Thursday, March 28, 2024

Zambians involved in creation of Ancient Egypt?

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ancient egypt

Has an article instantly so profoundly changed your life that you realize you are no longer the same person you were minutes or half an hour before the event? The pivotal moment for me was Friday May 10 from 8:05 to 8:45am. I was supervising my students who were quietly taking their two hour final examinations. I scrolled down my e-mails and saw my friend’s name with whom I rarely communicate. The e-mail said read this attached article which I have just published.
The journal article that Dr. Chisanga Siame had just published was titled: “Katunkumene and Ancient Egypt in Africa” from the Journal of Black Studies of 20 March, 2013. As I was reading it, I realized that it was providing possible definitive proof for the first time that I, my ancestors, we Zambians and Africans were the founders of ancient Egypt. The ancient civilization of Egyptian Kingdoms headed by powerful Pharaohs dominated North Africa and the Middle East for almost two thousand years from c 3100 to 1090 B.C. E.

This was before Assyrians, Persians, the Babylonian Empire, Greeks, and Romans occupied Egypt. This was also before Christ. The Egyptian civilization was the first to create a large empire, establish writing using hieroglyphs, large scale political economy, the bureaucracy and built the sophisticated massive pyramids.

Europeans and their scholars for a long time have denied that any Africans were involved in the Egyptian civilization. Their argument was that if they built the Egyptian civilization, where are those same Africans and their descendants to day?

What excited me the most is that Dr. Siame had cracked the code which was hiding right under our noses. He found out that the Bemba term uku tunkumana about two thousand miles away South of Egypt may have descended from the name Tunka Men the name of the ancient kingdom of Sudan suggesting a connection between the Bemba of Zambia people and ancient Egypt.

Dr. Chisanga Siame also discovered that his clan Namwanga the name of Siame in Zambia may be traced back to the Kings of ancient Egypt named Pharaoh Siamen who ruled in Egypt from 986-967 B. C. E. As I was reading, I was getting more and more excited. I felt like calling all my relatives, my friends, President Sata and President Kaunda of Zambia, or Oprah Winfrey or President Obama, Nelson Mandela or any African who could listen.

Dr Siame found connections between “the mushabati of the Silozi language of Western Zambia and the word umhlabathi found in Sizulu and SiXhosa” in South Africa (p.265). Both could be traced back to the Egyptian Pharaohs burial practices.

He also found out that the use of Nya prefix to denote a woman among my own tribe the Tumbuka, as is NyaBanda or NyaNkhata, may have come from ancient Egypt when our ancestors lived there.

At this time you may be asking so many questions just I did. How did Dr. Siame come up with this knowledge? Why this information didn’t come from important famous big name scholars with big grants from Europe especially Paris and London? May he Harvard? Isn’t this an internet hoax? The answer is simple but also complicated.

Dr. Chisanga Siame graduated with a political science degree from University of Zambia in 1976. He obtained his Ph. D. in Political Philosophy from NorthWestern University. These degrees did not prepare him to do this research. He had to study on his own for many years mastering hieroglyphs, looked at the work of Egyptologists, and especially that he focused deeply on studying philology, and then the morphology, phonology, semantics and syntax of language. There is so much information in his short 20 page published article. He had to work very hard for many years on his own in a very solitary way to make these discoveries. He could not get any grant for his research.

By Mwizenge S. Tembo

Author of “Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture”
Professor of Sociology Bridgewater College

73 COMMENTS

    • Yayayaya Zambians Zambians, what the hell is wrong just to accept that you are Zambians, Bembas pure and full stop?
      Today you want to be Egyptians?

    • Who gave this man a PhD I will ask them to get it back this shallow thinking worries me if Iam to do a critical appraisal of his paper I would give him a zero. Phonetic sounds of words should never be an indicator of originality or contact. What kind of shallow thinking is this. Siamen as siame a Bemba from Egypt . Lol my foot. Next this Accademic fraud star would claim Bembas came from Thailand because in medicine we use the word Siamese to denote Twins. But the originality of that word is Thailand. Yaba where is western bla bla university I’ve never heard of it

    • I am very educated Dr. iyi ni miss you ancient studies are not anything but personal concursion o your masters this is rubbbish and your theaories are trully based on earthism, i wonder ig your are christian enclining your thealogies to those o the freemason not so clever Dr. WE ALL KNOW WHO YOUR representations are and who are trying to teach educate people as a doctor on what can build them think forward i as a masters holder thinks better than your enlighted head.

    • @Nostradumus and Octopus Bwalya. I pity you both my young brothers…you suffer from severe ignorance and an inferiority complex placed on all of us by European civilisation. I would believe this claim, as I have spent the last year studying ancient Africa. What you need to know is the white man has lied to us all. They have lied about Egypt to take away the fact that ancient Egypt was built by blacks, us. The river Nile was a major highway/mototway in the ancient world..and people from north Zambia, and possibly the rest of southern Africa, took their knowledge and craftmanship up to Egypt and the northern regions, some settled there. PTAH an Egyptian god, means a small hill, in bemba a small hill is umuputa..so Ptah.

  1. Well… this is kind of confusing…. and contradictory to the existing theory that everyone originally came from South Africa ! It is easy to be convinced by their researchers since they have the skulls and anthropology degrees to prove the theories !
    However, I wish our solitary scientist all the best in his astounding research !

    • OMG have Zambians stopped learning history?Its common knowledge that we came from Egypt and not South Africa.We are talking way before Shake Zulu here! Gee!

  2. We built Egypt using white labour and through intermarriage with the whites(our laborers then) we produced Chinese. Check Chinese DNA and it will point to that history

  3. So why haven’t any hieroglyphs been found in this part of the world. People should stop trying to create things. At least the Saan people left paintings in caves. Talk about that and not imaginations please.

    • May I ask?
      Have we as Zambia or Africa at large heavily invested in history and research?
      Do you want the Whites to come and discover this for us when they were busy chopping off the Noses on the Pyramids so that the Pharaohs don’t look African when they were?

  4. So we built Egypt and yet we are struggling to plant grass and use it for Zambia’s staple diet of football? we are not organised enough to carry out such mammoth tasks as to build cities. If building cities was in our DNA, Lusaka would have been the envy of the world and yet it remains thousands of years backwards. Inspiring but let’s fix Zambia first before we can phone the rest of the world and tell them how good we are.

  5. Dr Siame is not only very correct on ` the mushabati` and `umhlabathi` connections to eygpt to western zambia and south africa respectively… but also on the Nya prefix of eygpt to tumbukas of eastern zambia and malawi

    But on the bembas i think he misdirected himself ,,, there is an obvious and clear link between bembas and nigeria,, NOT egypt, i find it hard to understand how Dr Siame could have missed that one. I suggest further genetic investigations by on bembas and yorubas or ebu to prove this case once and all..

    • @ndobo
      Come on, tell me about the Bemba link with Nigeria. This is a new one to me. How come? Please explain.

    • Wantanshi, pretty much all Bantu peoples, including a large proportion of Nigerians can trace their beginnings to Cameroonian highlands. If there is anywhere we are from, it is there.

    • @Ndobo.. I don’t think DR SIAME says Bemba’s originated in Egypt, in fact no tribe originated there. Mankind originated in the Rwenzori mountains Uganda, kenya etc, and then spread out. On the other hand he says bemba’s contributed to Egypt or the building of Eygptian dynasties…from my reading of the Egyptian Book of the dead, there is evidence that Egypt had contact with many people’s of the interior not only Bemba.

    • The Nigerians were ALSO in Egypt. In fact, the entire belt of Western African people came from the Nile Valley. Read Cheikh Anta Diop’s ‘Precolonial Black Africa’ or his other book, ‘The African Origin of Civilization, Myth or Reality.’

      Most people in Eastern Africa in places like Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, say that they came south from Egypt. The Wolof language of Senegal is IDENTICAL to Ancient Egyptian.

