Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a picture at Beni-Hasan.  This picture and those which follow it represent a census in the principality of the Gazelle under the XIIth dynasty as well as the collection of a tax.

The year would have to be a very bad one before the authorities would lower the ordinary rate:  the State in ancient times was not more willing to deduct anything from its revenue than the modern State would be.*

     * The two decrees of Rosetta and of Canopus, however,
     mention reductions granted by the Ptolemies after an
     insufficient rise of the Nile.

The payment of taxes was exacted in wheat, durra, beans, and field produce, which were stored in the granaries of the nome.  It would seem that the previous deduction of one-tenth of the gross amount of the harvest could not be a heavy burden, and that the wretched fellah ought to have been in a position on land at a permanent figure, based on the average of good and bad harvests.

It was not so, however, and the same writers who have given us such a lamentable picture of the condition of the workmen in the towns, have painted for us in even darker colours the miseries which overwhelmed the country people.  “Dost thou not recall the picture of the farmer, when the tenth of his grain is levied?  Worms have destroyed half of the wheat, and the hippopotami have eaten the rest; there are swarms of rats in the fields, the grasshoppers alight there, the cattle devour, the little birds pilfer, and if the farmer lose sight for an instant of what remains upon the ground, it is carried off by robbers;* the thongs, moreover, which bind the iron and the hoe are worn out, and the team has died at the plough.  It is then that the scribe steps out of the boat at the landing-place to levy the tithe, and there come the keepers of the doors of the granary with cudgels and the negroes with ribs of palm-leaves, who come crying:  ‘Come now, corn!’ There is none, and they throw the cultivator full length upon the ground; bound, dragged to the canal, they fling him in head first;** his wife is bound with him, his children are put into chains; the neighbours, in the mean time, leave him and fly to save their grain.”

* This last danger survives even to the present day.  During part of the year the fellahin spend the night in their fields; if they did not see to it, their neighbours would not hesitate to come and cut their wheat before the harvest, or root up their vegetables while still immature.

** The same kind of torture is mentioned in the decree of Harmhabi, in which the lawless soldiery are represented as “running from house to house, dealing blows right and left with their sticks, ducking the fellahin head downwards in the water, and not leaving one of them with a whole skin.”  This treatment was still resorted to in Egypt not long ago, in order to extract money from those taxpayers whom beatings had