In Ancient Egypt: State and Society, Alan B. Lloyd attempts to define, analyze, 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, and endeavours to establish what allowed the Egyptians to maintain that character for an extraordinary length of time, despite enduring cultural shock of many different kinds.