Did you know that “Egypt” wasn’t the real name of this country in ancient times, and it still isn’t even in modern times? Nope, that’s one of the many misconceptions about the country we call Egypt today (Can a country actually catfish people?). What else do we think is true about Egypt but really isn’t? That’s what John reveals in this episode of The Egypt Travel Podcast – conceptions and misconceptions of both modern and ancient Egypt (or whatever it’s actually called… find out in this episode!).

For more travel advice on trips to and around Egypt, check out all the other episodes of the Egypt Travel Podcast. And please feel welcome to go to www.EgyptElite.com for help planning your trip to Egypt, and we’ll be delighted to help you make it a reality.

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Episode 33 Transcript

Sabah el xheir, everyone. Greetings from sunny Aswan, Egypt where I’m recording this latest episode of the Egypt Travel Podcast while I’m here with 3 different sets of clients who are touring Egypt right now.

One of the clients in a small private group I have here right now suggested the other day that I should do a podcast episode covering common misconceptions of Egypt, and he did a great job of giving me a few starter ideas based on misconceptions that he, his sister, and his fiancé had about Egypt before they came. I met them for dinner in Luxor last week, and as they told me the things that they had assumed about Egypt but were surprised to find out were different once they arrived and began exploring the country, I realized that Michael, you were exactly right. This topic needs its own podcast episode, or maybe even a series of them.

Despite all the info out there (like this podcast, like EgyptTravelBlog.com, and all the other resources on Egypt that we and others put out), and despite the millions of tourists that visit Egypt every year and return home to talk about how wonderful and surprising the experience was, there are still hundreds of millions of people out there who have certain conceptions and misconceptions about Egypt. And I’m always amazed at how off people’s conceptions of Egypt are sometimes. Whether it’s in regards to ancient Egypt (which wasn’t even called Egypt, by the way) or the modern country (which also isn’t really called Egypt either, by the way), Egypt remains a land of contrasts, myths, misconceptions, and lots of surprises.

Let’s start with the name, since I probably just confused you on that topic by saying that wasn’t and isn’t the real name of the country. In ancient times, the place we know today as Egypt was called Kemet. Egypt as a name was a later Greek creation, Aigyptos, which was derived from the Egyptian name for the city of Memphis, which was also a Greek name we still use today for that ancient capital of Egypt, but which had a different name in the ancient Egyptian language too – Hwt-Ka-Ptah if anyone is interested, which meant Mansion of the Spirit of Ptah, an ancient god. So from Hwt-Ka-Ptah, the Greeks started staying Aigyptahhh, and of course they put “os” on the end of everything because, well they’re Greek. So we get Aigyptos, which then was picked up in Latin as Aegyptus after the Romans took Egypt from Greece, and then Egypte in old French, and now you can probably see where in English we get the word Egypt from.

It wasn’t the name of the country, but the Romans and the French and the English have been so globally dominant for the past 2000 years sailing around everywhere telling everyone about this great country called Egypt, so the people here just rolled with it and still do. They’re just like – sure, call us whatever you want, as long as you come see the Pyramids and stuff.

Similarly, when the Arab tribes from present-day Saudi Arabia invaded Egypt in the 600s and brought both the Islamic religion and the Arabic language to the area, they called the country Masr. Masr remains the country’s name today in the actual native language of the people here… not the indigenous language, but at least the current native language.

So Egypt – that’s basically the pan-European version of the country’s name. Masr that’s the native Arabic version of the country’s name. And Kemet is the original indigenous ancient Egyptian name for this country.

Related to that is another misconception about Egypt. Many of the people here, especially in northern Egypt, aren’t the same as the ancient Egyptians who built pyramids and empires here thousands of years ago. Many modern-day people here are Arabs descended form the tribes across the Red Sea in the Arabian peninsula or Turkish tribes to the north who came and settled during the long Ottoman occupation period. In fact, in the Delta region of Egypt in the north you can see many people who are very very light skinned, almost white, because they are of Turkish descent from Anatolia in modern-day Turkey or the Balkans in Europe or the Caucuses region, where the word Caucasion even originated.

In fact, Egypt’s last royal family was ethnically Albanian. They were from the European part of the Ottoman Empire and became governors here when the Ottomans ruled Egypt and then kings of Egypt when they broke away from Ottoman control. And the last famous royal family before that, of which the Cleopatra was a member, was Greek and Macedonian… they were from Europe too!

Which is actually really funny because in the new remake of the famous film about Cleopatra, the Israeli actress Gal Gidot was cast to star as Cleopatra, and all these idiots in the West were screaming online about how dare they cast a non-African to play an African queen? But guess what… the irony is that these uneducated people who think they’re so worldly and knowledgeable about Africa and Egypt were completely ignorant of this place’s history. They were imposing their own assumptions and misconceptions onto Egypt and then screaming at others who were actually getting it right.

Cleopatra wasn’t African; she was of European descent from the Balkans. And Gal Gidot, actually being from the Middle East herself, was way more ethnically diverse than Cleopatra ever was.

Only in the very far south of Egypt in what we call Upper Egypt or Lower Nubia do you see what are likely continuous lines of truly indigenous ancient Egyptians still inhabiting Egypt today, although some would argue that the Coptic families in Egypt are very likely the next most closely related to the ancients because they didn’t mix and marry with the invading Arab tribes from Saudi that took over the country after the Muslim conquest in the 600s.

Ok, so in sum here, Egypt is a foreign word used to refer to ancient Kemet, in the original Egyptian language, and modern Masr, in the Arabic language. But Egypt is the commonly accepted word in English for the country, so Egyptian themselves accept and embrace it as well, at least in other languages. And modern Egyptians are a mix of Arabs, Ottomans, Nubians, and more, in addition to indigenous Kemites or Kemetese or whatever adjective the ancient citizens of Kemet would have called themselves.

So now let’s go back nearly 5000 years to ancient Kemet and talk about one of modern Egypt’s greatest monuments – the pyramids. First, we honestly still don’t truly know how they were built. There are theories, but they are just that. Most likely the ancients used either long or winding mud-brick ramps, but they just as easily could have used a material or technique that we haven’t yet imagined and which isn’t currently referred to or spelled out in any surviving pictorials or records.

Second, the pyramids were most likely not built by slaves, but instead by local workers who were taking turns performing a period of national service to the state (i.e., the Pharaoh). Since they didn’t have an IRS or currency back then to collect taxes and the Pharaoh didn’t really need to collect a percentage of crops or meat that could spoil, the ancient Egyptian state often took taxes in the form of labor, and some of that labor was put to work building the final resting places of the god-kings who ruled absolutely.
How do we know this? Well, the best evidence comes from the ruins of the accommodations provided for the workers around the pyramid building sites and the remains of the food that they were fed in these areas. For example, precious meat would not have been wasted on slaves, yet remnants of massive amounts of meat have been found amid the workers’ villages surrounding pyramid construction sites. So it’s more likely that the builders of the pyramids were more of a national service corps that was conscripted to work for the Pharaoh for a period of time in exchange for the protection, both physi