Ancient Egypt : state and society 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