Kemet

"Kemet" (keh-MET) is the term ancient Egyptians used as the official name of their country. (Sometimes they also called it Ta-mery, or "beloved land.") Kemet translates as "Black Land", in reference to the fertile banks and fields surrounding the Nile (black from the soil). In contrast, "deshret" is the term for the "Red Land" or the desert (a modern term derived from "deshret") that surrounds the fertile "kemet". By using the term Kemet instead of Egypt, we refer to the country by the name its own people called it (Egypt is an English form of the Greek name for this land, Aegyptos, itself derived from Coptic hi(t)-ka(u)-ptah, "the house/temple of the ka of Ptah").