How did the ancient Egyptians see themselves? (ancestor
[How did the ancient Egyptians see themselves? ] Into which ethnic category did they put themselves? What did they call themselves? The language and literature left to us by the Egyptians of the Pharaonic epoch supply explicit answers to these questions which the scholars cannot refrain from minimizing, twisting or 'interpreting.'
The Egyptians had only one term to designate themselves: [hieroglyphics]=kmt=the negroes (literally).44 This is the strongest term existing in the Pharaonic tongue to indicate blackness; it is accordingly written with a hieroglyph representing a length of wood charred at the end and not crocodile scales.45 This word is the etymological origin of the well-known root Kamit which has proliferated in modern anthropological literature. The biblical root kam is probably derived from it and it has therefore been necessary to distort the facts to enable this root today to mean 'white' in Egyptological terms whereas, in the Pharaonic mother tongue which gave it birth, it meant 'coal black.'
In the Egyptian language, a word of assembly is formed from an adjective or a noun by putting it in the feminine singular. 'kmt' from the adjective [hieroglyphics] =km=black; it therefore means strictly negroes or at the very least black men. The term is a collective noun which thus described the whole people of Pharaonic Egypt as a black people.
In other words, on the purely grammatical plane, if one wishes to indicate negroes in the Pharaonic tongue, one cannot use any other word than the very one which the Egyptians used of themselves. Furthermore, the language offers us another term, [hieroglyphics] kmtjw=the negroes, the black men (literally)=the Egyptians, as opposed to 'foreigners' which comes from the same root km and which the Egyptians also used to describe themselves as a people as distinguished from all foreign peoples.46 These are the only adjectives of nationality used by the Egyptians to designate themselves and both mean 'negro' or 'black' in the Pharonic language. Scholars hardly ever mention them or when they do it is to translate them by euphemisms such as the 'Egyptians' while remaining completely silent about their etymological sense.47 They prefer the expression [hieroglyphics] Rmt kmt=the men of the country of the black men or the men of the black country.
In Egyptian, words are normally followed by a determinative which indicates their exact sense, and for this particuar expression Egyptologists suggest that [heiroglyphics] km=black and that the colour qualifies the determinative which follows it and which signifies 'country'. Accordingly, they claim, the translation should be 'the black earth' from the colour of the loam, or the 'black country', and not 'the country of the black men' as we should be inclined to render it today with black Africa and white Africa in mind. Perhaps so, but if we apply this rule rigorously to [hieroglyphics] =kmit, we are forced to 'concede that here the adjective "black" qualifies the determinative which signifies the whole people of Egypt shown by the two symbols for "man" and "woman" and the three strokes below them which indicate the plural'. Thus, if it is possible to voice a doubt as regards the expression [hieroglyphics] =Kme, it is not possible to do so in the case of the two adjectives of nationality [hieroglyphics] kmt and kmtjw unless one is picking one's arguments completely at random.
It is a remarkable circumstance that the ancient Egyptians should never have had the idea of applying these qualificatives to the Nubians and other populations of Africa to distinguish them from themselves; any more than a Roman at the apogee of the empire could use a 'colour' adjective to distinguish himself from the Germani on the other bank of the Danube, of the same stock but still in the prehistoric age of development.
In either case both sides were of the same world in terms of physical anthropology, and accordingly the distinguishing terms used related to level of civilization or moral sense. For the civilized Romans, the Germans, of the same stock, were barbarians. The Egyptians used the expression [hieroglyphics] =na-has to designate the Nubians; and nahas48 is the name of a people, with no colour connotation in Egyptian. it is a deliberate mistranslation to render it as negro as is done in almost all present-day publications.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Friday, January 14th 2011 at 9:37PM
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