Origin of the ancient Egyptians CHEIKH ANTA DIOP
Origin of the ancient Egyptians
CHEIKH ANTA DIOP
the following is a partial reprint from the publication:
General History of Africa 2: Ancient Civilizations of Africa
The Egyptians as they saw themselves
It is no waste of time to get the views of those principally concerned. 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: k m t = Black people. This is the strongest term existing in the Pharaonic tongue to indicate Blackness; it is accordingly written with a hieroglyph in the Pharaonic to hieroglyph representing a length of wood charred at the end and not crocodile scales. 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 km = Black; it therefore means strictly Black people 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 Black people 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, kmjtw = Black people, 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. These are the only adjectives of nationality used by the Egyptians to designate themselves and both mean 'negro' or 'Black' in the Pharaonic 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. They prefer the expression 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 particular expression Egyptologists suggest that 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 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 kme, it is not possible to do so in the case of the two adjectives of nationality 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 nahas to designate the Nubians; and nahas 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.
The divine epithets
Finally, Black or negro is the divine epithet invariably used for the chief beneficent gods of Egypt, whereas all the malevolent spirits are qualified as desrêt = red; we also know that to Africans this form applies to the white nations; it is practically certain that this held good for Egypt too but I want in this chapter to keep to the least debatable facts.
The surnames of the ilaahs are these:
Kmwr = 'Great Black Man' for Osiris
km = Black + the name of the ilaah (man)
kmt = Black + the name of the ilaah (woman)
The km (Black) qualificative is applied to Hathor, Apis, Min, Thoth, set kmt = the Black woman = Isis. On the other hand 'seth' , the sterile desert, is qualified by the term desrêt = red. The wild animals which Horus fought to create civilization are qualified as desrêt = red, especially the hippopotamus. Similarly the maleficent beings wiped out by Thoth are Des = dèsrtjw = the red ones; this term is the grammatical converse of Kmtjw and its construction follows the same rule for the formation of 'nisbés'.
Witness of the Bible
The Bible tells us: ' . . . the sons of Ham [were] Cush, and Mizraim [i.e. Egypt], and Phut, and Canaan. And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Havilah, and Sabtah, and Raamah, and Sabtechah.' Generally speaking all Semitic tradition (Jewish and Arab) classes ancient Egypt with the countries of the Blacks. The importance of these depositions cannot be ignored, for these are peoples (the Jews) which lived side by side with the ancient Egyptians and sometimes in symbiosis with them and have nothing to gain by presenting a false ethnic picture of them. Nor is the notion of an erroneous interpretation of the facts any more tenable.
. . . . the common ancestor of the Annu settled along the Nile was Ani or An, a name determined by the word khet and which, dating from the earliest versions of the 'Book of the Dead' onwards, is given to the Black man osiris (ausar). The wife of Ani (Black man) is Anet (Black woman) who is also his sister, just as Isis (auset) is the sister of osiris (ausar). The identity of An with osiris has been demonstrated by Pleyte; we should, indeed, recall that osiris is also surname by (?) the Anou: 'osiris Ani'.
Anu is represented alternatively by symbols (figure1). Are the Aunak tribes now inhabiting the upper Nile related to the ancient Annu? Future research will provide the answer to this question.
Conclusion
A new page of African historiography was accordingly written in Cairo. The symposium recommended that further studies be made on the concept of race. Such studies have since been carried out, but they have not contributed anything new to the historical discussion. They tell us that molecular biology and genetics recognize the existence of populations alone, the concept of race being no longer meaningful. Yet whenever there is any question of the transmission of a hereditary taint, the concept of race in the most classic sense of the term comes into its own again, for genetics tells us that 'sickle-cell anaemia occurs only in negroes'. The truth is that all these 'anthropologists' have already in their own minds drawn the conclusions deriving from the triumph of the monogenetic theory of man kind without venturing to put them into explicit terms, for if mankind originated in Africa, it was necessarily negroid before becoming white through mutation and adaptation at the end of the last glaciation in Europe in the Upper Palaeolithic; and it is now more understandable why the Grimaldian negroids first occupied Europe for 1oooo years before Cro-Magnon Man - the prototype of the white race - appeared (around -2000) . . . .