> A few digests ago the matter of a possible Semitic substrate across
> Europe came up. I guess the question may be, does this really
> exist, and is it a product of PIE contact with Semitic languages
> (early PIE - PSemitic relations) or over an overlay of Indo-
> European speakers over Semitic speakers (a true substrate). This
> seems like it would be an interesting debate and an important
> finding to determine.
The discussion of a Proto-Semitic Substrate depends upon the date by
which Semitic languages first appear in the Near East. Proto-Semitic
adopted all words for agriculture from the earlier agriculturists of
the Middle East. With the exception of Ancient Egyptian and Proto-
Semitic, Afro-Asiatic langauges do not share a common vocabulary for
agricultural items suggesting that the Proto-Berber, Proto-Hausa,
Proto-Cushitic, Proto-Egyptian and Proto-Semitic dispersed BEFORE
agriculture spread across the area of the Sahara and Sahel.
Proto-Afro-Asiatic was a language probably spoken amongst mesolithic
cultures in Africa circa 10,000 BCE to about 8,000 BCE. It has been
suggested that it was associated with the Capsian culture, first
recognised at Qafsa in Tunisia, developing from a local variant of
the Ibero-Maurasian culture, and spreading out across the Sahara with
the pottery-using wet period cultures that followed after the Glacial
Maximum of 18,000-15,000 BCE.
The Khartoum Capsian spread into East Africa and was probably the
origin of the Omotic and Cushitic languages (which are the two most
closely related of the Afro-Asiatic langauges).
Semitic probably developed from the Isnian culture of the Nile Valley
(another local adaptation of the Capsian). Isnian had an impact upon
the Harifian microlithic culture which developed in the Sinai and the
Negev at the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B phase, about 6,000
BCE (associated with the arid phase which saw the PPNB sites of
southern Palestine abandonned). These people used the Helwan
retouche technique which was common in the Eastern Desert region.
With the Harifian culture it seems that a cultural fusion between
agriculturists who were coming to depend more and more upon
transhumance with herds of sheep and goats, with the nomadic hunter-
gatherer lifestyle associated with the Proto-Semitic coming out of
Africa. Some have suggested that it was the Harifians who introduced
herringbone pottery styles from the Sahara into Southern Palestine.
If so, they stand the best cultural chance of being the original
proto-Semitics.
The appearance of Semitic in the Near East thus only happened after
6,000 BCE, and is associated with what Andrew Sherrat calles the
Secondary Products Revolution. This is the discovery that animals
could be used for more than meat. Goats were cultivated now for milk
as much as meat, and sheep were cultivated for fleece, with cheeses
and textiles being traded with sedentary agricultural settlements for
non-animal products. The Munhata culture of Israel saw the
development of the nomadic pastoral culture in full development,
extending into the Yarmoukian culture 5,500-5000 BP, concentrated on
the northern Jordan Valley, Transjordanian hills, and parts of
northern Israel, following on PPNC.
This Transjordanian culture then developed into what Juris Zarins
calls the Syro-Arabian pastoral techno-complex. Working with Steve
Brandt, they show that this techno-complex developed as a string of
inter-related pastoral cultures extending down the Euphrates in the
NE and down the shore of the Red Sea to the South East. This stands
the best possibility of being the ancestral culture for the Semtic
language family as a whole. In Iraq this culture expanded into the
expanding Ubaid culture, that spread upwards from Eridu in the South,
through the Hadji Muhammed culture to carry the Ubaid Chalcolithic
culture from the Mediterranean coastline at Amuq and Ras Shamra to
Bahrein and Oman along the Persian Gulf.
The technocomplex also seems to have displaced the hunter-fisher
cultures of the shores of the Persian Gulf which extended from Dubai,
through Qatar and Bahrein to Kuwait and Southern Iraq. This hunter-
fisher culture was probably the precursor of the Sumerians. Dilmun
(Bahrein) remained the semi mythical homeland (and often the
preferred burial site for high status Sumerians) down to historical
times. The Sumerian infusion into Southern Iraq seem to have become
quickly acculturated into Ubaid cultural forms and settled, as the
Jamdet Nasr and following Uruk culture, in the towns and villages of
Shinnar (Sumeria), just as a variety of the Syro-Arabian
technocomplex was settling in the area along the Euphrates from Mari
to Kish (the ancestral Akkadian group).
This evidence suggests that unlike what certain Indo-Europeanists
have suggested that there is no Semitic substrate beneath Indo-
European. Rather the evidence would seem to show that both Semitic
and Proto-Indo-European adopted a common vocabulary from a third
party, the Middle Eastern culture(s) that in fact began grain
agriculture and the domesticatioon of cattle, sheep and goats (The
Pre-Pottery Neolithic cultures of the region from Beldibi in Anatolia
to the Trigris, and from Armenia to Palestine).
On the basis of the evidence it would appear that this group, if not
Nostratic (an outside possibility) was probably a language of the
Hurro-Urartuan-NECaucasian group. Johanna Nicholls has found a
number of cognates for agricultural terms in Chechen and related
languages which go back to before 8,000 BCE and are related to the
agricultural vocabularies of Semitic, Kartvellian, and Proto-Indo-
European.
There is a conference on these matters at Montreal in March. It
would seem that just as archaeology is giving answers to PIE pre-
history, so a better agricultural and archaeological understanding is
illustrationg the development of proto-Semitic too.
Regards
John