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Although Egypt lies outside the scope of this survey, it must be mentioned here as the place where Jews produced translations into Greek of many of their sacred books. Beginning with the Books of the Law around 250 BCE, this process of translation continued in Egypt (and, in the case of some works, in the Land of Israel as well) until all the books of the current Hebrew Bible, and a number of other, “non-canonical” texts had been rendered into Greek. This collection of writings, commonly referred to as the Septuagint (abbreviated as LXX; see Schürer III.1 1973–87; Dines 2004; Rajak 2009) eventually came to form the Christian “Old Testament,” but its influence in the non-Jewish world before the advent of the Church has recently been more recognized and its influence reassessed (Barclay 1996; Rajak 2009). Certainly the existence in Greek translation of the Hebrew Torah bore witness to the non-Jewish, Greek-speaking world that the Jews were a clearly delineated ethnos who possessed their own distinctive and characteristic nomos, a clearly marked state constitution.