ABSTRACT
Contemporaneously with Sumer, but largely independently, the great and historically influential culture of Egypt was forming in the valley of the Nile. Although the palace was the most important early Egyptian institution, the temple, as in the Sumer, played a very important role. In Egypt reckoning preceded writing, as far as present evidence indicates, there being a great paucity of material remains from the pre-literate period. Egyptian writing comes into history as a fully developed script and like Sumerian it was originally pictographic although, unlike cuneiform, the Egyptian script retained much of its original pictorial quality. While Egypt was governed by the sovereigns of the Middle Kingdom, in Mesopotamia the Sumerian restoration was challenged by the development of the Babylonian Dynasty. The language of Middle Egyptian continued until the Empire, when it became affected by extensive contacts with other cultures.
