One thing that Egyptian research has brought into my life is a love of learning languages. From the Hieroglyphs, Coptic and Hieratic of Egypt to the Greek and Latin that began our sources of Egypt to the German and French texts about early translation.... Egyptology requires a desire to explore language. One early text I found was a piece called "Totemism, Tattoo and Fetishism as Forms of Sign Language" by Gerald Massey. The book talks about Ancient Egypt as well as other cultures but in this whole paper one thing stuck with me. It was a minor portion, merely 2 pages in Gerald's work. The words for phrases like "my home' and "my tribe" are similar all around the world. The list he gave in his book includes:
Algonkin: Otem
Ottowa Indians: Odem
Ojibway: Daim
Sanskrit: Dama
Greek: Domos
Latin: Domus
Sclavonic: Domu
English: Dome
Zulu: Tumu
Maori: Tam
Scottish: Tom
Japanese: Tomo
Assyrian: Timi
Coptic: Tem
Ancient Egyptian: Tem-t
Aboriginal: Tumba

I look at this huge list and I am amazed. Though it is just a selection of the languages across the world the similarity is something that we can't ignore. How did so many of these words sound the same and have the same meaning. Though Massey doesn't address it, to my recall, in his works I have always seen this as an idea that the word for home/tribe must have been an early word. And that this word must have been spread with the spread of early languages.

This is one of those subjects I need to look into in the near future. I want to know the language lines for the word home/tribe over time.

A side not one these words above is that these words represent the roots of many words such as Kingdom in English and also words for community, city, town, men and gathering of people in many languages. The study of linguistic is one of the things I find fascinating.

Beginning of the road.....

All journeys have a start and this one does too. The start is...... What does "Ancient Egyptian" mean? How do we delineate this term from Egypt in general, modern or in the past.

The short answer is time. As far as time is concerned Ancient Egypt ends at 30 BC with the defeat of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony. (That is a story for another day I am sure) Those dates are etched into the writing of Greco-Roman scholars. We know them as fact. Where it started is a completely different concern altogether. The beginning can be as early as 8,000 BC  up until approximately 5,500 BC. The debate over these dates has been going on for some time. Do we start when the images of the gods first appear or do we wait until there is a tribe with some Egyptian qualities living along the Nile River? The earliest examples of what is claimed to be an image of Anubis and another of the Apis bull and perhaps even Sekhmet are to be found on the rocks near where the Tashwinat Mummy was found in Libya.

The one thing we can be sure of is by the time the Naqada culture came around in 4,000 BC there were people we would recognize as Egyptians along the Nile. These people even had hieroglyphs, a full set of them. This also brings us to a very important word that is km.t (pronounced by most Kemet). This is the Egyptian word for themselves. No longer can we debate on which people were Egyptian and which were not. Those historical people, long ago, are kind enough to give us a slap in the head to recognize them as a contiguous group.

So, we call km.t Egypt but what did it mean to the people who wrote these texts thousands of years ago? km is the word for black and it is theorized that km.t means black soil or refers to black soil and the fertile areas of delta and bank along the Nile River. How ever we translate it by 3,100 BC we have a pharaoh ruling Egypt from Memphis, religion in place, writing and no way to deny that these people are Egyptians as our modern minds would define them.

In short, this is the brief definition of when Ancient Egypt begins and ends.