This workshop will be held in Room 108 at the

Joukowsky Institute of Archaeology and the Ancient World

at Brown University

Rethinking the Origins: the Departure of Ancient Egyptian as a Branch from the Afroasiatic Family is a workshop that seeks to gather world-leading experts on the Ancient Egyptian, Semitic and other Afroasiatic languages, as well as historical linguists in order to discuss an issue that has never been properly addressed in such an interdisciplinary environment: the real position of ancient Egyptian in the Afroasiatic language family. The workshop aims to explore language-specific questions from a phonological, lexical, and morpho-syntactic point of view in order to engage scholars in a linguistic debate on the origins of the earliest codified languages of Africa and the Near East. The main research question concerns the necessity for a new internal classification of the Afroasiatic languages with respect to the position of ancient Egyptian inside this family. In fact, could Pre-Egyptian be the sister, rather than a daughter, of the Proto-Afroasiatic language?