New book: an Egyptian tax register

The tax account occupies more than 50 pages of a codex in the British Library, long known but never published. Its more than 1500 lines give us the names of landowners and the amounts of money they paid for the land tax in 546/7. Rich and poor, men and women, living people and estates, institutions and individuals all appear, giving us a close look at how wealth was divided in an entire village and at the workings of the taxation system.

The volume, A Sixth-century Tax Register from the Hermopolite Nome, has just been published by ISAW Director Roger Bagnall together with James G. Keenan and Leslie S. B. MacCoull in American Studies in Papyrology. It is available from the David Brown Book Company (US) and Oxbow Books (UK).