This book is the first economic history of ancient Egypt covering the entire pharaonic period, 3000-30 BCE, and employing a New Institutional Economics approach. It argues that the ancient Egyptian state encouraged an increasingly widespread and sophisticated use of writing through time, primarily in order to better document and more efficiently exact taxes for redistribution. The increased use of writing, however, also resulted in increased documentation and enforcement of private property titles and transfers, gradually lowering their transaction costs relative to redistribution. The book also argues that the increasing use of silver as a unified measure of value, medium of exchange, and store of wealth also lowered transaction costs for high value exchanges. The increasing use of silver in turn allowed the state to exact transfer taxes in silver, providing it with an economic incentive to further document and enforce private property titles and transfers.

The Archive of Thotsutmis, Son of Panouphis presents for the first time one of the largest collections of Demotic ostraca to have been discovered intact by archaeologists in the twentieth century. They were excavated at the site of Deir el-Bahari, on the west bank of the Nile, opposite the city of Luxor, Egypt. