Quotes from John Romer

the erection of Djoser's pyramid provided pharaoh's subjects with visible evidence of the power of the transport and supply systems that they had built over the previous half-millennium and which were the very essence of the state.

For though Europe has no deserts and no Nile, Champollion and Ramesses both lived in small-scale wheat-based economies founded on the technologies of the Middle Eastern Bronze Age. Broadly speaking, the material elements of those two economies – stone-cutting and metal-smelting, animal husbandry and farming and the everyday technologies of house and home – weaving, potting, baking, brewing, cheese-making and the rest – were much the same.

The supreme irony in this is that though written texts were never at the heart of pharaonic culture, those that have survived have played a major role in the construction of modern ancient Egypt. Such a fundamental role, in fact, that ever since Jean François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century, the study and translation of pharaonic texts has continuously distorted a broader understanding of that ancient culture.

In similar fashion, the assumption that the texts within the pyramids were products of a dawn-land of primitive religion long served to isolate those dark columns of hieroglyphs from the living world that drew them. As Harold Hays, one of the Pyramid Texts' most acute commentators recently observed; 'the agent and event are erased, and without them there is no human history.

Coupled with efficient systems of tithing and supply conducted in the name of pharaoh, the valley's prodigious fertility had promoted such colossal surpluses within the state that, after some four centuries, the government was able to conceive and undertake the construction of four colossal pyramids and their attendant temples.

Sheik Muftah Culture

The Egyptian Origins of the Semitic Alphabet'.