      The DNA of a pharaoh Ramesses III proves that his genes are all over the Great Lakes of Eastern Africa, but mostly in Southern Africa. ****
      Another well known one, Tutankhamun’s family reveals the descendants of that family mostly in East Africa, then Southern, West and the Horn of Africa in that order. Arabs didn’t build…

  6. Historical ideas are generally hypothetical for the simple reason that human memory is limited. Oral tradition can provide sketchy ideas similar to cartoon pictures as opposed to digital photographs. Archaeology can also help. Similarly, common vocabulary can indicate early contact through colonization, conquest, occupation or trade. When linguistic evidence is abundant, then it is possible to hypothesize a common ancestry for speakers. With regard to Chisanga Siame ‘s suggestions, it is highly speculative and rather lacking in comparative and historical method to be taken seriously. The Afro-Asiatic Family is closer to Nigero-Congolese A than to Nigero-Congolese B. In other words, Hausa is nearer to Arabic or Ancient Egyptian than Namwanga is. Insufficient data and no methodology!

    • Dr. Kasonde
      I would advise you to read Dr. Siame’s the paper first before you pass rush judgement. Remember we are all acadmics and we have tons and tons of information or knowledge; anthroplogy, archeology, biological anthroplogy, politics, philology, history, genetics etc etc.

  7. To me this looks credible. What with a President starving his people of food and giving heavy loads to his citizens he and his Ministers are refusing to carry on their shoulders.
    This kind of attitude is reminiscent of Pharaoh Remissis when he was oppressing the people of Israel. Its possible Sata can be a descendant of the Pharaohs of Egypt!
    But behold our Moses commeth in 2016.

  8. There is also Chiota at the heart of Tokyo city like commonly known in Zambia…so Zambians are the original ancestors of the Japanese…!

  9. This is a lie, nosense and to say the least rubish. would the doctor tell me that jst becase there is Banda Sea then zambians must have lived where this banda Sea is found. What the learned Doc should know is that that Arabs were very much invoved in slave trade therefore our langauges are heavy subsides by Arabic. i wld be supplised if doc one day will say zambians lived in UK before Christ cause he hears names like Livingston here and in UK.

  10. We already knew we created Egypt better known as Kemit. The wise came from the east, why do you think us Thumbukas are intelligent by nature. Moving on Egypt has Nubians, all above study nubians and you shall know we made Egypt.

    • We made Egypt and then promptly forgot all that we had learned it seems! People, let us make things to be proud of now instead of trying to latch onto former glories. Even if we had built the Great Wall of China but then migrated here we would still be in the same place and poverty we are in now. We are capable of greatness without these ancient glories. That is what we need to believe!

  11. Broken hill man,kenyapithcus,etc means we come from baboons ,the bantu came from Egypt interesting,it means some Zambians are descendants of monkeys no wonder they don’t eat the delicacy.

  12. KEMET is the original name for Egypt the Greeks changed the name. what the Dr has pointed out I kinder agree with what he says but there a few areas that I need to do some reserch on before I totaly agree. What we should also understand is, we have been tought our history from a ‘Euro-Centric point of view. We were a conqured people! The first thing a conqurer does is to superimpose upon the ruins whatever govering power considers to be a better administration system. So he brings his way of life and calls it civilization and in his-story he is gonner make himself look good. When we study history from an ‘Afro-centric point of view you would discover Africa is the birth of life and the evedence is there for us to see. One should also understand the the River Nile enters about 400,000…

  13. Maybe you should get this doc to try & relate all the Chandas’ in India to those in Zed too!!!!
    You guys, that’s why you are never taken seriously – you are trying to stretch some imagination!! the closest we may have come – also by stretch of the imagination – is having been the slaves building the pyramids! But all that has to be a joke – coz going by the historical time scales the Luba-Lunda kingdom was still in the Congo, our migrations happened much later than ancient Egypt!

    Ye this guy did all this research ALL BY HIS OWN – talk of being peer reviewed!!????

    Ka tanka manine uko mudala!!!!!!!!

    • Boxale you have point on the Chndas in India and all the sound alike names there. I have always been curious about the slaves that were taken to India and far east through Tanzania- Dar-es-salaam. I believe quite a number of our ancestors were taken but no pure black people are present today compared to the Americas. What happened to them? Are the Chandas some of remnants?

