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Где кончается Египет и начинаются чужеземные страны? Еще раз о термине Kmt в надписях Камоса
The paper deals with the use of word Kmt in First Kamose Stela. There were
different opinions on the point, one of them suggesting that Kamose and his advisors
used the same meaning of the word: “this Kmt” of Kamose and “our Kmt”
of his nobles both mean ‘a portion of Kmt per se under our = Theban control’. A
detailed analysis can show however that Theban nobles of Kamose text express a
specific concept in which Kmt per se firmly coincides with contemporary Theban,
non-Hyksos controlled part of Kmt of old (= of Egypt in its regular meaning),
while Egyptian territory under Hyksos rule is not Kmt at all, in any actual or eventual
sense of the word; this territory is not an ‘occupied part of Kmt’ which is to
become a part of Kmt ever again, but constitutes a part of the “Land of the Asiatics-
Aamu” (adjacent to the whole land of Kmt) and thus is a part of non-Egyptian
world of foreigners. Some reflections of this concept within the framework of an
opposite, traditional view on Kmt can be seen in Kamose Stela which can be
shown to designate Hyksos possessions in Egypt as “the land of Avaris” and in
Tale of Apophis and Seqenenre where Avaris is named “town of the Asiatics-
Aamu”. This unique “reductionist” concept of Kmt probably emerged as a compensatory
attempt to reconcile natural general presumption that sacred land of Kmt
cannot fall under foreign conquest with the fact of Hyksos rule in the northern
parts of Egypt. The easiest though not very valiant way to achieve such reconciliation
was just to exclude these parts from the notion of Kmt/Egypt as such. The
reductionist concept in question, by the way, could emerge if only Avaris kingdom
had been really founded by certain group of Asiatic invaders, not by local
Delta Egyptian subjects of Asiatic origin, as it is not rarely assumed.
