The Harbor and its Town: Defining the Semantic Shift of dmj from the Old to the New Kingdom

The noun dmj expresses a key concept of ancient Egyptian harbor terminology. In the scholarly literature, the term is variously translated as “quai”, “harbor”, “port” or more neutrally as “landing stage”. Moreover, it is well known that dmj underwent a process of semantic extension which apparently resulted in the colexification of the concepts [HARBOR] and [TOWN], and, subsequently, the gradual regression of [HARBOR] (CopticS Ϯⲙⲉ “town”).
My contribution aims at providing an explanative model for the semantic shift [HARBOR] > [TOWN] which has not yet been explained satisfactorily and which is, in fact, highly unusual from the viewpoint of comparative linguistic typology. Based on a thorough survey of the textual sources from the 5th Dynasty to the end of the New Kingdom, I propose to describe the Egyptian dmj according to the following four parameters: location, components, responsible officials, and commodities. By elaborating separate semantic models for the evidence from the Middle Kingdom, the 18th Dynasty, and the Ramesside Period, it will be shown
(1) that dmj initially referred to landing stages that involved specific infrastructure and were managed by different officials;
(2) that it was its use in administrative terminology that progressively led to the semantic shift [LANDING STAGE] > [TOWN]Mid-18th Dynasty.