Istwa Nou

Around the middle of the fourteenth millennium BCE the Mushabian culture became established in Sinai and the Negev, carrying tools and toolmaking techniques characteristic of the late Afian of Egypt and the cultures that followed it there. The archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef argued that the Mushabian merged with the Geometric Kebaran, a local Levantine tradition, and that the merger produced the Natufian around 13,000 BCE. The Natufian lasted until the middle of the tenth millennium BCE, when farming began in the Middle East, and its makers are generally taken to be the cultural forebears of the early Semitic speakers. Follow that chain backwards. Grain harvesting in the Ethiopian highlands before 16,000 BCE, the Afian in Egypt by 15,000 BCE, the Mushabian in Sinai, the Natufian in the Levant, then the first farming villages of the Middle East. Every step runs south to north. The culture textbooks treat as the source of the Neolithic has an African grandparent.

After the pre-proto-Semitic speakers left Egypt for the northeast, the ancestral Boreafrasian language stayed behind and then split in two. One branch became proto-Chado-Amazigh, the common ancestor of the Chadic and the Amazigh languages. The other ran down to ancient Egyptian. The westward departure of the Chado-Amazigh speakers fits the early Holocene, about ten thousand years ago, when a shift to wetter conditions let people settle across much of the northern and north-central Sahara, and the archaeology of that period shows them doing exactly that. The communities that remained on the Nile kept speaking the tongue that would become early ancient Egyptian several millennia later. Egyptian was the last branch of the Afrasian tree still growing in Egypt. It is what was left after seven thousand years of departures, northeast into the Levant and west into the grasslands, by a population that kept shedding daughter communities while staying on the river that would carry its name.