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!
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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 Both Principal Investigator Marie Legendre and Postdoctoral Fellow Eline Scheerlinck have been studying previously unpublished fiscal documents in the collections where they are currently stored.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.
On our blog, we have explored various sources for studying Abbasid fiscal practices, including literature, inscriptions, coins, and papyrus documents from the fiscal administration. In this post, I aim to highlight a perhaps less obvious source of information on the fiscal system: private letters on papyrus. Unlike other papyrus documents—such as lists, registers, tax demands, tax receipts, writing exercises, or correspondence between administrators—private letters were not direct products of the fiscal administration. So, what traces did the fiscal apparatus leave in documents from the private sphere?
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.
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.
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.
We would like to shine a spotlight on a tax receipt from 10th century Egypt which we mentioned in our post on the Paperwork of Taxation: Abbasid Fiscal Documents from Egypt, but which has not received much scholarly attention. It documents, in a combination of 3 languages, a father paying taxes for his son. The multilingual landscape of the Abbasid fiscal administration is of special interest to our postdoc Eline Scheerlinck, who wrote this post.
Earlier this week, team member Eline Scheerlinck spent three days in the Manuscripts Reading Room of Cambridge University Library, studying Coptic papyri that are part of the library’s collections. Eline will be editing the papyri together with Manchester-based Coptic papyrologist Jennifer Cromwell, who also founded the blog Papyrus Stories. The Coptic papyri in question were part of the working archive of Egyptologist Herbert Thompson (1859-1944) and entered Cambridge University Library in 2012 and 2014. Read the whole story below!
The administration of taxation in the Abbasid Caliphate generated a substantial amount of paperwork. A fraction of this documentation, in the form of pieces of papyrus and paper written in Arabic, Coptic, and Greek, has been excavated in Egypt and dispersed to various collections, predominantly located in Europe and the United States. These documents provide insight into the management of taxation on the ground. In this blog, our postdoc Eline Scheerlinck provides a first look at the various types of documents that were produced in the context of the Abbasid fiscal administration in Egypt.
