rmula for the offering on the
funerary stelo, and sums up more completely than any other
the nature of the tax paid to the gods by the living, and
consequently the nature of that paid to the king; here, as
elsewhere, the domain of the gods is modelled on that of the
Pharaohs.

One room, a few feet square, and, if need be, one safe, would easily
contain the entire revenue of one of our modern empires: the largest
of our emporiums would not always have sufficed to hold the mass of
incongruous objects which represented the returns of a single Egyptian
province. As the products in which the tax was paid took various forms,
it was necessary to have an infinite variety of special agents and
suitable places to receive it; herdsmen and sheds for the oxen,
measurers and granaries for the grain, butlers and cellarers for
the wine, beer, and oils. The product of the tax, while awaiting
redistribution, could only be kept from deteriorating in value by
incessant labour, in which a score of different classes of clerks and
workmen in the service of the treasury all took part, according to their
trades. If the tax were received in oxen, it was led to pasturage, or at
times, when a murrain threatened to destroy it, to the slaughter-house
and the currier; if it were in corn, it was bolted, ground to flour, and
made into bread and pastry; if it were in stuffs, it was washed, ironed,
and folded, to be retailed as garments or in the piece. The royal
treasury partook of the character of the farm, the warehouse, and the
manufactory.

Each of the departments which helped to swell its contents, occupied
within the palace enclosure a building, or group of buildings, which was
called its "house," or, as we should say, its storehouse.

[Illustration: 059.jpg THE PACKING OF THE LINEN AND ITS REMOVAL TO THE
WHITE STOREHOUSE.]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a chromolithograph in Lepsius,
_Denhm._, ii. 96.

There was the "White Storehouse," where the stuffs and jewels were
kept, and at times the wine; the "Storehouse of the Oxen," the "Gold
Storehouse," the "Storehouse for Preserved Fruits," the "Storehouse for
Grain," the "Storehouse for Liquors," and ten other storehouses of the
application of which we are not always sure. In the "Storehouse of
Weapons" (or Armoury) were ranged thousands of clubs, maces, pikes,
daggers, bows, and bundles of arrows, which Pharaoh distributed to his
recruits whenever a war forc