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A PROVOCATIVE TOUR THROUGH THE ANALYSIS OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

scope reaches from the Sahara and the Horn of Africa to eastern Africa. All of the substantive chapters inHistory 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 ofX 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.