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.
Month: August 2024
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.
