Lexical Reconstruction to Reconstruct Prehistory: The Proto-Afrasian Terms for Weapons, War, and Other Armed Conflicts

 
PIIS086954150016794-3-1
DOI10.31857/S086954150016795-4
Publication type Article
Status Published
Authors
Affiliation: Russian State University for the Humanities
Address: Russian Federation, Moscow
Journal nameEtnograficheskoe obozrenie
Edition№4
Pages237-252
Abstract

The article aims to reconstruct the Proto-Afrasian terminology of weapons and armed conflicts, including illuminating the problem of war in prehistory from a linguistic point of view, usually ignored by archaeologists and prehistorians when discussing this problem. The proto-language of the early Afrasians and their immediate descendants, the North Afrasians (who spoke the Proto-Semitic-Egyptian-Berber-Chadic language), whom the author identifies with the creators of the Natufian and post-Natufian archaeological cultures of the Levant, started branching, according to his glottochronological calculations, by the method of M. Swadesh, significantly improved by Sergei Starostin, in the 11th-10th mill. BCE. The article provides detailed etymologies of 12 reconstructed Proto-Afrasian terms for weapons (from mace to shield) and 13 terms denoting different types of armed conflicts; several of these indicate either an already established or an emerging meaning of “war” in the Proto-Afrasian language, and thus in the minds of its speaker community.

Keywordscomparative-historical linguistics, reconstruction, proto-language, lexicon, Afrasian languages, weapons, war
AcknowledgmentThis article is a translation of: А.Ю. Милитарёв. Лексическая реконструкция для реконструкции предыстории: праафразийские термины, относящиеся к оружию, войне и другим вооруженным конфликтам // Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie. 2021. No 4. P. 5–23. DOI: 10.31857/S086954150016695-4
Received22.09.2021
Publication date28.09.2021
Number of characters40601
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1 Recent decades’ breakthroughs in population and archaeological genetics, satellite archaeology, dating methods, progress in sociocultural anthropology, cross-cultural research, comparative mythology and folklore studies have significantly advanced the reconstruction of human prehistory1. Another rapidly advancing, though most underappreciated, field of study is comparative and historical linguistics, the application of which can illuminate aspects of prehistory that are less accessible or even unavailable to other fields and methods and are most effective when coordinated with extralinguistic data. 1. See Korotayev et al. 2019.
2 The ground-breaking interdisciplinary works in the 1980s, including those by Diakonoff2, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov3, stimulated similar research in different language families of the Old World. In the Afrasian (Afro-Asiatic, Semito-Hamitic) macrofamily, these were mainly the various works of the Czech linguist Vaclav Blažek4 and the present author5. On the current state, importance, and further prospects of this line of research in Eurasian and African studies, see the paper by Korotayev et al.6. 2. Diakonoff 1981.

3. Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984

4. Blažek 1994; 2008; 2013.

5. Militarev 1990; 2000; 2002; 2019.

6. Korotayev et al.
3 The present article has a dual purpose: (1) to present a set of reconstructed Proto-Afrasian terms of a particular semantic field, which in itself may be of interest to prehistorians, archaeologists, and ethnographers, and (2) to demonstrate the possibilities of the classical comparative and historical method, enriched by later additional methods, such as glottochronology developed by Morris Swadesh7 and substantially improved by Sergei Starostin8, by the example of one of the controversial problems of ancient history: prehistoric warfare. 7. Swadesh 1955.

8. Starostin S.A. 2000.
4 In the scholarly press, especially of the last two decades, the causes of ancient wars and the motivations of the warring parties9, early evidence of wars10, and other problems related to prehistoric wars are vividly discussed. A recent international conference in 2018 was devoted to the issue of wars and, more broadly, prehistoric conflicts11. War itself is said to be correctly identified by a number of researchers as one of the causes of social evolution12. However, the very validity of the issue of the causes of wars is questioned: “despite the importance of a process such as war, the search for the cause of wars actually distracts and obscures their nature and place in the evolution of human societies”, and further: “The problem is that the attempt to explain wars assumes that they are entities that can be described, analysed, and explained. A more productive approach is to recognise the following: that we resort to aggression to achieve our goals is part of our biological heritage, and we need to explain how aggression is expressed under different circumstances”13. Note that such a view of human nature, human “biological heritage”, dating back to Sir Arthur Keith and apparently dominating in modern anthropology, is not the only one – let us recall the passionate rejection of it by our great compatriot Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson in his “Genealogy of Altruism”. 9. Ferguson 2000.

10. Otterbein 2004; Kennedy 2016.

11. Hansen, Krause 2019.

12. Carneiro 1970, cited in Johnson, Earle 2017: 34

13. Ibid. P. 34–35.
5 At first glance at the discussion of prehistoric warfare by archaeologists and prehistorians, it is striking that there is no consensus on the distinction between war and any other type of armed conflicts in the prehistoric era; it appears that such a consensus can only be tentative and purely terminological. Moreover, the very debates about the existence of a war in Epipaleolithic and Early Neolithic seem speculative, taking into account that they revolve around only a few (usually two) bioarchaeological pieces of evidence of interpersonal violence14, while “other interpretations, including capital punishment, human sacrifice, murder... cannot be ruled out”15. Ethnographic extrapolations may suggest some insights, but they hardly significantly enrich the understanding of the war in prehistory16 and even less shed light on the key question: can prehistoric armed conflicts be considered as war – and, if so, which ones? The formulation of Haas also helps little to answer this question. He considers war to be “armed conflict and related activities and relations between independent political units in societies of all types”17 and suggests – unclear on what basis – “that wars as we define them rarely occurred before ten thousand years ago”18. 14. Antoine et al. 2013: 68; Kennedy 2016.

15. Otterbein 2004: 71.

16. Haas, Piscitelli 2013.

17. Haas 1996: 1357, cited in Johnson, Earle 2017: 34.

18. Ibid.
6 The search for an answer to this question in this debate does not seem promising to the author.
7 Korotayev et al. aptly note: “Currently, the main source for the reconstruction of the most ancient history of humankind is archeology, which almost by definition makes it possible to restore only just a few elements of the most ancient human culture (naturally, almost exclusively – material culture)”, while “A mere introduction of comparative linguistic data makes it possible to significantly refine our reconstruction of a respective culture”19. 19. Korotayev et al.: 287.
8 It is, first of all, about the reconstruction of the corresponding proto-language terms, relying on methodologically correct and technically qualified comparison of the related words in the “daughter” languages. In particular, the somewhat scholastic dispute about the definition of war in the prehistoric context can be resolved by reference to the perception of war by the prehistoric people themselves, reflected in the reconstructed proto-languages they once spoke – or, to put it more cautiously, in models reconstructed with varying degrees of approximation to the living languages they spoke. Despite all the objective difficulties and nuances of translation in all languages, both ancient extinct and living, the term “war” is usually distinguished from the terms “struggle”, “skirmish”, “plunder”, “raid”, and others located in the same semantic field. If in a representative selection of the daughter languages, related words have the meaning of “war” specifically (and it can be justified that they are all inherited from the proto-language rather than borrowed later), it is highly unlikely that a proto-language term with a different meaning – say, “fight” – in different descendant languages, independently of each other, changed its meaning to “war”, so that in the proto-language the corresponding reconstructed word could mean something other than “war” in the meaning of that term, which was once associated with it by the speakers of the proto-language.

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