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wife is believed to have been Nefertiti's sister, therefore legitimising his claim to the throne.

However, the nobility could prove difficult to control. In the First Intermediate Period following the over-long and stagnant reign of Pepy II (22878-2184 BC) and his short-lived and ineffectual successor Nitiqret (2184-2181 BC), the government of Egypt partially collapsed, allowing local princes (called Nomarchs the rough equivalent of medieval lords) much greater leeway to rule their own Nomes, or regions. This was a period of social unrest, with several ephemeral kings ruling from different capitals, incapable of reigning in the Nomarchs. During this period, several religious and political prerogatives of the king became available to those of lower class chiefly the nobles. These included the famous funerary texts that gave the dead king instruction on how to ascend to the afterlife. Prior to the First Intermediate Period, the afterlife (and the large, complex tombs, mortuary temples and funerary goods) was the domain of the king and those they chose to honour. After the decentralisation of the government, many other nobles and wealthy men surrounded themselves with these symbols of power and kingship in imitation of royalty. Following the restoration of a strong central government at the start of the Middle Kingdom, these texts and benefits remained available to the nobility, and eventually worked their way down to the commoners. Thus the rise of the nobility owed itself to the power of the king, but was also able to take advantage of weak rulership to advance further. Indeed, the office of Tjaty seems to have increased in power, perhaps because it was the vizier rather than the various weak kings that prevented the complete collapse of central government during the First Intermediate Period.

Beneath the nobility, there was a class of educated men who had all been though scribal training and who formed the bulk of the bureaucracy that kept the taxes coming in and recorded everything of note in Egypt. The ancient Egyptians valued the scribe highly, and they greatly valued themselves, as scribal Instruction Texts demonstrate. Many of these texts highlight the less than savoury nature of many of the lower class professions and compare them unfavourably to the power, wealth and privilege enjoyed by the scribe:

"I do not see the stonemason on an important errand... but I have seen the coppersmith working at the door of the furnace, his fingers were like crocodile

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