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On the Antiquity of Agriculture in Ethiopia*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Christopher Ehret
Christopher Ehret
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

From various kinds of evidence it can now be argued that agriculture in Ethiopia and the Horn was quite ancient, originating as much as 7,000 or more years ago, and that its development owed nothing to South Arabian inspiration. Moreover, the inventions of grain cultivation in particular, both in Ethiopia and separately in the Near East, seem rooted in a single, still earlier subsistence invention of North-east Africa, the intensive utilization of wild grains, beginning probably by or before 13,000 b.c. The correlation of linguistic evidence with archaeology suggests that this food-collecting innovation may have been the work of early Afroasiatic-speaking communities and may have constituted the particular economic advantage which gave impetus to the first stages of Afroasiatic expansion into Ethiopia and the Horn, the Sahara and North Africa, and parts of the Near East.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 1979 , pp. 161 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

1 Simoons, F. J., ‘Some questions on the economic prehistory of Ethiopia’, J. Afr. Hist., vi, 1 (1965), 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 de Wet, J. M. J., ‘Domestication of African cereals’, African Economic History, no. 3 (spring, 1977), p. 26.Google Scholar

3 Especially Hans-Jurgen Sasse, ‘The Consonant phonemes of proto-East Cushitic: a first approximation’, forthcoming in Afroasiatic Linguistics; Paul Black, ‘Lowland East Cushitic: Subgrouping and Reconstruction’ (New Haven: unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Yale University, 1974)Google Scholar; Heine, Bernd, ‘The Sam languages: a History of Rendille, Boni and Somali’ (Nairobi, 1976Google Scholar, unpublished manuscript); and Richard Hayward, work in progress on Qawko subgroup.

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5 See especially the recent and current work of D. L. Appleyard of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

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7 Ehret, C., Ethiopians and East Africans: the Problem of Contacts (Nairobi, 1974), chapter 2, 1.Google Scholar

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10 This inference is made on the basis that the lowest percentages of core vocabulary cognation within Omotic are of the same range as the lowest ones within Cushitic: see Bender, M. L., ‘The languages of Ethiopia: a new lexicostatistic classification and some problems of diffusion’, Anthropological Linguistics, xiii, 5 (1971), especially p. 175.Google Scholar

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20 For Semitic and Ethiopian plough agricultural terminology used in this article, I am deeply indebted to the materials presented and analysized by Amatruda, W. T., ‘Linguistic evidence for cereal plow agriculture in Ethiopia and the Horn’, unpublished U.C.L.A. seminar paper, 1971.Google Scholar

21 For Cushitic work see notes 3–5 above; for Chadic, see Newman, Paul, ‘Chadic classification and reconstructions’, Afroasiatic Linguistics, v, 1 (1977).Google Scholar

22 Hadramaut form, isolated in Asian Semitic and naming a plant native and almost endemic to Ethiopia, must be considered a loanword; medial /h/ arose as an attempt to render the glottalic release of Ethiopic *t', an element foreign to Arabic pronunciation.

23 For the correspondence Agew ø (zero) = Beja /h/ = Chadic *Y initial, see C. Ehret, ‘Omotic’, isogloss set for ‘sand’.

24 Appleyard, D. L., ‘Linguistic evidence of non-Semitic influence in the history of Ethiopian Semitic: lexical borrowing in Ge'ez and other Ethiopian Semitic languages’, paper presented to Conference on Ethiopian Origins, School of Oriental and African Studies, 06 1977.Google Scholar

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27 Appleyard, ‘Linguistic evidence’.

28 Ehret, Historical reconstruction, table 2.

29 Ehret, Historical reconstruction, table 1.

30 Ehret, Ethiopians, chapter 1.

31 Appleyard, ‘Linguistic evidence’.

32 Amatruda, ‘Linguistic evidence’. But the pre-Semitic and Cushitic origin of much of this vocabulary has long been generally recognized by scholars.

33 Fleming, H. C., ‘Omotic overview’, chapter 13 in Bender, M. L., The Non-Semitic Languages of Ethiopia, 308Google Scholar; see also Ehret, , ‘Cushitic prehistory’, 91–2.Google Scholar

34 As is also cogently argued by Simoons, ‘Some questions’.

35 For a recent review of evidence for the climatic shifts noted here and in the following sentences, see Livingstone, D. A., ‘Late Quaternary climatic change in Africa’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, vi (1975), 249–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar