Posted on 03/25/2015 11:53:00 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
A recently translated ancient Egyptian tax receipt shows a bill that is (literally) heavier than any American taxpayer will pay this year — more than 220 lbs. (100 kilograms) of coins.
Written in Greek on a piece of pottery, the receipt states that a person (the name is unreadable) and his friends paid a land-transfer tax that came to 75 "talents" (a unit of currency), with a 15-talent charge added on. The tax was paid in coins and was delivered to a public bank in a city called Diospolis Magna (also known as Luxor or Thebes).
But just how much was 90 talents worth in ancient Egypt?
"It's an incredibly large sum of money," said Brice Jones, a Ph.D. student at Concordia University in Montreal, who translated the text. "These Egyptians were most likely very wealthy."
The receipt has a date on it that corresponds to July 22, 98 B.C. Paper money didn't exist at that time, and no coin was worth anywhere near one talent, the researchers said. Instead people made up the sum using coins that were worth varying amounts of drachma.
One talent equaled 6,000 drachma, so 90 talents totaled 540,000 drachma, researchers say. For comparison, an unskilled worker at that time would have made only about 18,000 drachmaa year said Catharine Lorber, an independent scholar who has published numerous journal articles on Egyptian coins.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Several ancient and medieval texts at McGill University Library and Archives are in the process of being deciphered and published by Brice Jones, a PhD student at Concordia University. Until now the texts had not been studied and few knew of their existence. Credit: Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library and Archives
This is meaningless without knowing the size of the underlying transaction. How much land was sold, and how much did the purchaser pay for it?
Yeah, but it was in a great location:
The tax on the purchase - not even the purchase price itself - equaled thirty times the annual wage of a commoner. Soak the rich!
It actually translates to “shared responsiblity payment”
A drachma was equivalent to a Roman denarius, which represented a good day's pay (see the parable of the laborers in the vineyard who agreed to work (Matt. 20). Maybe it should read 180 drachmas.
Make that: “the laborers who agreed to work for one denarius for a day’s work” (Matt. 20)
Make that: “the laborers who agreed to work for one denarius for a day’s work” (Matt. 20)
:’)
The biggest ‘talent’ was how there was a 15-talent surcharge added to the actual tax. Reminds me of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary entry: “Excise: a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid”
how much is that piece of pottery worth.
That's an error. A telent is a unit of weight, like a pound. The exact weight varied by region, but Wiki says that an Egyptian talent was 60lb.
In order to know how much money we are talking about, you would need to know whether it was a talent of bronze or silver or gold. Later in the article it suggests that it was Bronze, and says that the 15 talent "surcharge" was just a way of converting from silver to bronze.
If you want to guess how much it would be worth today, 75 talents x 60 lb = 4,500 pounds x 14.58 troy ounces per pound = 65,600 troy ounces of silver x $17 per ounce = $1.1 million.
However, if they paid in bronze, which today is a lot cheaper than silver, it would be 90 talents x 60lb x $2 per pound = $10,800
So, how much is that in today’s US dollars?
Sounds like a lot of money, but if the taxpayer was the Bill Gates of Ptolemaic Egypt maybe not so much.
Ha! They paid their taxes in pennies.
Thanks, you beat me to it.
A talent was the load a man could carry.
Its value is remarkably difficult to equate to today, because the relative scarcity of metals would mean that the purchasing power of metals might be very different then and now.
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