7 Dmjw, N(j)wtjw ‘Townsfolk’ in the Coffin Texts: Social and Political Changes in Egypt at the Turn of the Third Millennium BCE
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Abstract
The Coffin Texts constitute a unique repository of sources that echoes the social and organizational changes that affected Egypt in the late 3rd and early 2nd millennium BC. Concepts such as ȝbt “extended family” or dmj “harbour, city,” among many others, became more abundant or were introduced for the first time in the private, literary and religious compositions of Egypt during these troubled times. The comparison between the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts makes thus it possible to calibrate the importance of such changes in the context of the archaeological and epigraphical record and to analyze to what extent they correspond to actual social dynamics visible in the material evidence too. The intriguing abundance of mentions to dmjw and n(j)wtjw “citizens” opens a path to explore the importance of “public” opinion, city audiences and city identities as potential counterparts of officials as well as signs of more autonomous lifestyles implicit, for instance, in concepts like nḏs “poor one,” quite popular in this same period.