Returning Stolen Property

Ethiopundit has an informative piece up about the long-drawn out struggle to get the Italians to return the obelisk they stole from Aksum during their invasion of 1935. Also interesting is the information he provides on the linguistic relationship between the ancient and modern languages of Ethiopia. An interesting fact is that the horn of Africa region contains more attested Semitic languages than the entire Middle East, something to keep in mind when next some crank starts to posit a "Semitic invasion" of Africa: it almost certainly occurred the other way round (don't even get me started on the "Hamitic" nonsense). In fact, the vast majority of the Afroasiatic languages of which the Semitic tongues constitute a branch exist in Africa alone, and after Arabic, the second most widely spoken Afroasiatic language is West Africa's Hausa.

Although he doesn't explicitly mention it, the sheer number of times Italian governments have promised to return the obelisk and then failed to deliver within the past few years alone is mind-boggling, and it's hard for me to believe anything an Italian government has to say on this score - they've only been stalling for time for 57 years now.

Comments

[Andrew Heavens]

I agree that it is hard to believe the Italians on this one. It might be worth making the effort this time though. I spoke to Richard Pankhurst, a long time campaigner for the return over here, and he is actually optimistic. Apparently engineers have been going back and forth between Addis Ababa and Rome sorting out the technical details of the return.

If the obelisk does go back it might set a good example to the UK which has piles of Ethiopian treasure stolen during their expedition here in 1868. Read all about it on www.afromet.com.

[razib]

hm, but isn't the afrocentric diversity of afro-asiatic languages a function of the spread of arabic and aramaic with transnational empires/trading networks?

[Abiola Lapite]

"hm, but isn't the afrocentric diversity of afro-asiatic languages a function of the spread of arabic and aramaic with transnational empires/trading networks?"

We can rule that out as an impossibility. The Horn of Africa wasn't cut off from any such networks, so it is hard to understand why linguistic diversity should have been uniquely preserved there. The direction of spread of the Semitic languages within the Middle East is historically attested: the original language of much of present-day northern Iraq was Sumerian, a linguistic isolate, and there is plenty of information available about the original languages of the territories which were overrun during the Islamic expansion.

In short, given what we know from recorded history, knowing that the Chadic branch of Afroasiatic alone consists of more than 600 attested languages, and seeing as not a single family of Afroasiatic outside of Semitic extends out of Africa, it is pure wishful thinking to imagine that the family could have originated anywhere else. There simply isn't a trace of evidence to support such an assumption.

[Abiola Lapite]

I also forgot to add: when we look at linguistic distance between related languages, it is obvious even to the untrained eye that like the Germanic family, all of the non-African Semitic languages are very closely related indeed, so they cannot have diverged very long ago. This is true whether we're talking about Arabic, Aramaic, Edomite, Hebrew, Moabite or Phoenician. One would have expected that any influences that wiped out all evidence linguistic diversity over a broad area wouldn't have selectively preserved only those languages which happened to be very closely related.

[razib]

abiola,

yeah, you're right, i've always been struck by how similar hebrew & arabic are, even accounting for the artificiality in their development imposed by their status as liturgical tongues.