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7 - What Remains in the Hands of the Gods: Taxation in Kharga Oasis through the Demotic Ostraca (Fifth Century BC to First Century AD)

from Part II - Managing the Oasis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2019

Roger S. Bagnall
Affiliation:
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York
Gaëlle Tallet
Affiliation:
Université de Limoges
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Summary

More than thirty years of excavations in Kharga Oasis yielded a large amount of Demotic ostraca providing information about the tax systems in place in this remote area of the Egyptian Western Desert. In this chapter I propose an overview of the Demotic fiscal documentation emanating from various settlements of the Great Oasis considered (part 1). These texts provide insights on the multiple tax systems set up by state as well as by local temples in the longue durée of the second part of first millennium BC. The king seems to have levied taxes at the district and the village levels while the temples took an amount from the harvests of their tenants. In this context, the temple of Amun of Hibis of Kharga appears as the religious institution that owned the most land in the whole oasis (part 2). It helps also to know the nature of the taxes - in cereal, in oil for lighting - and attests to the existence of a form of banalité required for the use of a mill (part 3).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Great Oasis of Egypt
The Kharga and Dakhla Oases in Antiquity
, pp. 122 - 132
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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