Kemet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article or section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since August 2006. (help, talk) |
| Kemet in Hieroglyphs | |||
|---|---|---|---|
Kemet (kmt) The Black Land or The Black Earth |
|||
The word Kemet is one of the indigenous Egyptian names for "Egypt." It is a conventional pronunciation of the transliteration kmt.
[edit] Why did the Egyptians use the name "Kemet?"
The ancient Egyptians gave their country the name "Kemet" ("km.t" in transliteration), which is translated by most Egyptologists as “the black land,” i.e. the strip of land made fertile by the black silt deposited by the annual rising of the Nile, which was the basis of both agriculture and transportation in ancient Egypt. However, Afrocentrists, who defend the theory of a sub-Sahran African origin of Egyptian civilization, theorize that "kmt" has another meaning, namely “the ground of the Blacks” (i.e. people).
[edit] History of the Word
One of the many words that the Egyptians used at the time of the Ptolemies for "designer" is km.tyw which Egyptologists interpret as “the inhabitants of the Black Land.” However, the fact that in this word the determinative of place is omitted allows the defenders of the Afrocentrist cause to interpret this word as “the black inhabitants.” Actually, it is a derived word which results from the addition of an ending to the substantive km.t, “the Black Land”; km.tyw thus means “those of Black Land, just as jmn.tyw, formed from jmn.t, “the West”, means “those of the West”.
[edit] Khem
Khem (also spelt Chem) is the Egyptian word for black, and was usually used to describe the fertile soil surrounding the Nile, which was notably blackened. As such, it was also used by the Egyptians as a name for their nation, as it was principally composed of the fertile lands around the Nile. Some feel it may derive from the Hebrew translation, Ham - the name used by the writers of the Bible to refer to Egypt.
For a period of time, Canaan was under Egyptian influence, as was Kush (part of Nubia), and Libya, one of whose leading tribes was named Pitu, there is also an ethnic connection between them. Although Ham was a name for Egypt and Africa in general, Mizraim, generally thought to translate as the two lands, was the name for the specific area of Upper and Lower Egypt in particular. Consequently, in order to describe the relationship between nations, the Bible mentions Canaan, Mizraim, Cush, and Phut, (considered by some academics to correspond to Pitu), to be the sons of Ham. Canaan was the latest region to become part of the Egyptian sphere of influence, and was the youngest. Literal readings of the text would imply that each of these nations was descended from a single person of that name, who founded the tribe from his immediate family members.
