Katunkumene and Ancient Egypt in Africa

This article, given life to a great extent by the “King Tut” craze of the 1970s, addresses the controversy regarding the “race” of the ancient Egyptians. It does so, however, not by interrogating the concept of race, but by simply inquiring into whether nonarchaeological, nonphysical anthropological evidence exists suggesting origins of the ancestors of present-day Africans in Egypt. A critical contention of the article is that mainstream Egyptology has failed to make the connection between contemporary Black Africa and ancient Egypt because its methods, steeped in positivism, assume that historical artifacts in themselves can furnish answers to questions of provenance without prior assumptions revolving around a particular provenance. At the very least, the methods have unjustifiably excluded from consideration contemporary Black Africa as the home of the descendants of the ancient Egyptians. Consequently, Egyptologists have characterized ancient Egyptian as an Afro-Asiatic language and failed to recognize its substantial Kiswahili-Bantu substrate, a failure that has resulted in many improperly transcribed hieroglyphs. Convinced that ancient Egyptian was substantially a Bantu language, I have been able not only to trace some names of its kings back to the ancient Nile Valley but also to link two words in Egyptian religious practice to traditional African religious practice. These measures, added to the alternative names for Egypt unearthed by my analysis of the existing terms in the literature suggest strongly ancient Egyptian ancestry of many people in southern Africa a provenance in ancient Egypt of a substantial number of Zambians.