The author publishes 157 tax receipts and other texts from Thebes in Early Ptolemaic Egypt (332-200 BC), including 102 Demotic texts and 55 Greek or bilingual texts. 113 texts are published here for the first time, and the others were previously only partially published or have been substantially reread. The first six chapters contain text editions organized by tax category. Short essays introduce each category, and in several cases reinterpret them. The text editions include facsimile drawings together with transliterations and translations. Photographs are appended for all but 21 of the texts that are known only from facsimiles. The seventh chapter summarizes the careers of the scribes and officials, including attestations outside tax receipts, and distinguishes two different career patterns. The eighth chapter discusses the taxpayers known from multiple tax receipts, and how modern collectors acquired and dispersed these ancient archives. Full indexes complete the volume.

This book is the first economic history of ancient Egypt covering the entire pharaonic period, 3000–30 BCE, and employing a New Institutional Economics approach. It argues that the ancient Egyptian state encouraged an increasingly widespread and sophisticated use of writing through time, primarily in order to better document and more efficiently exact taxes for redistribution. The increased use of writing, however, also resulted in increased documentation and enforcement of private property titles and transfers, gradually lowering their transaction costs relative to redistribution. The book also argues that the increasing use of silver as a unified measure of value, medium of exchange, and store of wealth also lowered transaction costs for high value exchanges. The increasing use of silver in turn allowed the state to exact transfer taxes in silver, providing it with an economic incentive to further document and enforce private property titles and transfers.

The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology offers a comprehensive survey of the entire study of ancient Egypt, from prehistory through to the end of the Roman period. Authoritative yet accessible, and covering a wide range of topics, it is an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and general readers alike.

This book is the first ever edition of an abnormal hieratic business archive from the Louvre of a mortuary priest in 7th century BCE Thebes (Egypt), discussing points of history, law, economics, religion, grammar, chronology and abnormal hieratic palaeography.

The Archive of Thotsutmis, Son of Panouphis presents for the first time one of the largest collections of Demotic ostraca to have been discovered intact by archaeologists in the twentieth century. Rarely have such deposits been found in situ. Excavated by Ambrose Lansing on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1915-16 at the site of Deir el-Bahari, the integrity and context of this find are critical to the proper understanding of the texts it contained. Through the publication and analysis of this archive of Demotic and Greek texts recorded on ostraca, Muhs, Scalf, and Jay reconstruct the microhistory of Thotsutmis, son of Panouphis, and his family, who worked in Egypt on the west bank of Thebes as priests in the mortuary industry during the early Ptolemaic Period in the third century BC. The forty-two ostraca published in this volume provide a rare opportunity to explore the intersections between an intact ancient archive of private administrative documents and the larger social and legal contexts into which they fit. What the reconstructed microhistory reveals is an ancient family striving to make it among the wealthy and connected social network of Theban choachytes and pastophoroi, while they simultaneously navigated the bureaucratic maze of taxes, fees, receipts, and legal procedures of the Ptolemaic state.

Study of papyri and ostraca in the Oriental Institute Museum, Chicago, which includes Demotic, Greek, and bilingual tax receipts from early Ptolemaic Thebes.

A comprehensive edition and commentary of 77 ostraka Ostraka in the Collection of New York University is a comprehensive edition and commentary of 77 ostraka, or potsherds with ancient texts written on them, from Greco-Roman and late antique Egypt. Seventy-two of these ostraca are housed in NYU Special Collections, originally purchased by Caspar Kraemer in 1932, then the chair of the NYU Classics Department. Although Kraemer advertised the imminent publication of the texts in 1934 and later collaborated with the famed papyrologist Herbert Youtie, neither completed the project. The ostraka in this small collection span the 2nd century BCE to the 8th century CE and include both Greek and Coptic texts. The majority, however, form a coherent dossier of tax receipts related to mortuary activities in Upper Egypt during the reign of Augustus (texts 7-70, dated from roughly the last quarter of the 1st century BCE to 12 CE). The five ostraka published in this volume not held by NYU include one that had been part of Kraemer’s original purchase but was subsequently lost (thankfully preserved in a photograph in Youtie’s archive at the University of Michigan), and four ostraka now held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The latter four texts were purchased separately and published previously, but clearly belong to the same group of texts. They are included in this volume both for the sake of completeness and because the present authors were able to improve the readings in light of the context provided by the dossier as a whole. In addition to the scholarly edition of these texts, the volume contains a full discussion of their provenance, the taxes involved, the taxpayers and tax-collectors, and a ceramological analysis of the sherds as media for these texts. The book will be of interest primarily to specialists in papyrology and scholars who study the economic history of the ancient Mediterranean, Hellenistic Egypt, the Roman empire, and papyrology.