it for centuries, and neither sales, nor redistributions, nor revolutions, nor changes of dynasty, could cause it to be forgotten.  The officers of the survey inscribed it in their books, together with the name of the proprietor, those of the owners of adjoining lands, and the area and nature of the ground.  They noted down, to within a few cubits, the extent of the sand, marshland, pools, canals, groups of palms, gardens or orchards, vineyards and cornfields,* which it contained.

* See in the great inscription of Beni-Hasan the passage in which are enumerated at full length, in a legal document, the constituent parts of the principality of the Gazelle, “its watercourses, its fields, its trees, its sands, from the river to the mountain of the West” (11. 46-53).

The cornland in its turn was divided into several classes, according to whether it was regularly inundated, or situated above the highest rise of the water, and consequently dependent on a more or less costly system of artificial irrigation.  All this was so much information of which the scribes took advantage in regulating the assessment of the land-tax.

Everything tends to make us believe that this tax represented one-tenth of the gross produce, but the amount of the latter varied.  It depended on the annual rise of the Nile, and it followed the course of it with almost mathematical exactitude:  if there were too much or too little water, it was immediately lessened, and might even be reduced to nothing in extreme cases.  The king in his capital and the great lords in their fiefs had set up nilo-meters, by means of which, in the critical weeks, the height of the rising or subsiding flood was taken daily.  Messengers carried the news of it over the country:  the people, kept regularly informed of what was happening, soon knew what kind of season to expect, and they could calculate to within very little what they would have to pay.  In theory, the collecting of the tax was based on the actual amount of land covered by the water, and the produce of it was constantly varying.  In practice it was regulated by taking the average of preceding years, and deducting from that a fixed sum, which was never departed from except in extraordinary circumstances.*

* We know that this was so, in so far as the Roman period is concerned, from a passage in the edict of Tiberius Alexander.  The practice was such a natural one, that I have no hesitation in tracing it back to the time of the Ancient Empire; repeatedly condemned as a piece of bad administration, it reappeared continually.  At Beni-Hasan, the nomarch Amoni boasts that, “when there had been abundant Niles, and the owners of wheat and barley crops had thriven, he had not increased the rate of the land-tax,” which seems to indicate that, so far as he was concerned, he had fixed the tax to pay his dues without difficulty.

[Illustration:  128.jpg THE LEVYING OF THE TAX:  THE TAXPAYER IN THE SCRIBE’S OFFICE]