Is the old Egyptian chronology wrong? I'm heard about someone named David Rohl, who claims that the Egyptian chronology we know is in accurate, this apparently was in 2007 and the only websites that I've found that talk about this new chronology are christian based websites that are focused on proving that the bible is historical accurate, so I don't know if they can be trusted, since they would most likely overlook or deny any evidence that could pose an argument against what they believe, if you don't know what I'm talking about here: http://creation.com/egyptian-history-and-the-biblical-record-a-perfect-match http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Rohl) Oh and there is also here: http://www.offthegridnews.com/2011/03/27/atheists-and-the-dark-secrets-of-egyptian-history/ I don't know how the people on that last website feel about that bible. anyway, is there really a problem with the old chronology?
My problem, as the Linguistics Moderator, is the difficulty we're having trying to figure out where the Afro-Asiatic language family originated--which will tell us where the speakers of those languages came from. The Afro-Asiatic family has six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic. Egyptian is the only language (that we know of) in its branch, and it died out when the Arabs conquered the country after the rise of Islam. Today, Afro-Asiatic languages are spoken in southwestern Asia and in northern Africa. The Semitic branch is well-studied. Arabic is one of the world's leading modern languages by population, Hebrew is widely studied by both religionists and historians because much of the world's oldest writings are in ancient Hebrew. Aramaic, once the lingua franca of the entire Middle East, still survives, although since it is not any nation's primary language it may eventually vanish. And of course ancient Egyptian has been studied intensively; its writing system ("hieroglyphics," a syllabary in which each symbol represents a syllable) is the ancestor of nearly all modern phonemic writing systems (both alphabets like ours and abjads like Hebrew and Arabic in which vowels are not represented), with Korean as the major exception. And of course syllabaries like Japanese and Cherokee, the abugidas of India, and Chinese logograms were developed independently. We cannot figure out whether the ancestral Afro-Asiatic language arose in Asia, whence the speakers migrated to Africa, bringing the revolutionary technology of agriculture; or arose in North Africa, implying that the population there invented agriculture on their own. So the "chronology" is not really the problem. The problem is figuring out the direction of the population movements. North Africa is now a genetic stew, since most of the world's empires have sent traders, immigrants and/or conquerors. The DNA of the modern North African peoples is, essentially, indecipherable. This places a (so far) insurmountable obstacle to the tracing of their history.
