Basically, we can examine three groups of names which have applied to Egypt. In
the early period of Egypt, during the Old Kingdom, Egypt was referred to as
Kemet (Kermit), or simply Kmt , which means the Black land. They called
themselves "remetch en Kermet", which means the "People of the Black Land". The
term refers to the rich soil found in the Nile Valley and Delta. But it was also
sometimes referred to as Deshret, or dshrt , which refers to the "Red Land", or
deserts of which Egypt is mostly comprised.
Later, Egyptians referred to
their country as "Hwt-ka-Ptah" (Ht-ka-Ptah, or Hout-ak Ptah) , which means
"Temple for Ka of Ptah", or more properly, "House of the Ka of Ptah" Ptah was
one of Egypt's earliest Gods. As in modern Egypt, this was both a name for the
administrative center of Egypt, what we call Memphis today, as well as the name
of the country as a whole.
Egypt, as many people of the world refer to
the country today, is a derivative of this ancient name. Even today, people who
speak one language often change the spelling of words in another language
because of the difficulty they may have in pronouncing some of the sounds of
that foreign language. Hence, in pronouncing Hwt-ka-Ptah, the Greeks changed
this world to Aegyptus (Aigyptos), which they used in their literature as the
name of an Egyptian King (perhaps Ramesses, though in a fictional manner), the
Nile River and for the country itself. We find the word used by Homer in his
famous "Odyssey. We believe the Greeks had difficulties with the Egyptian
pronunciation of the letter "H" at the beginning and end of
Hwt-ka-Ptah.
Today, the word Egyptians often use for their country is
Misr. This is probably derived from an ancient term, Mizraim which may have
itself been derived from an ancient Egyptian word, md-r mdr , which people in
the region called Egypt. Misr is an Arabic name simply meaning "country", and
part of the tradition of this term in as a name for Egypt comes from the Islamic
Quran. The term can also mean "fortress", or "castellated" , which refers to the
natural protective boarders of Egypt which protected the country from invaders.
This name can be extended as Misr El Mahrosa.
As a final note, it is
interesting that the origin of "Coptic", a word which we today use to refer to
the Christians of Egypt (and actually, the principle Christian church of
Ethiopia, as well others throughout the world related to this form of
Christianity), actually is derived from the word Copti. The Arabs who invaded
Egypt in, like the Greeks, had problems pronouncing the term, Aegypti, which
means "Egyptian citizen". Essentially, they changed the word to Copti. Of
course, at that time, Egypt was a Christian nation, so the term became limited
to actual Egyptian Christians as the country became more and more Muslim.
Sunday, January 5, 2014
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