The Final Call

Musa’s Ancient Egyptian Arabic Discovered?

By Wesley Muhammad, PhD. -Guest Columnist- | Last updated: May 29, 2013 - 11:41:27 AM

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According to the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad the language that Prophet Musa (Moses) spoke was “Ancient Egyptian Arabic.” What is this language? According to the consensus of linguistic scholars, Ancient Egyptian and Arabic are two distinct languages that are only very distantly related. Arabic is a Semitic language and is included, with Ancient Egyptian, in the larger language family called Afroasiatic.

Ancient Egyptian, however, is not a Semitic language, though the distant relationship between Ancient Egyptian and the Semitic language family is undeniable. What, then, is “Ancient Egyptian Arabic?” Is it the same as modern Egyptian Arabic, called al-āmiyah (Ameya) and is the version of Arabic spoken in Egypt today? How should we understand the designation “Arabic” in this description “Ancient Egyptian Arabic?” Arabicists (scholars of Arabic linguistics) and Semiticists (scholars of Semitic linguistics) are well aware of the fact that “Arabic” could mean many things, especially 4,000 years ago (2,000 BC), the approximate time of Musa. Should we understand by “Ancient Egyptian Arabic” an ancient and Egyptianized version of Modern Standard Arabic (fuṣḥā) or its putative source, Classical Arabic (al-‘Arabiyya)? Or should we envision a version of the pre-Islamic language called “Old Arabic?”

As Classical Arabic (and thus Modern Standard Arabic) is in many ways an artificial creation of the Abbasid-era grammarians (influenced also by the theologians),  it differs so much from Old Arabic (in some matters of pronunciation, morphology, syntax, and lexicon) that, according to some Arabic scholars, it is a totally new language type. Further, Old Arabic is not the same as Ancient North Arabian or its dialects (e.g. Oasis North Arabian, Thamudic, Safaitic, etc.), and these languages differ from the Ancient South Arabian dialects (Sabaic, Minaic, Qatabanic, and Hadramatic). Any one of these could conceivably reflect the original “Proto-Arabic” or (more realistically) the state of the language in 2000 BC. What, then, are we to understand by Ancient Egyptian Arabic? We find no descriptive details in the extant or available body of the Teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad. However, there has been a recent discovery that may very well shine tremendous light on the language of the prophet Musa.

In 2007 Prof. Richard Steiner, professor of Semitic languages and literatures at Yeshiva University (New York) delivered an important lecture at Hebrew University of Jerusalem entitled “Proto-Canaanite Spells in the Pyramid Texts: A Look at the History of Hebrew in the Third Millennium B.C.E.” Prof. Steiner has succeeded in deciphering an Egyptian text that has dumbfounded scholars for more than a century. The text (see illustration) is a collection of magical spells inscribed on the subterranean walls of the pyramid of the Egyptian king Unas at Saqqara. The pyramid was built in the twenty-fourth century BC, but Egyptologists agree that the texts are older, maybe as old as 3,000 BC.

The passages are serpent spells provided to the ancient Egyptians by Canaanite priests from the ancient city of Byblos (in present-day Lebanon). Because they are written in hieroglyphic characters scholars previously tried to read them as ordinary Egyptian texts but have consistently failed to make any sense out of them. Prof. Steiner apparently has cracked the code of these passages. “It’s unintelligible to Egyptologists, but it makes perfect sense to Semitists,” he told National Geographic News. It turns out that these are Semitic inscriptions written in Egyptian hieroglyphics used with Egyptian phonetic values to spell Semitic words. These spells are in the Semitic language (Proto-Canaanite) of the Canaanite priests, a language which is an archaic form of Ugaritic and Biblical Hebrew. These inscriptions thus represent the earliest attestation of a Semitic language and the earliest continuous Semitic text ever deciphered.

These ancient texts with their marriage of Egyptian script and phonetics with Semitic grammar and vocabulary thus evince an ancient form of what could be called “Ancient Egyptian Proto-Canaanite.” However, we could also with good reason call it Ancient Egyptian Arabic. How so?

The (Proto-)Canaanite language is a member of the Northwest Semitic branch of languages, which also includes Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and others. Arabic has traditionally been placed in the South Semitic branch, but recently some scholars have grouped it with Canaanite (thus “Arabo-Canaanite”) within the Northwest Semitic or even “Central Semitic” branch, while others disagree. Nevertheless, the close relationship between (Proto-)Canaanite and Arabic is clear.

University of Michigan Professor Emeritus George Mendenhall, one of the world’s leading authorities on the Near East and Near Eastern languages, has identified the “earliest identifiable Arabic-speaking social group” as the Midianites, an important Kushite (i.e. Black) political entity that came into existence suddenly in the 13^th century BC in northwest Arabia. This highly sophisticated culture spoke a language which is an archaic ancestor of modern Arabic. Further, observing that the earliest segments of Biblical Hebrew as a rule exhibit the highest percentage of Arabic cognates, Mendenhall affirms that the further back we go in time the closer Hebrew is to Arabic. Hebrew’s predecessor and source, the Canaanite language called Ugaritic, was also very similar to Arabic as revealed by recently discovered texts. Documents excavated in Ras Shamra, a city in ancient Syria, by the Lattakia Department of Archeology show that ancient Ugaritic is very close to Arabic in grammar and vocabulary, with around 1,000 cognate terms. This closeness between Ugaritic/Canaanite and Arabic suggests that the ancient Proto-Canaanite and the ancient Proto-Arabic languages were close. This then raises the possibility that the ancient Canaanite language behind the Egypto-Semitic magic spells of King Unas’s pyramid was a Proto-Arabic language and thus reflect an Ancient Egyptian Arabic, not unlike that spoken by the Prophet Musa who was in Egypt around that time (ca. 2,000 BC).

We thus may very well have in Figure 1 an actual illustration and example of the type of language, Ancient Egyptian Arabic, which the Prophet Musa spoke.

(Dr. Wesley Muhammad is an Historian of Religion who earned a Bachelor’s degree (1994) in Religious Studies from Morehouse College and a Master’s degree (2003) and Doctorate (2008) in Islamic Studies from the University of Michigan. He has authored several scholarly studies on the Teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, including “The Truth of God: The Bible, The Qur’an and the Secret of the Black God” as well as “Black Arabia and the African Origin of Islam.” )