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Linguistic and archaeological evidence for Berber prehistory
The Berber languages are relatively well-studied, and it is possible to explore their geographical extent today and in the past, and also reconstruct basic and cultural vocabulary which can be attributed to speakers of proto- Berber. However, there is a major problem reconciling this with textual and archaeological evidence. The proto-Berber we can reconstruct seems to be far to recent to match what we know from other evidence; indeed it seems to reach back to period as late as 200 AD. Textual evidence (and Canarian inscriptions) point to a period prior to 400 BC, while the most credible archaeological correlate would be the spread of pastoralism across the Sahara, pointing to the period 5-4000 BP. The paper explores this disjunction and suggests the underlying reason for it is massive language leveling in the period after 0 AD. In other words, the original speakers of Berber did indeed spread out westwards from the Nile Valley, 5-4000 years ago, but the diversity which evolved in this period was eliminated by a sociolinguistic processes which levelled divergent speech forms. Historical linguists have been wary of invoking such process until recently, but evidence is mounting for their importance in many and varied cultures, including China, Borneo and Madagascar. Hypotheses are evaluated to explain the Berber situation and it is suggested that a combination of the introduction of the camel and the establishment of the Roman limes were the key factors in creating this linguistic bottleneck.
However, there is considerable evidence that the Berber must have been the dominant population throughout much of North Africa and the Sahara in the past (Basset 1952; Camps 1980; Willms 1980; Ameur 1990; Brett & Fentress 1996; Blench 2001). Although the Tuareg are presently the most widespread group, found across much of Algeria, Niger and southern Libya, their expansion is probably relatively recent as they may have entered the south-central Sahara as late as the 6th century AD. This is a considerable geographical range, but it has been regularly argued
that Berber culture and by implication, people, reached as far as the Nile Confluence (e.g. Behrens 1985, 1989). Bechhaus-Gerst (1989) claimed to detect loans from Berber into Nubian and Behrens adduced cultural evidence from rock-paintings etc. Such a stretch is not inconceivable geographically, but the evidence for this remains weak, both linguistically and archaeologically. The Berber remain a highly mobile group, forming new communities in the coastal cities of West Africa and are adept at maintaining a strong media presence. The Zenaga in SW Mauretania were a significant group when first described, but are now down to some 300 speakers (Tayne-Cheikh 2008). North of Agades in Niger live the Tətsərret, who language shows correspondences with Zenaga and who are now encapsulated by the Tuareg (Attayoub 2001; Lux 2011). Other islands of Berber peakers occur with the Arabic-speaking zone further east, most notably at Awjila (Paradisi 1960), formerly at El-Fogaha (Paradisi 1963) and Siwa (Laoust 1932). Furthermore it is regularly claimed that Berbers reached the Canaries at an unspecified date in the past, leading to the formation of the Guanche, the now-vanished aboriginal population (Wölffel 1956). Berber is written with a script of varying readability which first appears in the 3rd century BC, but almost all texts are disappointingly short, hence the contribution of epigraphy to Berber history is limited (Chaker 2002). Figure 1 shows a bilingual Latin/Berber inscription from Roman North Africa published in Gsell (1934) which gives an idea of how these inscriptions can be transliterated.
Despite an abundance of information, there are a series of major unanswered questions about the affiliations, origins and date of diversification of the Berber languages. Berber is Afroasiatic, yet it retains only a very small corpus of established Afroasiatic roots once deep-level Arabic borrowings are weeded out. This suggests that it must have split from Afroasiatic at quite some time-depth, a hypothesis for which archaeological or linguistic support is lacking. Similarly, the dates of the expansion of Berber are unknown; its extremely low internal diversity points to a recent epoch. Evidence from Neo-Punic and Latin borrowings suggests a date for proto-Berber of 100-200 AD. This is difficult to harmonise with the expansion of pastoralism across the Central Sahara, which suggests a date of 5-4000 BP. If this is indeed so, what sociolinguistic process can hypothesized which is somehow in consilience with the archaeological record?
This paper is a preliminary attempt to provide some answers to these questions. Berber is widespread and appears to be old, yet the Berber languages are surprisingly close to one another, so much so they are approach mutual intelligibility across much of their range. Berber itself is a highly idiosyncratic branch of Afroasiatic with many features that do not occur elsewhere, which suggests it split from the main ‘tree’ a long time ago. However, it has numerous well-assimilated loans from Arabic found virtually across its range. The difficulties of fitting Berber neatly into a story about the evolution of Afroasiatic led one of the major reconstructions of the phylum to omit it from consideration (Ehret 1995).
The only way to account for this is to suppose that the speakers of proto-Berber must have been resident somewhere for a long period, diverging from Afroasiatic but not diversifying internally
1. Some major social or economic change must have transformed their society, stimulating a major expansion. Blench (2001) argued that this was pastoralism, on the basis that a quite detailed lexicon of livestock-keeping can be reconstructed for proto-Berber. While this remains the case, Kossmann (1999) points out that crop production terminology (olive production, cereals etc.) also seems to be part of proto-Berber. This is more
difficult to assess, since many pastoral populations simply do not practice Maghreb-style agriculture.
