Egypt had many names during its long history, among them kmt ‘black country’ and tA.wj (country-M.Du) ‘the two countries’. The language was called r ny kmt (speech of black:country) ‘language of Egypt’.
In the middle kingdom, the proper name Hwt-ka-Ptah ‘house of Ptah’, designated the precinct of the Ptah temple at Memphis, the capital. This name was applied to the city and then to the whole country. To judge from Mycenaean and Akkadian renderings, it must have been pronounced something like [ajguptah]. This yields Aígyptos in Greek, as early as Mycenaean and later in Homer. From this stem Latin Aegyptus and all modern designations except the Semitic ones like Arabic misr.
The Greek word for an Egyptian, Aigıptios, yielded the Coptic word kubti, this in turn the Arabic word qubṭi, this again the Neo Latin word Coptus, from which all the modern designations for the people, culture, language etc. of the most recent phase of Egyptian derive.