South Arabia back into Ethiopia and Eritrea, suggesting that the Semitic branch may have originated in Ethiopia. The Semitic, Berber, and Egyptian branches do not use tones phonemically such that tones like sign languages are not the physical segments themselves, but mental abstractions of them.
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Equally in the Horn of Africa, although Arabian influence has now been extended before the Axumite civilisation, most of the early Epi-paleolithic links seem to have happened in the other direction, from Africa into Arabia, early enough to have carried the Omotic and Cushitic languages into the important trading nation in northeastern Africa from India and the east to the Mediterranean. The difference between Chadic, Omotic, Cushitic and Semitic, were wider than that seen between any members of the Indo-European family and as wide as some of the differences seen within and between separate language families, for example, Indo-European and Altaic. At its height, Aksum controlled northern Ethiopia, Eritrea, northern Sudan, southern Egypt, Djibouti, western Somaliland, Yemen, and southern Saudi Arabia being powerful states of Persia, Rome, Aksum, and China. Aksum was previously thought to have been founded by Semitic-speaking Sabaeans who crossed the Red Sea from South Arabia (modern Yemen) as traders who lived in D'mt in Northern Ethiopia (8th and 7th centuries BC). Ge'ez, the ancient Semitic language of Ethiopia, is now known to not have derived from Sabaean as early as 2000 BC. The Aksumite people represented a mix of Cushitic and Semitic speaking people in Ethiopia's Aksum proper. |
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