Black Genesis (8 page)

PHARAOH MENTUHOTEP'S ENVOY TO YAM

The final translation of the Uwainat Inscriptions was a joint effort between Joe Clayton and Aloisia de Trafford, and their study and conclusions were published in an article coauthored with Borda in the July 2008 issue of the
journal
Sahara.
⁴⁰
They refrained from giving the exact location of the inscriptions for fear of tourist guides taking clients there. The inscriptions are rather faint and cannot be seen from the plains below. Fate would have it that Mark Borda happened to aim his binoculars in that precise direction, a visual lucky turn of the spade (although, as Borda later explained to us, he quite methodically and thoroughly surveyed all likely surfaces in targeted areas, and the inscription is located on a conspicuous boulder that would have been difficult to overlook). The inscriptions form a rough rectangle 0.74 by 0.84 meter (about 29 by 33 inches). The left portion of the rectangle shows a king sitting on a throne under a canopy opposite a large cartouche bearing his name. Above and below the king's cartouche is written his royal title. The right portion of the rectangle has two lines of hieroglyphs, and beneath each there is a drawing of a man making offerings. Here is the translation by Clayton and de Trafford.

(Left side)
Son of Re, Mentuhotep [inside the cartouche]
King of Upper and Lower Egypt [above cartouche]
Horus living Forever [below cartouche]

(Right side)
Yam bringing incense [upper line]
[images: man kneeling, holding a bowl; another man lying face down, holding a bowl?]
Tekhebet bringing . . . [lower line]
[image: man kneeling, presenting a mountain goat]

Clayton and de Trafford dated the inscriptions from the Middle Kingdom ca. 2000 BCE. This is, in any case, confirmed by the name of the king as well as the horizontal orientation of the hieroglyphs. The two proposed that the whole motif means that people from Yam and also from Tekhebet (a place of unknown location and, oddly, not mentioned in any other ancient Egyptian texts) came here to Uwainat to rendezvous with an Egyptian delegation sent by King Mentuhotep, probably Mentuhotep II, to present gifts to the pharaoh and also trade with his envoy. According to Clayton, de Trafford, and Borda:

This new find in Uwainat adds another startling piece to this puzzle by revealing evidence for Egypt's relations with two foreign lands and raises the possibility that these lands may have been located in sub-Saharan Africa, either south or southwest of Jebel Uwainat, possibly hundreds of kilometers further west of the Nile than previously
thought.
⁴¹

Oddly, Clayton, de Trafford, and Borda do not mention the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands in northern Chad as a possible location of the legendary kingdom of Yam and/or the mysterious kingdom of Tekhebet—although they imply this by suggesting sub-Saharan Africa hundreds of kilometers south or southwest of Uwainat. This can be only either Sudan (south of Uwainat) or the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands in northern Chad (southwest of Uwainat). The latter are perhaps the most likely and most obvious place. Clayton, de Trafford, and Borda also avoided speaking of the Tebu or Goran people who originally came from the Tibesti Mountains, even though they presumably knew that Ahmed Hassanein had encountered a group of them at Jebel Uwainat in 1923. Although no one can tell for sure how long ago these black-skinned people inhabited the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands, these areas have an abundance of rock art similar to Uwainat that suggests a prehistoric origin. Today some three hundred fifty thousand Tebu still inhabit the Tibesti Mountains, although they have now converted to Islam and therefore no longer live by their old ways. It is highly likely that prehistoric rock art of the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands and the art found at Uwainat have a common origin. It is also very likely that the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands were the final destination of the Abu Ballas Trail. Surely, then, an expedition starting from Uwainat and heading to the Tibesti highlands would be the next logical step in the search for the fabled Land of Yam or Tekhebet. We 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.