Christopher Ehret

Christopher Paul Ehret was an American scholar of African history and African historical linguistics who was particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record. He was a professor at UCLA for almost half a century and published a great multitude of works, including Reconstructing Proto-Afrasian (1995) and Ancient Africa (2023). He authored around seventy articles on a 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 Somali languages.