Revenue assessment and taxation are poorly understood. There is no evidence for direct personal taxation of the sort collected in Graeco-Roman Egypt, but only taxation of production, nor is there evidence of a precursor to the banking system which facilitated a more obtrusive fiscal regime in the Ptolemaic Period (von Reden 2007). Scribal ideology distinguished those who worked from those who collected:
Be a scribe! It will save you from work (bpk). It will protect you from all (physical) labor (kpt). It will separate you from rowing with an oar, so you will not carry a basket, and you will not be under (the charge of) many lords, under numerous chiefs. (P. Sall. I, 6, 10-11)
But the scribe, he is the controller of the work of everybody. Work is counted for him as writing. (var. ‘‘Work is not required (htii) for the scribe’’). He does not have dues (spyt).
Those who worked (bpk) then handed over their ‘‘production’’ (bpk) (Warburton 1997: 237-57). The terminology does not distinguish clearly in a modern sense between ‘‘taxation’’ and production. The terms htri and Spyt then simply refer to all types of payments due as royal revenues (Allam 2002: 99-101; Warburton 1997: 263-81). In many cases these were assessments on the production of groups, not individual workers, managed under the delegated responsibility of local officials. Model letters, used as scribal exercises in the New Kingdom, are then full of complaints that such assessments are too high or that insufficient personnel or resources have been provided to deliver the production required (Caminos 1954; Lichtheim 1976: 167-75).
The collection of revenues required the mobilization of fleets of ships, and very considerable administrative effort. In the Early Dynastic Period the regular ‘‘Following of Horus’’ may refer to a royal progress around the country, collecting but also consuming revenues on the spot. New Kingdom model letters refer to the very expensive local preparations for the arrival of the king traveling round the country. Collection for the center is hardly documented in the Old Kingdom, although Weni, as Overseer of Upper Egypt, claimed to have ‘‘counted’’ Upper Egypt twice for the palace ( Urk. I, 106). Old Kingdom dating formulae refer, however, to a (typically) biennial counting of cattle and other animals. Temples owned large herds, providing the constant stream of animals for sacrifice, and the crown received a regular supply of animals from the herds in the provinces (Franke 2007: 162), but the taxation of single animals belonging to individual owners is more difficult to envisage.
In the Ramesside period the primary state revenues from land consisted of‘‘rents’’ from categories of royal land, and possibly a general collection of 1 khar of grain for each aroura of cultivated arable land (Eyre 1994a: 130; Haring 1998: 85): the single term smw is used both for ‘‘harvest’’ and harvest revenues, and it is difficult to distinguish between terms that refer to land quality and terms that refer to revenue classification. The surviving documentation comes mostly from the Ramesside period, when the Temple of Amun managed much of the countryside of Upper Egypt, but in practice revenue responsibility was complex and overlapping. The Eighteenth Dynasty vizier Rekhmire is described as controlling the accounts of the mayors, local officials, and scribes of the fields throughout Upper Egypt (Urk. IV, 1119-39). In contrast, in the late Ramesside P. Valencay 1, the Mayor of Elephantine argued with the Chief Taxing Master at Karnak over responsibility for lands in Edfu and Kom Ombo. One plot had only received partial inundation; the mayor had assigned a cultivator and had already paid the appropriate reduced assessment. It has always been a principle in Egypt that no rent or tax should be paid on land that received no flood. The other plot was cultivated by nmhw-people who paid dues by ‘‘carrying gold’’ (fpi nbw) direct to the Treasury (Wente 1990: 130-1). This is an isolated reference, both as evidence of a revenue mechanism and for its suggestion of payment in money rather than produce (but note Romer 1998: 131-2).
Reeds and palm ribs for basketry and matting, clay for pottery or flax for cloth were readily to hand for domestic production. Good-quality wood, metal, and stone came from outside the Nile Valley. Wood required trading expeditions. Metals, semi-precious stones, and fine building stone were acquired by expeditions into the unfriendly desert environment, with the logistic problems of rations, water supplies, and transport. The mines and quarries never seem to have been worked continuously. The direct acquisition of these prestige resources was not a private enterprise but a government activity that was sometimes centrally organized and sometimes locally controlled. In the Twentieth Dynasty the hierarchy of the Amun Temple controlled such production in Upper Egypt, both for temple projects and to transmit produce to the palace. This compares with the role of the nomarchs during the Middle Kingdom. Amenemhet of Beni Hasan, in the reign of Senwosret I provides the clearest statement. He organized all forms of work, including gold-mining expeditions using locally recruited men, so that: ‘‘all work (bpk) of the King’s-house happening under my charge... I delivered their production (fpi. i bpk. sn) for the King’s-house; there was no deficit against me in any bureau of his. The entire Oryx Nome was working (bpk) for me in unison’’ (Urk. II, 15-16; Lichtheim 1988: 135-41).
It is not clear whether labor duties - corvee - were a regular revenue imposition for royal projects (Trapani 2004), and it is difficult to strike a clear distinction between corvee as a compulsory labor tax and a recruitment of migrant labor that mitigated rural and seasonal underemployment. The issue is one of the degree of compulsion, and demands were probably uneven. Expedition records stress the satisfaction of the workforces with payment and conditions, In contrast, those on royal service expected to draw on local communities for all types of resources. Protection decrees attempt to exclude temple workforces from such demands in order to protect their revenue streams and activities, while a decree of the reign of Horemheb (Kruchten 1981; Allam 2002) publicizes measures against the petty abuses of the military and local functionaries in imposing work services and payments on the population, but especially on the nmhw class. The picture is one of delegated responsibility, unevenly imposed, and widely liable to petty abuse. Probably labor demands were imposed on communities rather than individuals: Thuthmose III had the canal round the First Cataract cleared of stones, and then decreed that ‘‘It is the fishermen of Elephantine who will dig (out) this canal each year’’ ( Urk. IV, 814).
Slave labor played no major part in the Egyptian economy (Bakir 1952). There is clear evidence for the sale of individual slaves, particularly prisoners of war, but this was to individual domestic households and not for large-scale agriculture, building, or manufacturing. Captive populations were settled on the land and were assigned to major building projects, particularly in the endowment of temples. However, their status seems to merge rapidly into that of the rest of the population, even when they retained a degree of ethnic identity. This is not to suggest that the working population should be classed according to modern concepts of individual personal freedom. Their situation was one of economic dependence rather than of legal status (Menu 2000/1; Eyre 2004). Much of this population was attached by ties of dependence and patronage to the household of a high office holder or to a temple, working land or providing service to which they were tied by economic reality. Translations of key terms are conventional and not particularly reliable as technical classifications: mrt ‘‘serfs’’ for groups of dependent agricultural workers, (n)dt as personnel dependent on (the estate of) a great man, or smdt for the productive ‘‘staff’’ of a temple endowment. These contrast with the New Kingdom nmhw, ‘‘free-man’’ - literally ‘‘orphan’’ - or earlier nds, ‘‘little-man,’’ who seem to be persons without a dependent economic relationship to a patron, but directly dependent on the king. This terminology does not provide a clear picture of economic class distinctions.
World History