    • Imwe banthu think! Slaves building pyramids? We were the founders and origins of people staring 150,000 years ago. If we were building Egypt two thusand years ago, who could have enslaved us since we were the only people? Don’t confuse this with the recent European colonialism and the Atlantic Slave trade of the 1600s and 1800s. As Zambians we must stop this inferiority mentality.

    • @Boxale:There are black people in India who trace their roots to E.Africa and they are known as Siddis who are few.Check youtube for videos about Siddis of India.

    • EnkA, yes am aware of the “african-Indians”.

      The point am trying to make is that, yes, names may rhyme & in the end we may indeed find that they originate from the same root – it is just that we just need solid verifiable evidence more than just some rhyming names – coz I bet you, I don’t think many Universities/colleges will be rushing to place this paper at the top of their archives!!

  14. Name rhyming may not necessarily be a prerequisite to distance blood relationships. For example “Guru” which means “King”, “Chief”, “Elder” or an “authority” in a specialized field, in Indo Asia, has the same meaning and rhymes with “Mukulu”, “Abakulu” or “Mukulumpe”, in our local lingo here.
    “Mukulu” like “Guru” means “King”, “Chief” or “elder” in Zambia. So it means we may have built ancient Bombay and possibly the Chinese Great walls?
    There’s a cluster of Islands in the South Pacific that make the Nation of Tonga. The citizens are called Tongans. You don’t wanna hear HH and Fr. Haabwalya hail from there, do you? Come on folks!

    • why not.. zambian tongans are from tonga island,,, there is also UPND there… you must ask mazoka where he used to go for holiday, off course tonga island, his mbuya`s island…hahahahahahaah

    • Did you know that we Zambians and Africans are the origins of humans from 150,000 years ago. It makes sense that we took our language to all over the world rather than the other way round. Yes, Banda Island and Tonga could be from the Tongas of Zambia.

    • Gondwe. You actually don’t realize that the earth was one mass of land before it was split into continents. It was split into continents during the times of a man called Peleg hence were the word archipelago comes from and this word means group of islands if you remember geography from grade 7. So if the whole was one island surrounded by water then it means you will find similarities in things in people in Australia to those in Africa and maybe in South America but if you believe in evolution then this is a different story but the law of themodynamics defies evolution because it states that nothing left by itself gets better and I am sure you can tell that whenever you leave your room without doing anything in it you will still need to clean it. Do some research if you can.

    • You have explained it so clearly
      However, our colleagues are so fixated on their tribal greatness that they will not believe that they was no tribe or language called Bemba at the time these pyramids were built some 5000 years or so ago! They think they have been here forever when in fact the so called Bemba were speaking some other languages in the Luba-Lunda kingdom in the forests of Congo less than 400 years ago!

  15. Next this guy will claim that we are Norwegians because Norwegian has same Names for some things and are pronounced the same.For example Umwana(bana) is barna in Norwegian and refers to children.

    • yes, why not investiage. We could have spread our language to Norway. Why are you afraid to think that way? Is because we Zambians have been told only Europeans could speard thing to us and not the other way round?

  16. nonsense!…it is common knowledge Zambians originally came from SPAIN..the bemba word for shoe (zapato) is the same as in spanish…this is definitive!! kekekekeke

    • Nice thinking from plannet mars yes even in Malawi their is nsapato so Malawians came from soain

  17. I haven’t read the paper, but would like to believe that it takes a lot more than similar names, lingustics, phonetics e.t.c. to allege common ancestry. There should be more evidence and analysis to show a connection. In Japan you have names like ‘Kumamoto’, ‘Kanamoto’ e.t.c Is that where the easterners of Zambia came from or went to colonise? What about the ‘Bandas’ in Sri Lanka? In any case, it doesn’t really help us with all the ongoings in Zambia for us to be linked with ancient civilisations – if anything, by the behaviour of some groups, we seem to be ‘de-evolving’, if there is such a word.

    • Many Zambians and Africans seem to be mentally intimidated. We could have spread those languages and names. We are the origin of all the 7 billion people in the world. We migrated and spread out to the rest of the rest of the world about 150,000 years ago.

  18. With the advent of DNA testing technology, it should be possible to verify all this by DNA testing surely. Obviously it will leapfrog and negate most of the painstaking work done by people like Dr. Siame. Unfortunately, advancements in technology can be unkind at times.

