One might be tempted to declare that the picture is too dark a one to be true, did one not know from other sources of the brutal ways of filling the treasury which Egypt has retained even to the present day.  In the same way as in the town, the stick facilitated the operations of the tax-collector in the country:  it quickly opened the granaries of the rich, it revealed resources to the poor of which he had been ignorant, and it only failed in the case of those who had really nothing to give.  Those who were insolvent were not let off even when they had been more than half killed:  they and their families were sent to prison, and they had to work out in forced labour the amount which they had failed to pay in current merchandise.*

* This is evident from a passage in the Sallier Papyrus n deg.  I, quoted above, in which we see the taxpayer in fetters, dragged out to clean the canals, his whole family, wife and children, accompanying him in bonds.

[Illustration:  130.jpg LEVYING THE TAX:  THE TAXPAYER IN THE HANDS OF THE EXACTORS]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a picture on the tomb of Khiti
     at Beni-Hasan (cf.  Champollion, Monuments de l’Egypte, pl.
     cccxc. 4; Rosellini, Monumenti civili, pl. cxxiv. b).

The collection of the taxes was usually terminated by a rapid revision of the survey.  The scribe once more recorded the dimensions and character of the domain lands in order to determine afresh the amount of the tax which should be imposed upon them.  It often happened, indeed, that, owing to some freak of the Nile, a tract of ground which had been fertile enough the preceding year would be buried under a gravel bed, or transformed into a marsh.  The owners who thus suffered were allowed an equivalent deduction; as for the farmers, no deductions of the burden were permitted in their case, but a tract equalling in value that of the part they had lost was granted to them out of the royal or seignorial domain, and their property was thus made up to its original worth.

[Illustration:  131.jpg LEVYING THE TAX:  THE BASTINADO]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a picture on the tomb of Khiti
     at Beni-Hasan.

What the collection of the taxes had begun was almost always brought to a climax by the corvees.  However numerous the royal and seignorial slaves might have been, they were insufficient for the cultivation of all the lands of the domains, and a part of Egypt must always have lain fallow, had not the number of workers been augmented by the addition of those who were in the position of freemen.