The Egyptian Book of the Dead contains 'negative confessions' declaring innocence of theft, murder, and adultery ('I have not stolen,' 'I have not murdered,' 'I have not committed adultery'), dated to 2600 BCE — many centuries before Moses — showing these prohibitions were already established Egyptian moral norms long before the Ten Commandments existed.

Before addressing the substance, a factual correction is needed, in the spirit of honest scholarship rather than reflexive denial: the 2600 BCE date attached to the Book of the Dead in the objection is not accurate for the negative-confession material itself. The 'negative confessions' (the 42 declarations of innocence before Osiris, including 'I have not stolen' and 'I have not killed') belong specifically to Spell 125 of the Book of the Dead proper, a text that emerges as a compiled corpus in Egypt's New Kingdom period, roughly 1550-1400 BCE — not 2600 BCE. The 2600 BCE date properly belongs to a different, earlier and textually distinct corpus, the Pyramid Texts (Old Kingdom, inscribed from the reign of Unas, c. 2350 BCE), which are funerary spells for royalty and do not contain the negative-confession genre in Spell 125's form; the negative confessions descend from the Pyramid Texts through the intermediate Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts (c. 2055-1650 BCE) but only crystallize into the specific declaratory list the objection is citing in the New Kingdom Book of the Dead. So the 2600 BCE figure appears to conflate two distinct Egyptian corpora separated by nearly a millennium. Correcting the date to c. 1550-1400 BCE still places the negative confessions comfortably earlier than or roughly contemporaneous with a traditional c. 1446 BCE or a critical c. 1250 BCE Exodus dating — the substantive point that Egyptian ethical reflection on theft, killing, and marital fidelity considerably predates and parallels Israel's is still correct and should be conceded; it is simply not as extreme a gap as '2600 BCE' implies, and the broader point that Egyptian wisdom literature (e.g., the Instruction of Ptahhotep, genuinely Old Kingdom, c. 2400 BCE) contains developed ethical reflection on honesty and justice is independently true and does not need an inflated date to make the case.

This correction does not weaken the Christian response developed for the wider pattern (see the natural-law treatment of the Golden Rule and the shared-principles table above); if anything, an authentically ancient and independent Egyptian tradition of moral self-examination — Ma'at, the Egyptian concept of cosmic and ethical order, underlying both the Instruction literature and the negative confessions — is exactly the kind of early, geographically and religiously unrelated convergence that Romans 2:14-15 and the classical natural-law tradition (Aquinas, Lewis) predict should exist, on the doctrine that all humans, as image-bearers with conscience, have some real access to the same moral order Israel later received in codified, covenantally-grounded form at Sinai.