Christopher Ehret

Christopher Ehret (born July 27, 1941), who currently holds the position of Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, is an American scholar of African history and African historical linguistics particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record. He has published ten books, most recently History and the Testimony of Language (2011) and A Dictionary of Sandawe (2012), the latter co-edited with his wife, Patricia Ehret. He has written around seventy scholarly articles on a wide range of historical, linguistic, and anthropological subjects. These works include monographic articles on Bantu subclassification; on internal reconstruction in Semitic; on the reconstruction of proto-Cushitic and proto-Eastern Cushitic; and, with Mohamed Nuuh Ali, on the classification of the Soomaali languages. He has also contributed to a number of encyclopedias on African topics and on world history.

Ehret’s historical books emphasize early African history. In An African Classical Age (1998) he argues for a conception of the period from 1000 BC to 400 AD in East Africa as a "classical age" during which a variety of major technologies and social structures first took shape. His Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (2002), brings together the whole of African history from the close of the last ice age down to the end of the eighteenth century. With the archaeologist Merrick Posnansky, he also edited The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History (1982), at that time a state-of-the-field survey of the correlation of linguistic and archaeological findings in the different major regions of the continent.

In reviewing An African Classical Age for the Annuals of the American Academy, Ronald Atkinson calls it “not easy or light reading,” but concludes that “the result is a remarkably rich, evocative social and cultural history…” and that it “will itself become a classic and shape future scholarship in early African history for many years to come.” The late Kennell Jackson of Stanford, writing in The Historian, says that “by the book’s midpoint, the immensity of his synthesis becomes apparent, as well as Ehret’s achievement as a historical conceptualizer. He repeatedly challenges formulaic ideas about causality, linearity as a model of change, and the cultural factors affecting innovation…. Ehret has written a fabulous African history book, furthering a genre far from the seemingly ubiquitous slavery studies and trendy colonial social history.” Peter Robertshaw in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, offers a more measured conclusion: “Ehret has produced a remarkably coherent and detailed history which should spur further research.”

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