This chapter explores whether magic is an appropriate or useful term for scholars to use in the context of ancient Egypt. It provides a historical overview of the development of Egyptian magic from the third millennium BC until the end of paganism during the first centuries AD. The origins of magic in the creation and its preservation in medical papyri further associate Egyptian magic with learnedness. The earliest period of Egyptian history from which texts have survived is the Old Kingdom. Several types of material related to magic are attested from the Middle Kingdom. The close association between Egyptian magic and medicine becomes explicitly clear in the famous Edwin Smith Papyrus of about 1550 BC. The Egyptians were well aware of the dangers of black magic. Just as in the earlier periods, there are also extant in the Graeco-Roman epoch manuscripts of narratives on magicians.

The Old and Middle Kingdoms together represent an important unitary phase in Egypt's political and cultural development. Divine kingship is the most striking feature of Egypt in these periods. In the form of great religious complexes centred on the pyramid tombs its cult was given monumental expression of a grandeur unsurpassed anywhere in the ancient Near East. Kerma in the Second Intermediate Period came to be an African counterpart of Byblos: an independent state beyond Egypt's political frontiers, with a court looking to Egypt as a source of sophisticated court fashion. If one considers the historical developments in Nubia in the Second Intermediate Period and the possibility that the position of Kush in the lists is a tribute to its political importance, then one might conclude that Kush was, from the outset, centred at Kerma. The implication is that Kush had emerged as a kingdom of considerable strength and importance, a counterpart to the Hyksos kingdom of the north.