On 13th January, the Caliphal Finances team kicked off the IMES Seminar Spring 2025 Lecture Series! PI Marie Legendre, Postdoc Eline Scheerlinck, and PhD student Georgi Obatnin offered a glimpse behind the scenes of the day-to-day research activities in our project. Marie began by explaining the origin of the lecture series’ title: Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bulls*it, in my opinion. She shared a video of Dutch historian Rutger Bregman speaking at the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos.

In the video, Bregman underscores the importance of taxation in addressing global economic issues (specifically, taxing the rich), and exclaiming the statement which is now the title of our lecture series. While the Caliphal Finances project might not entirely agree that “all the rest is bulls*it,” our focus on taxes, taxes, taxes does serve as a lens for understanding how empires function. Marie then outlined the primary research goals of the Caliphal Finances project and emphasized the critical role of fiscal documents on papyrus in our research.

The lecture highlighted various aspects of the methods, practices, and challenges involved in accessing, reading, organizing, and analysing papyrological sources and the data they yield. Marie presented an unpublished tax receipt written in Arabic on papyrus in 9th-century Egypt. This Abbasid fiscal document, concise as it is, now forms an integral part of our project’s source base. However, before studying it as a historical source—comparing, analysing, and contextualizing it—we must first address issues of access. Where is this piece of papyrus, and how did Marie gain access to it?

The extraction of large quantities of papyri from Egypt began in the late 19th century, leading to the formation of collections outside Egypt through sales and further excavations. In the UK, many academic institutions house papyri in their special collections, offering varying degrees of access to students and scholars. Although our own University of Edinburgh holds 18 papyri in its collections, none date to the Abbasid period. However, at our fellow Scottish institution, the University of Aberdeen, Marie examined the tax receipt shown during the lecture.

Eline’s section of the lecture explored the scholarly work involved in accessing papyri in their collections, and on the lives of the papyri within the collections where they currently reside. The Arabic and Coptic papyri at the University of Aberdeen are largely unpublished, and before our research, we had little knowledge of how many such papyri existed in the collection or of their contents. With the assistance of Michelle Gait, a staff member at the University of Aberdeen’s Duncan Rice Library, Eline studied digitized versions of archival materials, including notebooks from the 1920s and photographs taken in 1975. Combining these sources allowed the identification of the Aberdeen Abbasid tax receipt discussed by Marie. This discovery prompted an actual visit to the collection—a report on the visit is coming soon to the blog—to examine the original document as well as other Arabic and Coptic papyri in the Aberdeen collection.

During our visit, we accessed archival documents from the 1960s and 1970s related to the collection. These materials provided insights into the history of the papyri in the collection and helped clarify inventory issues. In her lecture, Eline reconstructed the story of the collection from those archival documents: the movement of the papyri within the UK, the unfinished project by Egyptologist Eve Reymond to edit the Coptic papyri, and various cataloguing, cleaning, and restoration efforts. Eline highlighted that, in the early 20th century, access to papyri often involved physically sending the documents to scholars. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, this practice was deemed inadvisable, but still done. As Eve Reymond noted in a letter that is now part of the archive: “The scholar should come to the papyri, not the other way round.” The Aberdeen library’s archive also documents an international initiative, the “International Photographic Archive of Papyri,” which aimed to photograph Greek papyri and distribute negatives locally and to papyrological study centres, where prints could be made and sent on demand.

While Eline discussed access to the physical papyri and their history as part of a collection, and Marie presented the contents of a specific papyrus fragment, Georgi demonstrated how digital tools in his PhD research facilitate the analysis of large amounts of papyrus documents. Georgi has already shared a blog post on his work with the Obsidian database. The Abbasid Arabic tax receipt, located in Aberdeen by Eline and interpreted by Marie, is now part of Georgi’s database. As a common document type, it can be compared to others and contribute to broader analyses within the Caliphal Finances project.

On Tuesday, 28th January, the next instalment of our lecture series will offer a brief departure from taxes, taxes, taxes. Dr. Simon Loynes, our colleague in the Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies department, will present a talk titled: From Esoteric Communication to Verbatim Revelation: The Conspicuous Absence of the Root W-Ḥ-Y in the Schematics of Revelation in Medieval Tafsīr. You can find our full program and more information about the lecture series here.

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