Bro. Asar Imhotep wrote a 42-page paper titled, “A Lesson in Egyptian Determinatives: The Case of KMT,” in which he opines on why the word “Kmt” and “Kmtyw” doesn’t mean “Black People” or “Black Land.”

On page 7 in his paper, Bro. Imhotep says that if the Kmtyw wanted to convey color, they would use the Black hair strand determinative. Bro. Imhotep provides examples with words like,
“to be in the dark”
“to be blind”
and the word “black” itself which all have the Black hair strand determinative.

Interestingly, a few lines down (highlighted in red) he appears to discredit his theory when he says,
“―black can be written without the determinative for hair, as can be seen in this variant km ―black, but this omission is still rooted in the variants above. In other words, we have the variant with D3
determinative as representative of the more fuller sense and it gives us a point in which to cross-check if the scribe decided to omit a glyph, which is very common in Egyptian writing. ”

he then goes on to say,

“The question now becomes, if blackness was conveyed using the D3 hair determinative, why do we not see this determinative on any variants of the word km.t ―Egypt? If the Egyptians wanted to speak
to the color of the land or the people, why didn‘t they use a glyph that they associated with blackness to reaffirm that the root deals with color? We should see this in at least one example, but there are no such
cases. They did employ this determinative, however, to a number of other vocabulary terms. ”

If “km” could be written without the hair strand determinative, why do they need to add the hair strand determinative? And is the hair strand determinative used for all things that are Black? Wouldn’t that be the case?

It’s a good paper, with a few holes that leave us with more questions than answers.