2. Why is Berber so remote from the rest of Afroasiatic?
The internal structure of Afroasiatic is from resolved, and the literature contains many competing models(cf. review in Blench 2006). Nonetheless, its grammar aligns it strongly with Semitic, and most genealogical trees place these two branches in proximity. Berber verbal affixes are strikingly similar to those of Semitic, both in form, function and position as prefixes or suffixes, and must be inherited from the common ancestor of Berber and Semitic (Lipiński 2001:44). Figure 2 shows a compromise genealogical tree for Afroasiatic;
The time-depth for Afroasiatic overall is difficult to gauge, and different for those who link its origins to the Near East and the Natufian (Diakonov 1988:32, fn. 14) and those who situate it in SW Ethiopia (Bender 2003). The earliest Semitic written material is Akkadian, dating from 2350 BC, but the city of Akkad is referred to in Sumerian documents of 2800 BC. This suggests a date of not less than 6000 BP for Semitic-speakers to enter the Near East and become established. This in turn implies a split from Berber prior to this, presumably in the Nile Valley, perhaps 6500 BP or earlier.
A date such as this is reasonable in terms of the erosion of common Afroasiatic roots in Berber, but the contrast with the ‘dialect chain’ appearance of modern Berber becomes even more stark. Clearly a complex palaeosociolinguistic narrative is required for Berber to account for the present situation.
The primary assumption must be that the ancestral group which split from Semitic remained in the Nile Valley for some thousands of years, and did not expand demographically. They may have been an isolated fishing community, tolerated at the margins of the growing Egyptian kingdom. Unless there are as yet unidentified references in Egyptian records, we may never know the exact process which led to the persistence of pre-proto-Berber. However, it is likely that their transformation into pastoralists is reflected in the archaeological record.
3. Berber and pastoral expansion in the Sahara As argued in Blench (2001) livestock production can be reconstructed for proto-Berber and it may thus seem reasonable to associate Berber with early pastoralism in the archaeological record. The difficulty with this is that cattle seem to be rather early in the Sahara, and thus not easily correlated with an undiverse linguistic group such as the Berber. The earliest dates for cattle in Africa are debated because it is difficult to be surethat skeletons represent domesticated species. Wild cattle existed in Northeast Africa, and by the time of Nabta Playa, they may have been managed by humans i.e. around 9000 BP (Gautier 1984, 1987). Di Lernia (2006) has now radiocarbon dated a large number of cattle burials in the Messak in southern Libya, and they give a fairly consistent suite of dates pointing to the introduction of livestock ca. 7000 BP. Bones of small ruminants also occur in these burials, together with occasional other species such as equids (presumably wild ass). This date is strikingly similar to the first appearance of pastoral nomadism in the south of the Arabian peninsula (Martin 2009; Blench 2011) and would seem to point to a rapid dispersal out of the Near East, heading both southwest into the Sahara and southeast into Arabia. These early Saharan pastoralists cannot be Berber; 7000 BP is prior to the usual date for the dispersal of Indo-European, whose internal diversity is evident to non-specialists. It may be, however, that an important distinction is to be drawn between the management of wild cattle and their domestication for milking. Murdock (1959) long ago drew attention to the distinction between milking and non-milking cattle management in Sub-Saharan Africa and there is reason to think this marked a substantial break in pastoral practice. Recent evidence for the ‘milking revolution’ places this at about 5000 BP (Dunne et al 2012). Isochronic maps of livestock in the Sahara do show a gradual expansion across to Mauretania, and there is a co-association with small ruminants. Unlike cattle, goats and sheep must be domesticated, as neither sheep nor goats are indigenous to Africa. The westward expansion culminates in Mauretania by ca. 3500 BP (Vernet 1993). To identify this with the primary expansion of Berber languages (Blench 2001) is to fail to take into account the closeness of Berber lects, as demonstrated in Galand (1970-1971) and Willms (1980). Berber is hardly more than a dialect chain, with less diversity than, say the Romance languages.
The period of >4000 years this model attributes to proto-Berber corresponds to well-dated language families such as Bantu and proto-Malayo-Polynesian, which respectively include 600 and 1000+ languages (Ethnologue 2009). Berber would then be extremelyanomalous to say the least. To explain this mismatch between archaeology and language, there are essentially three possibilities;
a) Berber behaves quite unlike any other known language family
b) The pastoralists in the archaeological record were a quite distinct ethnolinguistic group speaking an unknown language, which was completely re
placed leaving no modern representatives
c) Berber originally was much more diverse, but passed through a ‘bottleneck’ as a result of a sociolinguistic process of leveling Explanation
a) is treated as non-explanatory, since there is no evidence for such an anomaly. Saying something is completely exceptional essentially has no content. Explanation b) is more plausible, but there are two pieces of evidence against it. It would be remarkable if modern Berber were so completely mapped on to a previous language family that no relatives remained. To cite a comparable example, the spread of Indo-European almost completely assimilated the older languages of Europe, but Basque and records of Etruscan survived to testify to their existence. Secondly, modern-day Berber languages seem to contain no obvious traces of a substrate language. In other words, their lexicon does not contain extensive evidence for borrowing from the languages which they should have replaced if this model is valid. Again, Indo-European languages, notably Greek, have extensive substrate lexicon derived from presumed former languages, thereby attesting to their existence. So, while not impossible, b) appears to be highly unlikely. Given this, the most likely explanation is extensive language levelling. At some time in the past, a prestige
lect began to spread among already related but diverse languages and gradually eliminated idiosyncratic lexicon and syntax. In time, the renewed proto-language began to rediversify, leading to the language pattern found in the present. To understand how this might work, take the analogy of the British Isles. When English dialects were first surveyed after the Second World War, a considerable number of divergent lexical items were recorded, and mapped in different geographical regions (Orton et al. 1962-71). With the spread of broadcast media, these have largely been eliminated and mainstream items substituted. If processes of social breakdown and climate change continue, the forces keeping English inter-intelligible will gradually weaken and English will rediverge. The hypothesis is that something similar happened with Berber. If so, the interpretative challenge is to know where and when this occurred and what were the social processes which drove it.
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Originally Posted by Yuffayur
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