Some observations on language contact between Egyptian and the languages of Darfur and Chad

Journal article

With the discovery of Egyptian routes leading west from Dakhla Oasis (the so-called ‘Abu Ballas’ trail) and the inscription of Montuhotep II at Gebel Uweinat, serious attention is now being paid to links between Egypt and the ancient cultures of the Central Sahara, more succinctly in the Fezzan, Tibesti, and Ennedi and Darfur regions. While the majority of this research is archaeological or even epigraphic (the Montuhotep II inscription at Uweinat being the primary exemplar) in scope, there is also the possibility that ancient links between Egyptians and Saharan cultures are still to be presently found in the form of Sprachkontakt and the modern lexicons of Saharan languages. That is contemporary Saharan languages might well preserve some relic Egyptian loanwords, as might Egyptian contain loans from Saharan languages. A recent article by Thomas Schneider regarding the foreign connections of Egyptian cosmography and the Libyan Desert has proposed the occurrence of Teda lexical items in the Egyptian text of the Amduat.1 Teda is a language spoken in the Northern Sahara, and along with Daza comprises the Tebu (or Tubu) language family spoken in Northern Chad, Southern Libya, Eastern Niger and also historically the Gebel Uweinat of Southwestern Egypt.2 The idea of Ancient Egyptian loanwords in languages of this part of the Sahara is not particularly new in itself. In his 1862 Central Afrikanischer Vokabularien, Heinrich Barth proposed a number of etymologies and morphological similarities between Ancient Egyptian and Saharan languages as diverse as Maba, Teda, and Songhai.3 While Barth’s comparisons could not be considered rigorous by modern linguistic standards (not to mention phonologically impossible), and were clearly derived from the then scholarly zeitgeist in early Afrikanistik of finding ‘advanced’ Egyptian influences everywhere in Africa, the idea of such language contact between the Nile Valley and languages of Chad and Darfur has only been haphazardly revisited. Given the new research emphasis on pharaonic contacts with the Libyan (Western) Desert and identification of trade routes leading both west of Egypt and Nubia, there is a small but growing archaeological precedent for some sort of contact between Egyptians and the west in the Pharaonic period.

Authors: Cooper, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Sudanarchäologische Gesellschaft zu Berlin
• Journal: Mitteilungen der Sudanarchäologischen Gesellschaft
• Volume: 28
• Pages: 81-86
• Publication date: 2018-01-05
• Acceptance date: 2017-05-01