s, 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]

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 Gazell