There is rarely enough information about ancient cultures to satisfy contemporary interest. This is especially true of ancient Egypt and especially ancient Egyptian law. The civilization that left so many great buildings dedicated to its gods and kings left little evidence of the laws established by those gods and kings. This paucity of evidence, combined with the absence of a written law code, makes some scholars skeptical of speaking of Egyptian law as law in the proper sense (Théodoridès 291). But when you examine what we know about this aspect of ancient Egyptian society, the missing code fades away as a problem even if it doesn't evaporate completely. Most of what we know comes from fragmentary legal documents and stories of tomb 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, about the treatment of the king's ordinary subjects and 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 over Egypt in the last centuries of the first millennium BC, had some kind of written law, but Eyre describes it more as a manual for judges (92). Before them, the Persians under Darius are said to have commissioned the writing of the laws of Egypt (Théodoridès 319). Diodorus, a Greek historian who wrote in the 1st century BC, claims that there was a written code before the Persian occupation of Egypt. Yet we have not found a single copy of the code he claims existed. Assuming this code existed at some time in Pharaonic Egypt, there are some... middle of paper... periods of history. The king often acted as a protector of his subjects, implementing reforms when abuses came to light. For all the scholarly skepticism regarding the treatment of ancient Egypt as actual law, a layman in the twenty-first century AD would find the Egyptian judicial system during its heyday very familiar. Works Cited Erman, Adolf. Life in ancient Egypt. Trans. HM Tirard. New York: Dover, 1971.Eyre, C. J. “Crime and Adultery in Ancient Egypt.” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. vol. 70. (1984): 92-105. Shupak, Nili. "A new source for the study of ancient Egyptian judiciary and law: "The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant"." Journal of Near Eastern Studies. vol. 51.No. 1 (1992): 1-18. Théodoridès, Aristide. "The concept of law in ancient Egypt". The legacy of ancient Egypt. 2nd ed. Oxford: University of Oxford, 1971. 291-322.