The Egyptian word for watermelon was borrowed from the south

Watermelon was well established in Egypt before the middle of the second millennium BCE, and the botanical remains say so. The word Egyptians used for the crop says something more. It was taken from Nilo-Saharan languages spoken upriver, south of Egypt, and the borrowing happened centuries before the earliest surviving specimens. Language keeps a record that dirt does not. A word crosses when people cross, which means knowledge of the crop reached Egypt earlier than any preserved seed can prove. The direction is the part worth holding onto. Egyptian borrowed from Nilo-Saharan, which places the crop in the hands of peoples to the south first and puts Egypt downstream in the cultural sense as well as the geographical one. Cattle keeping, sacral kingship and the older religion of the river travelled that same way, from the middle Nile northward. The watermelon on an Egyptian table was a Sudanese fruit that had been on the move for a very long time.

Jolly Beach sits on the west coast of Antigua, looking out over reefs and a productive stretch of shallow sea. Around 2000 BCE the people there were making sophisticated flint blades, which sets the site apart from the general run of early stone working in the islands. Their diet was wide. They took eight major species of mollusc, fish from shallow water, sea turtles and manatees. They also took far more land animals than the other coastal sites on Antigua from the same period, and that is the second thing marking Jolly Beach out. Better stone technology and a broader food base together suggest a place people used for longer stretches, or for more purposes, than the camps around it. Two settlements on one small island, a short walk apart, could run on different economies. Archaic populations in the Caribbean read the ground in front of them and adapted site by site.

Across West Africa, in patrilineal and matrilineal societies alike, women have long acted as independent economic and social agents, and the reason is structural. Marriage there did not make a woman a dependent of her husband. In the trades and occupations women carried on, they owned what their labour produced. The largest commercial operators in recent Nigerian history have frequently been women, and the record shows women as major traders in that region in earlier centuries too, Muslim women among them as well as followers of the older Niger-Congo religion. In the territories absorbed in the fourteenth century CE into the kingdom of Benin, the weavers of cotton and raffia cloth were women. That cloth was the main export of the state, through the slave trade era included, and the women who made it controlled access to it and took the profit from it. The wealth of a West African kingdom rested on the enterprise of women, over a wide area and many centuries.

Omotic languages are spoken today across southern Ethiopia. They were once spoken much further north. The evidence is a set of Omotic loanwords sitting inside the Agaw languages of northern Ethiopia, which can only have entered by contact, and the contact has to predate 2000 BCE. That puts Omotic speakers across a large stretch of the Ethiopian Highlands four thousand years ago, well beyond the territory their descendants hold. What moved them was the expansion of Cushitic speaking peoples, which pushed the Omotic communities southward over the following millennia until the map came to look as it does now. The words stayed behind. Borrowed vocabulary is durable in a way that settlements are not, and a handful of Omotic terms embedded in Agaw speech is the surviving trace of a linguistic geography that has otherwise been erased. Ehret works this way throughout, on the principle that languages remember migrations which left nothing at all in the ground.