Names
The term Bejawi comes from Ta-Itjawy "people of Itjawy".
Ta-Seti Neferet, the mother of Egyptian King Amenhemet I's was of a peoples from Upper Egypt known as Ta-Seti. He built a great city state called "Amenemhat-itj-tawy" ("Amenemhat the Seizer of the Two Lands"), more simply called Itjtawy. Populations from the Ta-Seti region came to people Itj-tawy and from this power centre, Amenemhat I's armies extended the Egyptian empire. Egyptologists who believe Amenemhat I may have waited until his twentieth year to make the move to his new city base their evidence on an inscription found on the foundation blocks of the pyramid's mortuary temple. It records Amenemhat's royal jubilee, and also that year one of a new king had elapsed, suggesting that the pyramid was started very late in the king's reign. King Amenemhat I reorganized the administration of the country, keeping the hereditary nomarchs who had supported him, while weakening the regional governors by appointing new officials at Asyut, Cusae and Elephantine. Another move, both to dilute the army's power and to raise personnel for coming conflicts, was his reintroduction of conscription. In order to protect Egypt and fortify captured territory in Nubia, he founded a fortress at Semna in the region of the second Nile Cataract, which would begin a string of future 12th Dynasty fortresses. Along with protecting his newly acquired territory, he also create a stranglehold over economic contacts with Upper Nubia and further south.
Amenemhat's Ta-Seti army and conscripts came to be known Ta-Itj-tawy. In modern languages this is pronounced Bigawy, Bedjawi or Bejawi.
The Beja have been named "Blemmyes" in Roman times, "Buga"s in Aksumite inscriptions in Ge'ez, and "Fuzzy Wuzzy" by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was specifically referring to the Hadendowa, who fought the British, supporting the "Mahdi," a Sudanese leader of a rebellion against the Turkish rule administered by the British.
Read more about this topic: Beja People
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“Consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling with forts like chestnut-burs, or Echinidæ, yet the police will not let a couple of Irishmen have a private sparring- match on one of them, as it is a government monopoly; all the great seaports are in a boxing attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, “just in case” in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity—their links with their dead and the unborn.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)