Whatever aspect of Egyptian society we have scrutinized, we have found Pharaoh at the centre. Yet nothing would be more misleading than to picture the Egyptians in abject submission to their absolute ruler. Their state can be described as “a self-directed organism held together by a common regard for customary rights and obligations.”[168] Their polity was not imposed but evolved from immemorial predilections, and was adhered to, without protest, for almost three thousand years. Similar predilections have, in fact, maintained the institution of divine kingship among Africans related to the ancient Egyptians down to our own days. It was good, not evil; it gave a sense of security which the Asiatic contemporaries of the ancient Egyptians totally lacked. If a god had consented to guide the nation, society held a pledge that the unaccountable forces of nature would be well disposed and bring prosperity and peace. Nor does the Egyptian view lack ethical content. Truth, justice, were “that by which the gods live,” an essential element in the established order. Hence Pharaoh’s rule was not tyranny, nor his service slavery. APPENDIX The Influence of Mesopotamia on Egypt Towards the End of the Fourth Millennium B.C.[169] The problem to which we turn now has been discussed intermittently for the last fifty years, but in the earlier discussions preconceived ideas played a considerable part. For while it is admitted that intercourse stimulates individuals, it is often believed that granting foreign influence to have affected a people is derogatory. The essential difference between mechanical copying and creative borrowing, between a slavish dependence on foreign examples and a free selection of congenial material, is entirely overlooked. Another circumstance, too, has militated against an unbiased weighing of the evidence. When our knowledge of the ancient Near East was fragmentary, it was habitual to explain changes in terms of conquest and immigration from some hypothetical, as yet unknown, region; but the extensive explorations which took place between the two world wars have discredited this type of explanation, and the supposed homelands of the newcomers proved, in cultural matters, to have been peripheral dependencies of the two great centres in Egypt and Mesopotamia. These, on the other hand, were seen to have been unusually resistant to foreign influence and capable of imposing conformity upon all comers.[170] Our increased knowledge has thus induced an unwillingness to appeal to foreign influence or migrations as explanations of cultural changes. Now, however, the opposite viewpoint receives exaggerated emphasis, and we find students proudly proclaiming their ignorance of anthropology and emphasizing, without a critical examination of all the facts, the autonomy and self-containedness of the great cultural centres of the Near East.