Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

will return to this intriguing issue in chapter 5. Meanwhile, we must examine the Uwainat Inscriptions regarding another
issue, which was either not noticed or deemed unimportant by Clayton and de Trafford. This involves the form of the
writing of the words Yam and Tekhebet. In both names is presented the same ideogram , which is usually translated
as “hill land” or “foreign land” (that is, a place outside Egypt).
Although these translations are basically correct, we must now consider them alongside the quasi-similar ideogram
of “water mountain” that is found at Abu Ballas Hill and Muhattah Jaqub (the two main water refueling stations between
Dakhla and Uwainat). These main water stations can hardly be described as mountains: Abu Ballas Hill is only 30 meters
(about 98 feet) high, and Muhattah Jaqub is barely 25 meters (82 feet) high. On the other hand, the Tibesti-Ennedi
highlands have the tallest mountains in the Sahara (3,450 meters; about 11,320 feet), and they are known to receive 120
millimeters (about 5 inches) of rain each year. These highlands in Chad, which are directly southwest of Jebel Uwainat
and which would define an extension of the Abu Ballas Trail, are clearly befitting of the name Water Mountain.
The ideogram for “mountain” is a two-peaked mound ( ), but we have seen that when a circle (solar disk) is
placed between the two peaks ( ) it denotes the idea of “horizon,” known as akhet in ancient Egyptian. Now the sign
to denote “land” is a flattened ellipse ( ), so when it is combined with the akhet sign ( ) the meaning is “land
of the horizon.” Furthermore, by adding the sign for “people” ( ) the ideograms denote “the people of
the land of the horizon,” or, more simply, “the horizon dwellers.”
We can now recall that King Pepi II, in his letter to Harkhuf, uses the word akhet in connection to the land of Yam
so that he refers to it as ta-akhet-iu (literally, “the people of the land of akhet”). Although many Egyptologists also
translate this as “the horizon dwellers,” this is not actually correct, because in the letter of Pepi II, the word ta-akhet (the
land of Akhet) is not written with the signs( ), but with the combination of four signs: (1) crested ibis, (2)
circle, (3) half circle, and (4) flattened ellipse ( ). Further, it is true that when these four signs are combined, they
produce the phonetic sound akhet, but the meaning is quite different. However subtle, this difference provides a vital
clue to the whereabouts of Yam. Let us see why.
The crested ibis sign ( ), akh in ancient Egyptian, is an ideogram that denotes a supernatural being or entity of
light or, more simply, a “light spirit.” So when ta-akhet-iu (people of the land of Akhet) is written with this akh sign
coupled with the sign for “land” and the ideogram of three squatting divinities wearing an ostrich feather (
), we must read it as “land of the akh” or “land of the light spirits,” or, simply, “land of spirits.” Indeed,
both the American Egyptologist Henry Breasted and the British Egyptologist Wallis Budge, in their independent
translations of Pepi II’s letter to Harkhuf, rendered the term ta-akhet-iu as “land of spirits.” 42 Even though “spirits” in
this context implies inhabitants of a cosmic or imaginary land, the same cannot be said for the land of Yam, which is a
geographical reality somewhere southwest of Egypt. Could the akh people also mean “ancestor spirits”? If so, who were
these mysterious people whom Pepi II claimed populated the kingdom of Yam?
A detailed study of the letter of Pepi II was made by the French Egyptologist and philologist Charles Kuentz, 43 who
reminds us that in Egyptian hieroglyphs the general idea of a divinity or spirit is given by the sign of a human figure
donning the typical tress beard and squatting ( ). Yet this was not the case in Harkhuf ’s time, when a different sign—
the falcon on a standard ( )—was used to denote “divinity.” Thus, the sign used in the letter of Pepi II as the
ideogram in “land of the akh/spirits” ( ) must therefore mean something else—something that should fit this
geographical context of the region. One of Kuentz’s colleagues, the German philologist A. Wiedemann, noted that this
sign ( ) appears in the Pyramid Texts to denote an African people. This is also confirmed by Kuentz, who wrote: “The
determinative which is placed after , denotes in the Unas Inscriptions the names of Negroes.” 44
Kuentz also noted that in both the Harkhuf inscriptions and the letter of Pepi II, the names of African peoples are