Ancient Egyptian architects certainly followed a number of rules in the construction of their buildings, but both the nature and the function of these rules must be clarified. Identifying them just as mathematical formulae might be reductive and inappropriate. In general, continuity (real or pretended) is a striking element of ancient Egypt, where revivals of ancient features took place from time to time in both language and the arts. Although forms and tastes did not remain unchanged during the more than thirty centuries of ancient Egyptian history, the link with the past, with what had been done by the ancestors, continued to play a significant role. A good example is the religious text engraved by Shabaka, king of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, on a stele now at the British Museum, which is said to have been copied from an ancient, worm-eaten document. The style of the text is archaic and resembles the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts, but it is now generally assumed that it is a much later composition, perhaps even dating to Shabaka's time.

Concerning the arts, it seems that there were archives of traditional sources and models which could be consulted and used. The drawing of a shrine on papyrus, in black ink over a red square grid (fig. 47), might be the only surviving original example of this type of document. The existence of models may also be deduced by several observations.