The glottogenesis of Ancient Egyptian

Abstract This text is a review of Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic: Rethinking the Origins (2023). The book includes thirteen chapters all written by different scholars and addressing the relationship between Ancient Egyptian and other Afroasiatic, especially Semitic, languages. Most chapters conclude that Ancient Egyptian is indeed an Afroasiatic language but that the specificity and the degree of its affinities with other Afroasiatic languages, including Semitic, is obscured by the old age of the phylum and by methodological and theoretical issues. One chapter by Aren Wilson-Wright, however, strongly disputes the genetic relatedness of Ancient Egyptian and Semitic and thus the very existence of Afroasiatic. Most of the present review critically deals with several issues in Wilson-Wright’s argumentation.