7000 to 5000 BCE · Africanspan
A religion crosses a language barrier six thousand years before writing
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Around the seventh or sixth millennium BCE an idea of the divine held by Nilo-Saharan speakers passed to their neighbours in the Horn of Africa, communities speaking early languages of the Cushitic branch of the Afrasian family. From there it moved again, into many of the Omotic-speaking peoples of the southern Ethiopian highlands. It displaced the older Afrasian henotheism, in which a clan gives its allegiance to a god of its own, almost everywhere it went. A few Omotic societies in the far southwestern highlands kept the older system, and their survival is how the change can be dated at all. The timing is what makes this worth recording. There were no written records, no long-distance trade routes, no missionaries and no empires. Religious systems were still crossing the deepest divisions in African linguistic geography and rebuilding the beliefs of whole regions. The tools that recover this are comparative linguistics, reconstructed vocabulary and the distribution of leftovers. Nothing else reaches that far back.
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