Let the ancestors speak Removing the veil of mysticism from Medu Netcher

289 Pages·1995·90.2 MB·English

by  Ankh Mi Ra

Remo illg th eiIofM sticism from Medu etcher
BY
ANKHMIRA
A Guide to the Grammar of the Language of Kemet
/
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H ru r m t
Let The Ancestors Speak
Removing he Veil OfMysticism From Mcdu etcher
OLUME I
GuideTo TheGnlmmar OfTheLanguage OfKemet
By
Ankh oRa
Published b
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Paperback- 19.95
1stprintin 1995
Printing: International GrdphicslBeltsville, aryland
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DEDICATION
HE WHO IS WIst: WIll REMAIl'l FAITHFUL TO
I.£ARNINEi, AND WIll PRAY DJHUTY THE NETCHER
OF I.£ARNINCti TO EinrE HIM UNDERSTANDINCti AND
ASSISTANCE. DJHUTY IS THE "BABOON WITH
SHINING HAIR AND AN AMlABLE fACE, THE SCRIBE
OF THE NETCHERU," HE WIll NOT fORSAKE HIS
EARTHLY COLlEAGUES IF THEY CAll UPON HIM
AND SPEAK THUS TO HIM: "COME TO ME AND GUIDE
ME, AND MAKt: ME TO ACT JUSTLY IN YOUR OFFICE.
YOUR OFFICE IS MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN All
OFFICES.... COME TOME, GUIDE ME! I AM A SERVANT
IN YOUR HOUSE. LET THE WORLD TEll Of YOUR
MlGHT, THAT A.Ll MEN MAY SAY: 'G.REAT IS THAT
WHICH DJHUTY HAS DONE,' LET THEM COME WITH
THEIR CHILDREN, TO CAUSE THEM TO BE MARKED
AS SCRIBES. YOUR OFFICE IS A BEAUTifUL OffiCE,
YOU AR£ A STRONG. PROTECTOR. IT REJOICES
THOSE WHO ARE INVESTEDWITH IT," ...........
u
THIS BOOK IS IJoEI)ICATED TO THE AfRICAN SESHU
(SCRIBES) BOTH ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY,
AND NO ONE PERSONIFIES THAT TRADITION MORE
THAN BROTHER LISTERVELT MIDDLETON. AS
STATED BY THE HONORED ELDER SEBA AND
SCRIBE, DR. JOHN H. CLARKE, "ABOVE All,
USTERVaT MIDDLETON KEPT THE RECORD:
6 'Jet TheAncestorsSpeak
Preface
The wise person feeds the Ka wilh what endur s so that it is
happy with that person on earth. The wi c is known by his or her
good actions. The heart ofthe wise matches his or her tongue and
his or her lips are slmight when speaking. The isl,,; ha c eyes that
are made to see and ears that ar~ made to hear hat will profit t.he
offspring. The wise person who acts with AAT is free of
fal ebood and disorder.
seful is hearing to a son who hears. If hearing enters the
hearer, then the hearer becomes a ljstener. Hearing well is
speaking \' elL Useful is hearing to onc bo hears. Hearing is
\!
bener thanan thing else. It creatcs good will. Ho good it isfor a
son to unde~1and his father's words. Ibat on ... ill reach old age
because ofthose words.
He who hears is belovedofGod. He whom God hates does nul
bear. The heart makes ofits owner a hearer or non hearer. Man's
heart is his life, prosperity and health.... He who loves to hear is
one who acts on what is said. (Dja Ptahhotep 2350 H.C.E.
Menefer, KMT)
Ankh Mi Ra is a Great Royal Scribe, nswI sS' WI: in lhe truest sense of that
designation. He is one of but a handful of Africans in the United State~ who have the
!luenc)' in the language ofAncient Kernet (Egypt) to produce such a work ofscholarship
and beauty as Let The AnccstQrS..Speak. The hard, patient sacrificial work ofthis brilliant
scholar has born sweel fmit.
