In my search for Coptic and Greek fiscal documents from Abbasid Egypt, I (Eline Scheerlinck) came across a curious ninth-century document from the monastery of Apa Apollo in Bawit (P.LouvreBawit 7). The document is of interest for various reasons, but in this post, I want to focus on the fact that it contains fiscal terminology that is out of the ordinary. At the end, I’ll present a little non-fiscal treat—but it will only make sense after reading the rest of the post!
Month: October 2024
“It is often assumed that the Abbasid fiscal system was centralized and that a large portion of regional revenues were sent to the capital.” This hypothesis is explored in our project, where I (Noëmie Lucas) trace how provincial revenue was moved, as evidenced in the literary corpus. In this blog post, I provide an example from the corpus and elaborate on the type of information we can gather.
The primary source material for the Caliphal Finances project consists of fiscal documents, excavated in Egypt and mostly written on papyrus and paper. Both Principal Investigator Marie Legendre and Postdoctoral Fellow Eline Scheerlinck have been studying previously unpublished fiscal documents in the collections where they are currently stored. The ERC grant enables us to travel to these collections to study the documents. On the blog, you can read about Eline’s research visits to the papyrus collection of the Austrian National Library in Vienna and to the Cambridge University Library. This time, we want to highlight a lesser-known collection of papyri, particularly its Coptic and Arabic papyri: the University Collections of the University of Aberdeen, right here in Scotland.
In this post, postdocs Noëmie Lucas and Eline Scheerlinck join forces and explore the relationship between travel and taxation in Abbasid fiscal documents, focusing on 3 tax receipts that may or may not have functioned similarly to travel permits, akin to modern-day passports, for taxpayers in 8th and 9th-century Egypt.
