Note 145 — IV. EGYPT, THE KINGDOM OF THE TWO LANDS

This may have been a contributory cause to the extreme scarcity of legal and administrative documents, the main cause being the perishable nature of the Egyptian writing materials—leather and papyrus; but when the king’s decision is the source of law, the need of codes and statutes is much reduced (see my Ancient Egyptian Religion, 43-6). In any case, the rarity of written documents obliged us to telescope in this chapter evidence much more widely spread through time than we used in our description of Mesopotamia. We have attempted to stress the features of society which we believe to have been present well-nigh from the first and which remained fairly permanent. But we are aware of the danger that we have distorted our sketch of conditions in the early part of the third millennium B.C.