The Oldest Berber Text(s)? Egyptian Evidence for the Ancient Libyan Language(s)
Silvestri, Jason P.
The Oldest Berber Text(s)? Egyptian Evidence for the Ancient Libyan Language(s) - 2024.
47
The Ancient Libyans, the protohistorical inhabitants of North Africa, west of the Nile, are long assumed to have been ancestral to historical and modern Berber groups now indigenous to the region. Though many theories have circulated in recent years as to the linguistic identities of these people(s), few have consulted a small but important dataset of Ancient Libyan personal names, ethnonyms, loanwords, and even texts found in Pharaonic Egyptian textual records in the hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts. Examination of these, often brief and isolated, Ancient Libyan words in light of modern Berber languages, suggests that speakers of a para-Berber or early Berber language entered within the realm of Egyptian interaction sometime in the late 2nd millennium BCE, as best attested on pQeheq, a very fragmentary Qeheq-language magical text now in the collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin. Here the text, which may be the oldest known Berber-language (or at least non-Egyptian and non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic language) text, and the Qeheq language’ potential affiliation with the Berber family within Afro-Asiatic is presented, alongside a linguistic history of interactions between Egyptians and Ancient Libyans.
The Oldest Berber Text(s)? Egyptian Evidence for the Ancient Libyan Language(s) - 2024.
47
The Ancient Libyans, the protohistorical inhabitants of North Africa, west of the Nile, are long assumed to have been ancestral to historical and modern Berber groups now indigenous to the region. Though many theories have circulated in recent years as to the linguistic identities of these people(s), few have consulted a small but important dataset of Ancient Libyan personal names, ethnonyms, loanwords, and even texts found in Pharaonic Egyptian textual records in the hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts. Examination of these, often brief and isolated, Ancient Libyan words in light of modern Berber languages, suggests that speakers of a para-Berber or early Berber language entered within the realm of Egyptian interaction sometime in the late 2nd millennium BCE, as best attested on pQeheq, a very fragmentary Qeheq-language magical text now in the collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin. Here the text, which may be the oldest known Berber-language (or at least non-Egyptian and non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic language) text, and the Qeheq language’ potential affiliation with the Berber family within Afro-Asiatic is presented, alongside a linguistic history of interactions between Egyptians and Ancient Libyans.
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