Women's authority in Africa did not depend on descent through mothers

A common argument holds that women lose standing once a society reckons descent through fathers. African evidence does not support it. Among the Bantu speaking societies of the African Great Lakes, where descent has run through the male line for the past two thousand years, women held recognised spheres of property and authority of their own. In West Africa, independent women traders and entrepreneurs have been prominent for as long as the record reaches, in societies speaking Niger-Congo languages, whether those societies traced descent through mothers or through fathers. The kinship system turns out to be the wrong variable. What travels with women's authority is a cultural tradition, one carried across a third of the continent by the Niger-Congo expansions and rooted in societies far older than any African state. Ehret's point cuts against the habit of treating the subordination of women as a natural cost of social complexity. In this part of the world it was a local custom, and other customs were available.

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.

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.

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.