African schulars have been interested in Kcmct for many years, and almost to the
pen.on, those who have studied about KMThave concluded that the AncientKemites were
indigenous ("racially" and culturally) Africans, or black people, and, as such, are a part of
the great continental cultural tradition of Africa. I Most of these scholars, studied
European literature, ancient and modern, to reach their conclw;ions. They were restricted
to viewing Kernet through the European filter, reading books on KMT written almost
exclusively by European writers. Although some European scholars agreed willi
mainstrcarn African scholarly opinion ahout the origin of the Kemites, they lu.p were
forced 0 rely in many cases on filtered information, orworse still fabricated information. 2
Th late great Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop his hrilliant colleague Dr. Thoopbik
Obenga, Dr. Jacob Carrutllcrs, Dr. Maulana Karenga, '.i!rter Rekhty imb, and Dr.
Joseph ben Jochannan are but a few ofasmall numberofAfrican American scholars who
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Preface 7
han: facilit \·vith lht" MDW IR the "Hieroglyphic" writing sy.te111 of KMT. Even
now. however the nwnbers are growing rapidly.
et \ e know thar a full grasp vIthe meaning ofth t, t and lh fullest grdSP of
he Cl ture ofK r quire fluen in the MD 'fR.. I'hi i bl.: aus' e ffilCil letthe
or
Ancient people of 'peakfor themselves. It is al 0 becau .man t lb .tran "lation"
ofEgyptoJ gi are di torted at b st and in some cases arc campi t l~ a1 ariam:e wilh
etruth. , •temati tud· ofthefalsification process has be n don and ( portl'clb
Diop J and nearl 10,ears laterb Bemal. 4
ba n 111 'political science ofEg 'plolog in op T'dtion em rging at the
I.:
r or
h~'ghl the European la t: societ ith the- brillianl work hampollion after the
in] 'ali 'e b' apol n B naparte-, Egyptology continued to de lop durin the colonial
period and durin . re ati~ apartheid _ears. OperaUn without sch lars from frica'n
the mainstream dialogu about Africa.. self-serving world histo as written hi to . that
could not stand the light offree inquiry..
In awe of the revelation. about the high African culture K the emerging
0
white supremacy ideol gy in European nations was threatened. h white l.lpr rna'is
EuropeanUtinkers si.mply could notaccommodate to a sophisticar d bla friea that v as
prior to and an influ nee on classical Europe. The m 111. ofthe barbaric, pagan savage
Pi:lrt human d prayed Afriean which had served to justify slaver and colonization was
coming unraveled.
Kemet had to he explained anew, or as Bernal (1987) has put it in chapter four of
Rlack Athena, the Furop an ~cholars went to war on Ancient Ke111et~ changing without
nev·;, data~ their earlier views that come from the Cheeks themselves. \Vhite supremacy
scholars started a new story, either Kemet was low culture with either a whit.e or black
population~or it was high culture and white, especially ifit was shown to be influent.ial to
European civilization. Therefore~ the great rewrite of African hist.ory and the process of
the falsification of histOly of both Europe and Africa was hegw1. It could be maintained
moreeasily ifacce. s to the primary sources wm; not availahle to Africans. (e.g., Dr. Diop
was discouraged from tudying Egyptology at the Sorbonne in Paris where he later
earnedhis Ph.D.)
For example, we. ha e seen 'ne!,,'Toes' tralli'P0rted through millennia and
or
Lhomands miles, and placed in the Hapi (ile) alle, <.liscrct'l from Yebu
Elephantine) to the; SOUUl as' ubiaru; not as Kl.:mitcs. Thi pla"m "nt len an
aginary lin r border b t enth .black ubian and th \ 'hit Kemitt,;.
The"e .neg! es' ere in enteU during the sla'e p~riod fur pulitical purposes
throu hapartn rshipb een 'la e society sc-ientists and pulilici' ns and 'lave owners.
8 LetTI,eAnc~1()rsSpeali
The "negro" category was never defineu in any valid scientific way. Flexible biological
~ ience, to put it kind} ',aIlo ed European sJfl 'e society 10 cia,sify and name means as
needed bV the slave ocicty. IIapi alley ethnicf<:.ultural groups were designated as
different races, with a particular Nubian group referred to in the authentic Kemetic text as
aha' an ethnic designation. ButJ aha!':was ranslated byEgyptologists a "Negroes."
What schularship could yield such a gross mismatch between what as in the text
and what was repolted by the scholarly Egyptologists? Neither the name "negro" nor the
concep appear in the Kemeti(; lext in the European sense ofthat word, This simple and
ubtlc ranslatioD "error' has profound meaning for all translations_ In this ca e it
ubscures the truth ofAfrican' racial" and cultural reality and constructs a virtual reality"
more appealing to the European scholar~, Ofcomse, the question then arises, "What el~e
do we have to fee amine, The an weI'j e ~rytJJ.ing!
