This is a map I made showing the spread of language families belonging to the Afroasiatic (or Afrasan) linguistic phylum, with the time frame starting around 11,000 BC and ending around 600 AD (and so before the spread of Islam and Arabic). The exact timing and region of proto-Afroasiatic’s origin remains debated among scholars, but most likely it was somewhere in northeastern Africa during the late Pleistocene Epoch. The earliest diverging language family in the phylum would be Omotic, the languages of which are spoken in a circumscribed region in southwestern Ethiopia today. The other major Afroasiatic language families are ancient Egyptian, Cushitic (e.g. Somali), Chadic (e.g. Hausa), Berber (the languages of the assorted Amazigh peoples), and Semitic (e.g. Hebrew and Arabic).