In Ancient Egypt‎:‎ State and Society‎,‎ Alan B‎.‎ Lloyd attempts to define‎,‎ analyse‎,‎ and evaluate the institutional and ideological systems which empowered and sustained one of the most successful civilizations of the ancient world for a period in excess of three and a half millennia‎.‎ The volume adopts the premise that all societies are the product of a continuous dialogue with their physical context ‎- understood in the broadest sense ‎- and that‎,‎ in order to achieve a successful symbiosis with this context‎,‎ they develop an interlocking set of systems‎,‎ defined by historians‎,‎ archaeologists‎,‎ and anthropologists as culture‎.‎ Culture‎,‎ therefore‎,‎ can be described as the sum total of the methods employed by a group of human beings to achieve some measure of control over their environment‎.‎ Covering the entirety of the civilization‎,‎ and featuring a large number of up‎-to‎-date translations of original Egyptian texts‎,‎ Ancient Egypt focuses on the main aspects of Egyptian culture which gave the society its particular character‎,‎ and endeavours to establish what allowed the‎.‎‎.‎‎.‎