Note 50 — Chapter X · ASSUAN AND ELEPHANTINE.
Reading edition
The results of Dr. Birch’s labors were given to the public in his “Guide to the First and Second Egyptian Rooms,” published by order of the trustees of the British Museum in May, 1874. Of the contents of case ninety-nine in the “second room,” he says: “The use of potsherds for documents received a great extension at the time of the Roman empire, when receipts for the taxes were given on these fragments by the collectors of revenue at Elephantine or Syene, on the frontier of Egypt. These receipts commenced in the reign of Vespasian, A.D. 77, and are found as late as M. Aurelius and L. Verus, A.D. 165. It appears from them that the capitation and trades tax, which was sixteen drams in A.D. 77, rose to twenty in A.D. 165, having steadily increased. The dues were paid in installments called merismoi, at three periods of the year. The taxes were farmed out to publicans (misthotai), who appear from their names to have been Greeks. At Elephantine the taxes were received by tax-gatherers (prakteres), who seem to have been appointed as early as the Ptolemies. Their clerks were Egyptians, and they had a chest and treasure (phylax).” See p. 109, as above; also Birch’s “History of Ancient Pottery,” chap. 1, p. 45.
These barren memoranda are not the only literary curiosities found at Elephantine. Among the Egyptian manuscripts of the Louvre may be seen some fragments of the eighteenth book of the “Iliad,” discovered in a tomb upon the island. How they came to be buried there no one knows. A lover of poetry would like to think, however, that some Greek or Roman officer, dying at his post upon this distant station, desired, perhaps, to have his Homer laid with him in his grave.
Note to Second Edition.—Other fragments of “Iliad” have been found from time to time in various parts of Egypt; some (now in the Louvre) being scrawled, like the above-mentioned tax-receipts, on mere potsherds. The finest specimen ever found in Egypt or elsewhere, and the earliest, has, however, been discovered this year, 1888, by Mr. Flinders Petrie in the grave of a woman at Hawara, in the Fayûm.