ABSTRACT
The nature of the Egyptian Kingship is so extraordinary that no study of the many centuries in which it was discharged by the three hundred or so men (and a handful of women) who held the office can hope to achieve any sort of balance which does not place it firmly in the very centre of the foreground. In a quite inescapable sense the king was the reason for the existence of Egypt, just as he was the culminating product of the genius which produced the Egyptian state and all its multifarious and brilliant apparatus. All that apparatus was constellated around the figure of the king, in whose person the essential idea of Egypt as much as its actuality was realised.