  19. I bet a lot of bloggers don’t know that most Pharoahs were Sudanese. Check the names of the Pharaohs and you will be amazed. I have been researching into thos for a while now and know that Dr Siame is correct. What raised my curiosity was when one of the ministers in Egypt back in the 80s was in Times of Zambia with a Zambian surname but he was pure Egyptian. The only problem was information was limited in the 80s and I was young but I kept it in my mind to one day start researching so I found that a number of tribes in Zambia come as far as from Sudan. I am not surprised at what Dr Siame has found and would love to read his work.

    • Brother scholar am not surprised either… I was born in the 80’s and recently i have started that journey too, of discovery of our wonderful heritage…with the help of great black historians such as John hENRIK Clarke

  20. Pharaoh Taharka of the 25th Dynasty ruled 690–664, and he is identified in the Bible as “Tirhakah king of Ethiopia” (2 Kings 19:9) who confronted Sennacherib, king of Assyria, who was campaigning in Judah at that time. He is accurately called king of Ethiopia because he was a Nubian king who had invaded Egypt. The word Ethiopia in the Bible is always translated from the Hebrew word Kush, meaning Nubia (Sudan) to the south of Egypt.

    2 Kings 19:9 (NKJV)
    9 And the king heard concerning Tirhakah king of Ethiopia, “Look, he has come out to make war with you.” So he again sent messengers to Hezekiah, saying,

  21. THE BANTU PEOPLE ARE ESSENTIALLY ONE YET LOOK HOW SHAMEFULLY TRIBALISTIC WE CAN BE AT TIMES . I WATCHED A MOVIE ON THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE THE OTHER DAY AND WAS SHOCKED THAT I COULD EASILY UNDERSTAND THEIR LINGO. IT SOUNDED SORT OF LIKE LENJE…

  22. What fantastical nonsense! I read the headline and was anticipating credible reasoned arguments rather than accelerated flights of fancy!

  23. This is nonsense. Even if you want to create Bemba hegemony, this is just tto much!

    The chaps who came from the Luba-Lunda empire including the Bemba, just a couple of centuries ago now speak different dialects of the language they spoke in Congo.

    It is beyond reason that Bemba, in its present form, would have existed 5,000 years ago. Even the “English” spoken just 1,000 years would be incredibly difficult for you and I to understand!

    I understand why this fellow cannot secure a research grant…He is not a genuine researcher!

    • This researcher is telling the truth, he is in the right direction, and the reason he can’t get a grant is because for the 1000 years whites have been falsely trying to claim that whites made the Egyptian empire..and they don’t want Africans or the world to know the truth or else they would lose their power…powerful people don’t help powerless people get power

  24. This is a great find. On the other hand the ignorance demonstrated by most bloggers here is truly shocking. I know the find may seem slightly exaggerated at first sight, but an intelligent person will go and do research. And when you do research you will find that we Africans are the first people of the planet, we have been here for trillions of years…whereas the white race have only been here 6000 years flat. The significance of this article needs to be grasped, its huge. European/American civilisation is modelled on what we created in Egypt. Europeans know we built Egypt as well as the magnificent other Kingdoms on the continent, but they v lied to us, so as to dominate us…and if you are waiting for a muzungu to come and tell you the truth, you ll wait for ever, and be a slave.

    • Shocking…utterly shocking!

      The universe is only around 13 billion years old and you calim you have been around for trillions of years..dude, which rock in the universe where your ancestors squatting on?

      A genius called Einstein once said only two things could be infinte in this world, the universe and human folly, and he wasn’t sure about the universe. I think you and this joker are living proof that human folly is indeed infinite!

