There is rarely enough information about ancient cultures to satisfy contemporary interest. This is particularly true of ancient Egypt and especially ancient Egyptian law. The civilization which left so many great buildings dedicated to its gods and its kings has left few traces of the laws decreed by these gods and these kings. This paucity of evidence, coupled with the absence of a code of written law, makes some scholars skeptical about speaking of Egyptian law as law in the literal sense (Theodorides 291). But when we look at what we know about this aspect of ancient Egyptian society, the missing code disappears as a problem even if it doesn't completely evaporate. Most of what we know comes from fragmentary legal documents and stories of burial inscriptions. We have contracts for the exchange of goods and properties as well as partial records of court hearings. We also have stories, some perhaps apocryphal, of the treatment of the king's ordinary subjects and of the actions of the king himself. What we lack, unfortunately, is a legal code written for the ancient Egyptians of the Pharaonic period. The Ptolemaic dynasty, a Hellenic dynasty that ruled Egypt during the last centuries of the first millennium BC, had some sort of written law, but Eyre describes it more as a manual for judges (92). Before them, it is reported that the Persians under Darius had the laws of Egypt written (Theodorides 319). Diodorus, a Greek historian writing in the first century BC, said that there was a codex written before the Persian occupation of Egypt. However, we have not found a single copy of the codex he claims exists. Assuming this codex existed at some point in Pharaonic Egypt, there are some...... middle of paper...... periods in history. The king often acted as a protector of his subjects, enacting reforms when abuses were revealed. For all the skepticism among scholars about treating ancient Egypt as law proper, a layman in the 21st century AD would find the Egyptian legal system during its best period very familiar. Works Cited Erman, Adolf. Life in ancient Egypt. Trans. SM Tirard. New York: Dover, 1971.Eyre, CJ “Crime and adultery in ancient Egypt.” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. Flight. 70. (1984): 92-105.Shupak, Nili. “A new source for the study of the judicial system and law of ancient Egypt: “The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Flight. 51.No. 1 (1992): 1-18. Théodorides, Aristides. “The Concept of Law in Ancient Egypt.” The heritage of ancient Egypt. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University, 1971. 291-322.