Christopher Ehret has stood as one of the leading scholars of early African history for the past four decades. He has worked tirelessly during this time to illustrate how historians can employ linguistic evidence to unearth historical developments in regions and time periods for which little to no documentary evidence exists. For many historians of Africa not trained in historical linguistics, however, the manner in which Ehret and others draw conclusions about the past using language evidence remains somewhat of a mystery. In History and the Testimony of Language, Ehret draws on his accumulated wealth of knowledge in an effort to demystify this process.
To this end, Ehret divides the book into an introductory chapter and two parts. The introductory chapter provides a historiographic overview of the use of historical linguistics in writing African history, tackles some common myths about historical linguistics as a method for reconstructing the past, and outlines the major themes of the book. The four chapters comprising Part I – ‘Evidence and Method’ – focus on methodology and provide an introduction to the basic ideas of historical linguistics. Rather than serving as an historical linguistics manual, however, these chapters aim to provide historians with the necessary knowledge for thinking about and evaluating the data generated by historical linguists as a form of historical evidence. The topics addressed in these chapters include the meaning of genetic relationships among languages, the connection between the diversion of languages and the historical development of the societies that spoke those languages, the use of semantic histories of cultural lexicons to uncover the history of ideas in the distant past, the significance of loanword histories, and the utility of glottochronology in establishing time depth in language history. In Part II – ‘Applications’ – Ehret shifts the focus from methodological considerations to the application of these methods. Each of the four chapters comprising this part of the book build on the lessons from Part I to provide a case study in the use of language evidence in writing about the past. Here Ehret demonstrates his extraordinary, perhaps unparalleled, geographical and chronological range as an historian of precolonial Africa. The time periods examined in these case studies extend from the early Holocene to the nineteenth century, and the geographical scope reaches from the Sahara and the Horn of Africa to eastern Africa.
All of the substantive chapters in History and the Testimony of Language build on previously published essays and the insights they provide will therefore be familiar to anyone acquainted with Ehret's impressive body of scholarship. Ehret's goal in bundling these essays into a single volume, however, lies less in the presentation of new material than in providing students of history with an accessible introduction to the linguistic methods of history in the hope that they will engage in conversation with historians who employ these methods. Ehret certainly does not expect all historians to possess the specialized knowledge required to establish language classifications or reconstruct vocabulary. Rather, his main point is that all historians should be able to understand, evaluate, and critique arguments about the past based on linguistic evidence once specialists have done the technical work of establishing valid individual word histories. Ehret believes this the case because ‘historical interpretation of lexical testimony … calls on the same skills and ways of thinking that historians apply in historically understanding any other artifact of the past, written or material’ (p. 15). In making this argument, he seeks to emphasize that the ‘the tools for extracting history from language evidence are … historical tools’ and that ‘[t]hey deserve a place in the accepted repertoires of the historical discipline’ (p. 17).
Ehret is certainly correct in asserting that the interpretation of linguistic data in many respects resembles the interpretation of documentary and other types of historical evidence. And his call for all historians, particularly those of Africa, to understand the basic ideas of historical linguistics deserves reiteration. Ehret's efforts to situate linguistic methods of history in the mainstream of the historical discipline, however, perhaps leads him to downplay the differences in the types of narratives historians can produce using linguistic as opposed to documentary evidence. The time frames and chronologies informing narratives of early African history that rely on linguistic evidence, for instance, differ from those based on documentary sources. In addition, these narratives often do not include individual historical actors, relying instead on units of agency such as ‘speakers of X language’. A discussion of the particular challenges involved in writing historical narratives based on linguistic evidence would have enriched this valuable book, which deserves to assume its rightful position as required reading for students and scholars of African history.
