Christopher Ehret

Christopher Ehret (27 July 1941 – 25 March 2025), 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 many 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.

He contributed to a number of encyclopedias on African topics and on world history, such as Volume III of UNESCO General History of Africa book series for which he wrote a chapter on the East African interior.