Recently, our postdoctoral researcher Eline Scheerlinck dedicated a week to research at the library of the Papyrological Institute at Leiden University in the Netherlands. One of the primary objectives of the Caliphal Finances project is to examine all fiscal documents from the Abbasid period that have been previously edited by scholars, encompassing texts in Arabic, Greek, and Coptic. These papyrological editions are frequently published in highly specialised book series and journals, which are not always accessible, even in well-endowed university libraries such as the University of Edinburgh, where our project is based.
Month: August 2024
On our blog, we are exploring various types of papyrus documents that allow us to study the Abbasid fiscal system, as they form the core of the Caliphal Finances project’s sources. E.g., in this blog post, I, postdoc Eline Scheerlinck, focus on tax receipts, tax demand notes, and fiscal records. Those documents constitute the working papers and communications with taxpayers produced by the fiscal administration at various levels. Here, I highlight Greek scribal exercises found among the fiscal documents, which provide evidence of scribes practising phrases and numerals for use in fiscal administrative documents.
In this post, I will examine an example of another type of papyrus document that reveals information about the functioning of the fiscal system: administrative letters.
We would like to shine a light on one financial director (ṣāḥib al-kharāj) of Egypt during the Abbasid period who is known to us from various sources. An overall aim of the Caliphal Finances project is to study all the actors involved in fiscal collection from the taxpayer to the caliph, including the participation of local administrators and elites in the shaping of fiscal policies. We are particularly interested in the fiscal administrative hierarchy. Noëmie Lucas (WP4 Making the Link: Fiscal Practice and the Literary Corpus) is working on gaining a clearer view of the upper-level administrators who are better documented in the literary corpus than the local ones.
An important part of the Abbasid fiscal documents on papyrus are lists, accounts, and registers written in Greek, as well as exercises in which scribes are practicing Greek phrases and numerals to use in fiscal documents. We are publishing this post, written by our postdoc Eline Scheerlinck, in the context of our ongoing research into two related themes connected to the Abbasid fiscal system: the multilingual nature of the Abbasid fiscal administration and culture of accounting in the Abbasid period.