    • @Chief little bighorn… There’s nothing shocking here. The 13 billion years of the universe you mention is a matter of conjecture, a measurement or guess work, further the 13 billion years is the time the time since the universe evolved. At the end of the day no one quite knows the accurate age of the universe, if at all it does have a beginning and end. But, what i do know though, is that the African Man and Woman are the original people of the universe. We are the first and last. And also its well known fact that the tribes of southern, and east Africa built ancient Egypt, and thus modern civilisation, as all science today and religion are a copy of what existed in Egypt. Why do you think white people are always trying their best to make us seem inferior? Its because they know the…

    • There is too much ignorance among our People. They will continue living a lie like the one told to us in the s called Bible. The original Hebrew language did not have the letter “J” in its alphabet. So Jesus, Jew and Jehovah do not exist in the Original Text. Muzungu has been very successful with his lies for many years. People need to be enlightened.

  25. @chief little bighorn…so young man or woman, try your best to shade away the Eurocentric way of looking at things, i know you have been brainwashed to think everything a white person says must be correct, and anything your own people say must be ridiculous..I encourage to go off and do some homework, it ll save many lives. We did great things, and even after millions of our strong and brightest were kidnapped in slavery we have still managed to begin recovering slowly. Take christianity as an example, when you go to most churches why are all the images of God white, including the angels? The bible itself was written about us, we are the real jews, not the fake white jews we see today. My point is we have been brainwashed, and i can confirm that DR SIAME is telling the truth.

  26. Some of us have in America and Europe have done serious study on this subject for more than 30 years.Language and culture studies prove the facts that Kemet is and was a an African civillisation constructed by Africans.

  27. Why all this fuss? Of course the Pyramids were built by Africans Egypt is in Africa, A superpower like Egyptian empire would have explored and traded with all tribes along the length of the Nile river. That would have brought them into contact indirectly or directly with tribes deep into Central Africa. The Pyramids didn’t build themselves slave & paid labor would have come from far and wide. I think language is one of the most accurate and reliable ways to trace history because words carry the signature of history encoded in their meaning that is fairly immune to political manipulation. A great example of this the work of John Marco Allegro in his interpreting the dead sea scrolls and also his later work that shows how judeo christian religions evolved out a mushroom fertility cults.

  28. I find is wonderful that our DNA can trace humankind having emerged out the southern tip of the continent and western religious ideology’s roots are to be found on the Northern side. Africa is an incredible piece of the puzzle we should celibate this and look with open minds to try discover new patterns of our collective past.

  29. I have just acquired Mr Mwizenge S Tembo’s book ‘Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture and I am enjoying it. I have also read the article about Zambians possibly contributing to building ancient Egypt and I am fascinated and I truely believe it is possible because of the chain events happening at the time, if slavery was as brutal as it was in America when Egypt was being built, you only have to look at the evidence how africans spread in the americas, Since they were already in africa there was nothing stopping them(transport wise) from spreading through the continent to start afresh or find new lands, they might not necessarily been running away, it could be they were growing and needed new land for their growing populations. As for languages and people they evolve with time.

  30. Iam zambian currently working in Egypt and I support Mr Siame with his connecting Zambia to this side of Africa, as there are similarities ( with swaka or Lamba- same bonse ni Luba/Lunda) Sugar is Insukale in swaka/lamba, Egyptians call it Sukari , glasses/lenses in swaka/lamba are called Amandala Egyptians call then Nadara. But one word is funny Ayiwa is yes in Arabic but its no in Shona or is it Ndebele…but somehow for similar anotations base YES/NO

  31. Read Cheikh Anta Diop’s ‘Precolonial Black Africa’ or his other book, ‘The African Origin of Civilization, Myth or Reality.’ Or, Mohamed Gadalla’s ‘Exiled Egyptians.’

    The DNA of a King Ramesses III proves that his genes are all over the Great Lakes of Eastern Africa, but mostly in Southern Africa. ****Another well known man, Tutankhamun’s family reveals that the descendants of that family are mostly in East Africa today ****
    Most people in Eastern Africa in places like Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, say that they came from Egypt (Misri). The Wolof language of Senegal is IDENTICAL to Ancient Egyptian. Arabs went to Egypt en masse AFTER Mohammed’s death in 632 AD. Ancient Egypt…

  32. This is the truth EGYPT IS IN africa Not Europe all the statues icons an d hieroglyphics clearly teaches shows they were b lack people…I said this on Zimbabwe National Television for 5r years and all who challenge this are simple voluntarily and deliberately aNTI`Afrocentric………

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