UNESCO Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Editor G. Mokhtar)

Ancient Civilizations of Africa
(b) It was impossible to reach scientifically valid conclusions by working 'on a large
scale'. There were almost no unambiguous examples in history of major migrations
accompanying major cultural transformations.
(c) 'Negro' was not a clearly defined concept today as far as physical anthropologists
were concerned. A skeleton did not provide evidence of skin colour. Only the
tissues and the skin itself were important in that respect.
(d) It was imperative to broach the study of palaeopathology and of funerary practices
without delay.
(7) Professor Sauneron intervened in the course of a lively exchange of views on linguistic
matters between Professors Abdalla and Diop. Professor Sauneron stated that in Egyptian
K M (feminine KMT) meant 'black'; the masculine plural was K M U (Kemou), and the
feminine plural KMNT.
The form K M T Y W could mean only two things: 'those of Kmt', 'the inhabitants of
Kmt' ('the black country'). It was a derived adjective (nisba) formed from a geographical
term which had become a proper name; it was not necessarily 'felt' with its original
meaning (cf. Frank, France, French).
To designate 'black people', the Egyptians would have said Kmt or Kmu, not Kmtyw.
In any case, they never used this adjective to indicate the black people of the African
hinterland whom they knew about from the time of the New Kingdom onwards; nor, in
general, did they use names of colours to distinguish different peoples.
(8) Professor Obenga in his turn reverted to the linguistic demonstration which had been
begun by Professor Diop. 8
(a) After criticizing Professor Greenberg's method, on the basis of the recent work
by Professor Istvan Fodor' and remarking that, since the work of Ferdinand de
Saussure, it was an accepted fact that linguistic evidence was the most obvious
means of establishing whether two or more than two peoples were culturally
related, Professor Obenga endeavoured to prove that there was a genetic linguistic
relationship between Egyptian (ancient Egyptian and Coptic) and modern negro-
African languages.
Before making any comparison, one must be on one's guard against confusing
typological linguistic relationship, which gave no clue as to the predialectal
ancestor common to the languages being compared, and genetic relationship. For
example, modern English, considered from the typological point of view, had
affinities with Chinese; but, from the genetic point of view, the two languages
belonged to distinct language families. Similarly, Professor Obenga rejected the
notion of a mixed language as linguistic nonsense.
Genetic relationship depended on establishing phonetic laws discovered by
comparison between morphemes and phonemes of similar languages. On the basis
of such morphological, lexicological and phonetic correspondences, one could
arrive at common earlier forms. In this way, a theoretical 'Indo-European'
language had been reconstructed in the abstract and had been used as an operational
model. It was indicative of a common cultural macrostructure shared by
languages which subsequently evolved along separate lines.
(b) Professor Obenga drew attention to important typological similarities in grammar:
the feminine gender formed by the use of the suffix -t, the plural of nouns by
the suffix -m (ou, a). He next analysed complete word-forms and noted similarities
between those of ancient Egyptian and a considerable number of African languages;
between Egyptian and Wolof the correspondence was total. This series of
demonstrations led Professor Obenga to the conclusion that morphological,
8. The full text, as transmitted to the Rapporteur by Professor Obenga, is attached as
Annex II in the Final Report of the symposium.
9. I. Fodor, The Problems in the Classification of the African Languages (Centre for Afro-
Asian Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, 1966), p. 158.
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