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Tax Collecting in Byzantine Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

Extract

In this article there is presented a small group of hitherto unpublished tax receipts from Egypt which belong to A.D. 309 and 314. They come from the archive of Aurelios Isidoros, a farmer and occasional local office-holder of the village of Karanis, and with the other papyri of the same collection are in the possession of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The chief interest which these texts hold for students of Byzantine Egypt lies in the picture which they provide of the tax-collecting process and of the handling of government grain in Egypt under the tax system introduced by Diocletian, and in particular the new information which they furnish on the matter of supplementary fees and transportation charges.

The receipts of the year 309 are for deliveries of barley; that of 314 is for the payment of money for the village quota of clothing requisitioned for military purposes. We shall take up the barley receipts first, and then that for the price of the clothing.

Type
Papers Presented to N. H. Baynes
Copyright
Copyright © A. E. R. Boak 1947. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 The writer wishes to express his thanks to the Museum authorities for their kind permission to publish these documents. Other documents from the same collection have appeared in Études de Popyrologie II (1933), 122Google Scholar; III (1936), 1–45; V (1939), 85–117; Mélanges Maspero II (1934), 125129Google Scholar; Harv. Stud. in Class. Phil. 51 (1940), 3560CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Journal of Juristic Papyrology I (1946), 712Google Scholar. More will appear shortly in various publications.

2 In the transcribed text dots below the line indicate uncertain letters; dashes mark broken ones that can be read with confidence.