Inyotef and Niger-Congo Speakers

Inyotef son of Ka

Wm. E. Welmers identified the Niger Congo home land. Welmers in "Niger-Congo Mande", Current trends in Linguistics 7 (1971), pp.113-140,explained that the Niger-Congo homeland was in the vicinity of the upper Nile valley (p.119). He believes that the Westward migration began 5000 years ago.

In support of this theory he discusses the dogs of the Niger-Congo speakers. This is the unique barkless Basenji dogs which live in the Sudan and Uganda today, but were formerly recorded on Egyptian monuments (Wlemers,p.119). According to Welmers the Basanji, is related to the Liberian Basenji breed of the Kpelle and Loma people of Liberia. Welmers believes that the Mande took these dogs with them on their migration westward. The Kpelle and Loma speak Mande languages.

He believes that the region was unoccupied when the Mande migrated westward. In support of this theory Welmers' notes that the Liberian Banji dogs ,show no cross-breeding with dogs kept by other African groups in West Africa, and point to the early introduction of this cannine population after the separation of the Mande from the other Niger-Congo speakers in the original upper Nile homeland for this population. As a result, he claims that the Mande migration occured before these groups entered the region.

Homburger made it clear that the Fula language was related to the Egyptians of the 12th Dynasty. This is interesting because we find that at this time new rulers came to power in Egypt from the South. This period is often called the Middle Kingdom.

Many of these “southerners” probably included many people who later settled West Africa. As noted earlier the marker for the spread of the Niger-Congo speakers is the basanji dog. The hieroglyphic for "dog," in fact, as evidenced on a stele from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, derives from the basenji. In just a few strokes, the engraver captures the key characteristics: pricked ears, curled tail and graceful carriage.
It is probably no coincidence that the Basanji was see as the principal dog it probably represents the coming of power of the Niger-Congo speakers in ancient Egypt.

We know that in African societies great ancestors are made into “gods”. This is interesting because Wally has discovered a number of African ethnonyms among the gods of Egyptian nomes.

quote:


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Originally posted by Wally:
Ethnic names in the Mdu Ntr

Tutsi
Tutsi "the assembled gods"; "all of them (gods)"

Akan
Akan - the name of a god
Akaniu - a class of gods like Osiris

Fante
Fante - "he of the nose" - a name of Thoth - one of the 42 judges in the Hall of Osiris ("Shante" in modern Egyptian)

Hausa
Hosa - a singing god

Yoruba
Ourbaiu - great of souls, a title of gods or kings
Ouruba - Great God of soul

The permutations of names of such folks as the Wolof or the Fulani are so many, that it requires the effort of those who speak the language, to properly interpret the names -ie, Djoloff, Oulof, etc. and then look for their meanings in Budge's dictionary...


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It would be quite interesting if these nomes were formerly prominent southern nomes who gained prominence once the Inyotefs came to power.

Between 2258 2052 BC civil war broke out among the nobles of Egypt. During this period of disunity there was much suffering in the land and many of the fine cultural developments of the Old Kingdoms were discarded or rarely practiced. This period of chaos is called the "First Intermediate Period". A person who lived during this hard time named Iperwer, wrote Great and humble say: "I wish I might die". Little children cry out: "I never should have been born". Also during this time Lower Egypt was invaded by Asian people who ruled there for a long time.


Inyotef I





During this period of decline it was the Southerners who made it possible for the raise of Egypt back into a world power. These Southerners were called "Inyotefs", they lived around a city in Upper Egypt called "Thebes". Inyotef I founded the 11th Dynasty and made Thebes his capital.Inyotef declared himself king c 2125-2112 BC.

Inyotef I opposed Ankhtify of Heracleopolitan who he defeated. It was Inyotef who consolidated power in the south. Inyotef II (Wahankh) also fought the Heracleopolitans. He loved dogs especially the basenji.

Egyptian Basenji





Egyptian Basenji Dog Hieroglyph





I believe that some of the southern nomes led by the Inyotefs were composed of people who later migrated to West Africa after the Romans came to power. The Thebians were closely united with the Nubians.

Inyotef I was the father Mentuhotep I. Several of the wives of Mentuhotep II were Nubians. Under Mentuhotep, the delta chiefs were defeated and Egypt was united again into one country.


Mentuhotep




Under the Amenemhet I, of the Xllth dynasty the capital was moved form Thebes to Lisht near Memphis. This dynasty and those thereafter are called the Middle Kingdom.




