Kingship was central to speculative thought and prestige in the pyramid age. It was vital for temple ritual, as shown in the previous chapter, and also indirectly for funerary culture via the Osiris myth. It is tempting to see kingship as the essence of ancient Egypt, a condensed version of the key ideas permeating society and culture, but so much is extraordinary about pharaohs – their relationships with the gods, the realm of their afterlife, their separation from other people – that kingship almost appears as an eccentric anomaly in Egyptian society. This dichotomy is perhaps not surprising from a comparative perspective, where holders of a royal office – mostly male – embody such tensions in many societies.