\Ve are winning the battle for KMT, the battle to restore to Africa its birt11right, its
culture it~ creativeness. Those who argue that KMT was a white civilization or any
her nOD African ci iliLati n are reduced 0 u ing pTOparanda ta'tic. They u e
newspaper and popular magazine editorial ,""Titers to rc pond 0 academic challenoes_
They do this to try to win with money and political power, and th~ power ofthe media,
what they were newer able to v.lin in open ,<;cholar]y uebatc, R
Since the Cairo. ymposiunl where 20 ofthe world s Egyptologists met to debate
the race of the Ancient Egyptians, and since the European scholars oppusing Piop and
Obenga were cmbarra sed at that. meeting b the absence of documentation t.o support
their laim' for a white T there ha been a grand silence and absence of acarlemi
documentaLion and dialogue on these qu~ lions Where are the technical paper to
respond to the eleven categoric,s ofempirical data ~mpplied by Dr, Diop in Cairo in 1974?
It j th'. examination of everytbjng b..' car ful stud hat has alrC<'tdy born fruit.
Theuphilc Ohenga and Cheikh Anta Diop, among other thing. haY~ turned Greenberg'
hmguage classification system for the "!\l.jddle East." upside down, (No scholar can show
lhat the term iddlc Ea.f has any validi .. batsoever when applied to the Ancient
orld The great cons rue ion of the <'Afro-A jane' famil of langua es di appeared
under t.he relentless scholarship ofUbcnga and Diop,
-pplying the defining c-ompamtive linguist;~s mle of 'ouod correspulldellcie. as
I
the measure of genetic relation hips among languages, Obenga was able to rule out all
Asiatic languages from the ramily of African l(lnguages to which the Kemetic Janguag~s
belong The only non-African continental language that can be genetically classified
<)
\ itb Kemetic is rabie nd actuaH there is as much reason to call rabie- an African
>
ominentallanguagea there i' to calJ it I siatic, sincethe Saudi Arabian perrinsula is a'l
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Preface 9
much African as Asian. But clearly, the Indo-European and Asian family oflanguages are
in no way genetically related to African languages. ]()
So MAAr prevails in the work ofmany ofour African Scholan;.
Ankh Mi Ra is one ofthosc.
Ankh Mi Ra is the first African scholar to tackle the demanding task of writing a
grammar ofMOW NIR. This is audacious. In his work, we can sce that he is prccise.
He i~ clear. lIe manifests the :MDW NFR, the "Good Spccch" or "Beautiful Speech" that
Jacob Carruthers has elevated to an uperative concept. This moves Ankh Mi Ra to the
front ranks of scholarship and leadership for the study ofKMT. Already his students are
imitating the discipline and the unwavering search for truth and its expression through
:\11)\V NFR, "Good Speech." I am proud to count myselfamong the many who wil1leam
from him
As significant as this work is, it'is only the beginning There will be much more
from Ankh Mi Ra, There are thousands upon thousands of inscriptions to read, to
synthesize. There are translations to critique There is information to be shared and
students to be taught.
Because oftbis brilliant work, thousands ofAfricans and others will be even more
attrar,;ted lo the study of the language of Kemet and the broader culture to whieh it
provIdes access. Once that language door has been opened, thousands ofmultidisciplinary
Afi-ican and other scholars will have unfiltered access to the texts, to the primary sources,
to the actuaJ divine words ofthe Kemetic people. The Kemetic scribes will speak across
the millennia to the sons and daughters ofAfrica. Indeed, thcy did build for eternity.
Let The Ancestors Speak is a call to labor, a window on the rich culture ofAfrica,
a vision of the future. The ever popular, friendly and emotionally satisfying greeting,
"IIotep," is the beginning, not the end What do we say aller we say "Hotepl,),'
Rigorous and demanding hours, days, weeks, months, and years of intensive study is
required of all of us. Those of us who have access to tedmology, libraries, funds,
communications, and transportation have an obligation to our people to invest heavily in
the rescue and rcconstmction ofour cultural heritage.
We will certainly gain energy and direction fi-orn Ankh Mi Ra. The standard of
excellence has been illuminated.
Asa G.IIilliard III