Amenemhet

MIDDLE KINGDOM


It took strong leadership for the Egyptians to re establish the greatness of Egypt and the establishment of safe and secure borders.

The rulers during the Middle Kingdom were mostly men from the military. They frequently made raids into foreign lands in search of booty. And for the first time in Egyptian history a permanent army was founded to protect Egypt and keep it strong.

Amon became the major God of the Egyptians during the Middle Period. Amon was recognized at this time as the God of all Gods. This Amon was also called Amma by the Proto Saharans.

It is interesting to note that the Mande and other West African people like the Dogon and Dravidians worshipped the god Amma.

The fact that Mande, Wolof and Fula are related to Egyptian is probably due to the fact that when the Inyotefs took over Egypt the ancestors of these groups live in southern Egypt/Upper Kush. This would explain 1) the relationship between the Fula and Egyptian language of the 12th Dynasty 2) the introduction of the worship of Aman to the Egyptians a god worshipped by many Niger-Congo speakers, 3) the presence of Egyptian gods for selected nomes bearing West African ethnonyms and 4)the love of the basenji dog by the 12th Dynasty Egyptians.

Egypt was indeed a Pan-African civilization

Part 6: Winters' Response to Burlak,s Meroitic and Tocharian : Meroitic should not be compared to Proto-Tocharian or Proto-Sudani

Clyde Winters response to Burlak’s Meroitic & Tocharian Part 6: Burlak claims Meroitic should be compared to Proto-Tocharian

Burlak (2008) claims that Meroitic terms should be compared to Proto-Tocharian and that Winters’ did not compare Meroitic to Proto-Tocharian (p.101).

Comparing Meroitic to Proto-Tocharian was unnecessary for two reasons. First, the Kushana Hypothesis makes it clear that there was no need to compare Meroitic to Proto-Tocharian because , Kharosthi and Tocharian A was probably physically taken to Meroitic Sudan by the Indian scholars mentioned in the Classical Literature. Secondly, you can not decipher an ancient script using a proto-language because a proto-language can not be verified as having ever existed, because it is reconstructed from living languages, but lack any textual material to document its former existence.

You can not decipher a dead language using a Proto- language. This was attempted in the case of Olmec and proved to be a failure.

Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Claude Rilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.

This is a farce because we do have document evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages. As a result, any proto-term from Northern Eastern Sudani Rilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic

Rilly claims that lexicostatistics or glottochronology and Proto- Northern eastern Nilo-Saharan allows him to read Meroitic. This idea does not correspond to linguistic reality. Lexicostatistics is used to fit datable events among languages that theoretically are descendant from a common ancestor through examination of the basic vocabulary. The basic vocabulary is that part of the lexicon that shows slow change. These terms relate to basic cultural practices and universal human experiences.

Rilly can not use a Proto-Language to read Meroitic because there are only 26 attested Meroitic terms accepted by the establishment. None of these terms are cognate to Nubian or Taman terms except the name for a Meroitic god.

Rilly claims to be able to decipher Meroitic using a method that compares basic cultural words languages separated in time and space. Rilly, can not use this method to read Meroitic, because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nilo-Saharan cognates save one, the term for god.

Rilly has found only 1 cognate shared between Nubian and Meroitic there is no way you can date the time Meroitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan speakers spoke a common ancestral language. The absence of Meroitic and Nubian cognates prevents any fruitful comparisons between these languages.

There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of actual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the construct; and 3) the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.

Rilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction); and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards. This linguistic material fails to meet the standard because there is no textual or documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period. Moreover, the principle language Rilly hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. A fact Rilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.

Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documented evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).

We can reject Claude Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline. The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Rilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter.

Empire.H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language. Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568). If a proto-language is factually incorrect there is no way it can be used to represent a dead language.

First, it must be stated that no “dead “ language has been deciphered using a proto-language. These languages were deciphered using living languages, Coptic in the case of Egyptian, Oromo and(Ethiopian) Semitic was used to decipher the Mesopotamian Cuneiform scripts. The basic problem with using a proto-language to read a dead language results from the fact that the proto-language has been reconstructed by linguist who have no knowledge or textual evidence of the alleged proto-language.

Secondly, there are subgroups in anyfamily of languages. This means that you must first establish the intermediate proto-language (IPL) of the subgroup languages in the target language family. Once the IPLs have been reconstructed, you can then reconstruct the superordinate proto-language (SPL). You can only reconstruct the SPL on the basis of attested languages. In addition, before you can reconstruct the IPLs and SPL a genetic relationship must be established for the languages within the Superfamily of languages, e.g., Nilo Saharan.

