FROM PHAROAH TO TAXMAN
13 December 2017 – 18 March 2018
Almost everyone is familiar with the story of Christmas: Joseph and Mary were headed for Bethlehem for the census, which had been ordered by the Romans. The purpose of the census was to register people and their possessions in order to assess taxes more precisely. The Romans were not the first tax collectors. Quite the opposite. The notion that everyone should contribute to society was already several millennia old in the year 1 CE.
People in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt had been making offerings long before the Roman empire extended into the Near East. The first evidence of paying taxes dates back to around 3000 BCE. Tax collection led to one of humanity’s most important inventions: the development of a writing system. After all, everything that was received, mostly in kind, had to be counted, recorded and described. Those who could count and write were given jobs in collection and redistribution. Were they the first tax officials? And who paid taxes and in what way?
The exhibition From Pharaoh to Taxman took us to the Near East and a time long before our modern era. What do we know about the oldest taxes, and how did taxation develop under the influence of the Persians and the Greeks? All this was revealed using archaeological findings and historical sources. Objects from the Museum’s own collection as well as loans from the VU Amsterdam’s Special Collections, the National Museum of Antiquities, the Netherlands Institute for the Near East and the Leiden Papyrological Institute showed that taxes are much older than the Roman Empire in the Near East.
From Pharaoh to Taxman Study Day: on 8 March 2018, the Museum hosted a study day where six researchers from the Netherlands and Flanders shed light on tax collectors and taxpayers in antiquity.
You can read more (in Dutch) about the subject of the exhibition in the Museum magazine Impost.
Informative videos about the exhibition, including Belastingen in spijkerschrift, Kleitablet als kwitantie and Papyrus en potscherf als bron are also available on YouTube (in Dutch).
The exhibition was created in collaboration with the Vidi project Paying for All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men: A Fiscal History of the Achaemenid Empire (led by Kristin Kleber, funded by NWO).
