If the pharaoh's connection to the divine was a constant of pharaonic Egypt, the institution of the monarchy was a constant of Egyptian civilization. Indeed, that institution seems to have persisted in a way less interrogated than the institutions of Egyptian religion. "In public terms," says Baines, "the king was more important than the gods." Such a statement articulates the fact that political action achieved the status of individual relevance in Egypt, as well as the fact that without individual engagement the king might not have been able to hold the society's administration intact.
Baines goes on to describe the pharaoh as the "unifying apex of a host of dualities that constituted society . . . and the wider cosmos," though he also says that monarchy was hardly unique to Egypt in the ancient, civilizing world. What does appear to have lent special force to the unity in the pharaoh of human and divine attributes is the pharaonic ability to have unified the vast geography of upper and lower Egypt for such extended periods of time. Once unified,
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