The problem with Rilly’s method, is there is no way he can really establish the IPLs in Eastern Sudanic because we have no textual evidence or lexical items spoken by people who lived in the Sudan in Meroitic times. As a result, the languages spoken by people in this area today may not reflect the linguistic geography of the Sudan during the Meroitic period.

This is most evident when we look at modern Egypt. Today the dominant spoken language in the country is Arabic, Arabic has no relationship to ancient Egyptian. If we accept Rilly’s method for deciphering Egyptian we would assume that once me reconstructed proto-Semitic , we could read Egyptian—but as you know Egyptian is not a Semitic language.

Secondly, researchers have compared the “attested Meroitic” terms to all the Nilo-Saharan languages. The results were negative, they do not relate to any Eastern Sudanic language. If the lexical items attested in Meroitic are not cognate to Eastern Sudanic terms, there is no way to establish a genetic relationship between these languages. Absence of a genetic relationship means that we can not reconstruct the imagined IPLs of Meroitic sister languages, since these researchers failed to find a connection between Meroitic and the Eastern Sudanic. As a result, Rilly’s reconstructions of Nilo-Saharan can offer no insight into the language spoken by the Meroites.

Granted, by comparing languages and associating them with a particular time period you can make comparative reconstructions that may eliminate dialectal diversity. But Rilly can not do this because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nubian cognates. This along with the fact that we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire, especially Nubian,precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic.

Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago. This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire.

Nubians were never members of the Meroitic Confederation

The Noba are believed to have spoken a Nubian language. The Nubian language is not related Meroitic.Welsby in The Kingdom of Kush wrote, "Early scholars of the [Meroitic] language hoped that it may have been related to Old Nubian but this has been shown not to be the case, although both are agglutinative, lack gender and the place of inflexions taken by post-positions and suffixes. Whether it was related to the language of the Kerma culture is another unknown, as no inscriptions in Kerman have come to light"(p.190).

Lazlo Torok, in The Kingdom of Kush:Handbook of the Napatan-Meroitic Civilization , wrote "Since so far no bilingual text has been discovered nor any related language found, very little of Meroitic can be understood. Some linguists see a relationship between Berber and Chadic on the one hand and Meroitic, on the other. Others regard it as related to Nubian. On geographical grounds, it has been suggested that Meroitic may be related to the following language groups(in describing order of probability). Eastern Sudabic; Nilo-Saharan; Cushitic/Omotic; Kordofanian. The efforts based on such assumptions produced, however, very few results, if any. While the linguistic classification of Meroitic remains obscure, there is hardly any doubt that it was originally spoken in the northern Butana" (p.50).As you can see Meroitic has not been found to be related to Nubian, other languages in the Nilo-Saharan family ,or any other language spoken in the area.

The Nubians or Nobatai lived in the area from Aswan to Maharraqa called the Dodekaschoenas which was first under the rule of the Ptolemies and later the Romans. Most researchers believe that by 200 BC most of the region was occupied by Nubians. Ptolemy, noted that in the mid-2nd Century AD that the Nubae lived on the Westside of the Nile, and that they were not subjects of the Kushites.

David O'Connor makes it clear in Ancient Nubia: Egypt's Rival in Africa (1993), that the Nubians or Nobatai "adopted a Romano-Egyptian culture very different from that of Meroitic Lower Nubia" (p.72).

Welsby, in The Kingdom of Kush,also believes that the Dodekaschoenas was not fully occupied by Meroites. But there were some Meroites in the major cities.

When the Romans left the area in AD 270, the Diocletian agreement was between the Nobatae and the Romans, not the Romans and Kushites. This makes it clear that the Nubian speakers were Western oriented and not Meroites. In fact the oldest known Noba inscriptions were written in Greek and Coptic, not Meroitic.

The Noba/Nubians were enemies of the Kushites of Meroe. Above is a bound Nubian captive. This artifact was discovered at Meroe in 1911. On the chest of the figure are the following inscriptions: Qo-ne Qore nob o lo. This reads: " The honorable Nubian King arrive(d) as a captive". Another small brone Noba figure was inscribed with the words : E de qe Nob. This inscription reads: "Act indeed to register the Noba (prisoner)".

Claude Reilly's Sudani and meroitic Hypothesis

I found the article about Claude Reilly the “Champollion of Meroitique” very interesting. Although he is being given credit for presenting a method to decipher Meroitic, I already deciphered Meroitic years ago. Reilly believes that he can decipher the Meroitic language language using the Proto-NorthEastern Sudanic, which he has reconstructed.

