* This last danger survives even to the present day. During
part of the year the fellahîn spend the night in their
fields; if they did not see to it, their neighbours would
not hesitate to come and cut their wheat before the harvest,
or root up their vegetables while still immature.
** The same kind of torture is mentioned in the decree of
Harmhabi, in which the lawless soldiery are represented as
“running from house to house, dealing blows right and left
with their sticks, ducking the fellahîn head downwards in
the water, and not leaving one of them with a whole skin.”
This treatment was still resorted to in Egypt not long ago,
in order to extract money from those taxpayers whom beatings
had failed to bring to reason.
One might be tempted to declare that the picture is too dark a one to be true, did one not know from other sources of the brutal ways of filling the treasury which Egypt has retained even to the present day. In the same way as in the town, the stick facilitated the operations of the tax-collector in the country: it quickly opened the granaries of the rich, it revealed resources to the poor of which he had been ignorant, and it only failed in the case of those who had really nothing to give. Those who were insolvent were not let off even when they had been more than half killed: they and their families were sent to prison, and they had to work out in forced labour the amount which they had failed to pay in current merchandise.*
* This is evident from a passage in the Sallier Papyrus n°
I, quoted above, in which we see the taxpayer in fetters,
dragged out to clean the canals, his whole family, wife and
children, accompanying him in bonds.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a picture on the tomb of Khîti
at Beni-Hasan (cf. Champollion, Monuments de l’Egypte, pl.
cccxc. 4; Rosellini, Monumenti civili, pl. cxxiv. b).
The collection of the taxes was usually terminated by a rapid revision of the survey. The scribe once more recorded the dimensions and character of the domain lands in order to determine afresh the amount of the tax which should be imposed upon them. It often happened, indeed, that, owing to some freak of the Nile, a tract of ground which had been fertile enough the preceding year would be buried under a gravel bed, or transformed into a marsh. The owners who thus suffered were allowed an equivalent deduction; as for the farmers, no deductions of the burden were permitted in their case, but a tract equalling in value that of the part they had lost was granted to them out of the royal or seignorial domain, and their property was thus made up to its original worth.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a picture on the tomb of Khîti
at Beni-Hasan.