ABSTRACT
Ancient Egypt offers a chapter in the history of human consciousness and collective behaviour. It found its own solutions to universal problems of causation and of social coherence and stability. The Introduction considers three lenses through which we can view ancient Egypt. One is culture and the shaping powers of dominance hierarchy and the transcendental roles which people come to play. A second is the search for theories of everything: how knowledge and myth are intertwined. One area of knowledge, when accompanied by deference, is sufficient to explain ‘religion’, which is an inappropriate term for the ancient world and thus not employed in this book. The third is human agency. In a society of many individuals, who retain some measure of autonomy but remain largely undocumented, following paths of cause and effect is virtually impossible, particularly since perversity is integral to human thinking and behaviour. The Egyptians, in their search for understanding, saw the universe as an opposition between order and chaos, reflected in the choice which individuals have to make between good and bad conduct. The Introduction ends with summaries of the ancient geography of the Nile valley and of the chronology of ancient Egypt.