According to Reilly, since the people presently living in the Sudan today speak languages associated with the Nilo Saharan Superfamily of languages, the Meroites probably spoke a language associated withthis family. This was a radical decision, because research has shown that none of the attested Meroitic terms accepted by mainstream scholars are related to any living language in the Sudan (there are some Meroitic terms borrowed from Egyptian).

Because there are no cognate Meroitic terms and lexical items in the Eastern Sudanic Languages, Reilly has begun to reconstruct Proto- Eastern Sudanic, and attempt to read Meroitic text using his Proto-Eastern Sudanic vocabulary. Even if I hadn’t deciphered the Meroitic writing this method would never lead to the decipherment of this orany other language.

Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani can not be used to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence this group of languages was ever spoken in the Meroitic Empire. Reilly claims that lexicostatistics or glottochronology allows him to read Meroitic. Lexicostatistics is used to fit datable events among languages that theoretically are descendant from a common ancestor.The basic vocabulary is that part of the lexicon that shows slow change. These terms relate to basic cultural practices and universal human experiences.Reilly can not use this method to read Meroitic because there are only 26 attested Meroitic terms accepted by the establishment. None of these terms are cognate to Nubian or Taman terms except the name for a Meroitic god.

With only 1 cognate Meroitic and Northern Eastern Sudani languages, there is no way you can date the time Meroitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan speakers spoke a common ancestral language. Reilly claims to be able to decipher Meroitic using a method that compares basic culural words to date the time languages separated, can not be used to read Meroitic, because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nilo-Saharan cognates. The absence of Meroitic and Nubian cognates prevents any fruitful comparisons between these languages.Paper


There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of adctual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the contruct; and 3) the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.

Reilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction); and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards. This meets none of the standards because there is no documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period. Moreover, the principle language he hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. A fact Reilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.

Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documentated evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).


We can reject Reilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline. The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Reilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter.


Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Reilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.

This is a farce because we do have document evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages. As a result, any proto-term from Northern Eastern Sudani Reilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic

Empire.H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language. Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568).

First, it must be stated that no “dead “ language has been deciphered using a proto-language. These languages were deciphered using living languages, Coptic in the case of Egyptian, Oromo and(Ethiopian) Semitic was used to decipher the Mesopotamian Cuneiform scripts. The basic problem with using a proto-language to read a dead language results from the fact that the proto-language has been reconstructed by linguist who have no knowledge or textual evidence of the alleged proto-language.

Secondly, there are subgroups in anyfamily of languages. This means that you must first establish the intermediate proto-language (IPL) of the subgroup languages in the target language family. Once the IPLs have been reconstructed, you can then reconstruct the superordinate proto-language (SPL). You can only reconstruct the SPL on the basis of attested languages. In addition, before you can reconstruct the IPLs and SPL a genetic relationship must be established for the languages within the Superfamily of languages, e.g., Nilo Saharan.

The problem with Reilly’s method, is there is no way he can really establish the IPLs in Eastern Sudanic because we have not textual evidence or lexical items spoken by people who lived in the Sudanin Meroitic times. As a result, the languages spoken by people in this area today may not reflect the linguistic geography of the Sudan in the Meroitic period.

This is most evident when we look at modern Egypt. Today the dominant language is Arabic, and yet Arabic has no relationship to Egyptian. If we accept Reilly’s method for deciphering Egyptian we would assume that once me reconstructed proto-Semitic , we could read Egyptian—but as you know Egyptian is not a Semitic language.

Secondly, researchers have compared the “attested Meroitic” terms to all the Nilo-Saharan languages. The results were negative, they do not relate to any Eastern Sudanic language. If the lexicalitems attested in Meroitic are not cognate to Eastern Sudanic terms, there is no way to establish a genetic relationship between these languages. Absence of a genetic relationship means that we can not reconstruct the imagined IPLs of Meroitic sister languages, sincethese researchers failed to find a connection between Meroitic and the Eastern Sudanic. As a result, Reilly’s reconstructions of Nilo-Saharan can offer no insight into the language spoken by the Meroites.

Granted, by comparing languages and associating them with a particular time period you can make comparative reconstructions that may eliminate dialectal diversity. But Reilly can not do this because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nubian cognates. This along with the fact that we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire, especially Nubian,precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic.

Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago. This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. The Nubian speakers lived far to the north of the Meroitic Empire, a fact Reilly acknowledges in his paper.