From about nine thousand to six thousand years ago the earth’s axial tilt shifted from 24 to about 23 1/2 degrees1, causing the Sahara — originally a well watered savanna swarming with giraffes, elephants and gazelles2 — to dry out and force its human inhabitants outward toward the north and east African coastal areas and into Asia toward the Fertile Crescent. This could be termed the “Afro-Asiatic Diaspora” since what was once a single linguistic culture appears to have diverged at this time into several branches we now recognize as subdivisions of that family: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Omatic, Ancient Egyptian and Semitic. Hebrew, a member of the Semitic branch, flourished as a spoken language and literary medium between the tenth century B.C.E and the third or fourth of the Common Era. What may have been its most direct ancestor, Eblaite, was discovered only in the 1970s in cuneiform amidst the ruins of a clay tablet library near the Syrian town of Aleppo. Researchers believe the name “Abraham” for example, came down over the course of a thousand years from the Eblaite “Ebrium.” The noted Lithuanian-born Zionist Eliezer ben Yehuda (1858-1922) spearheaded the drive to bring Hebrew back as a living language. Like its other Afro-Asiatic relatives it feeds upon triliteral roots — ideas represented by combinations of (typically) three consonants. Vowels placed in different combinations among these sounds generate the vocabulary associated with that idea. |
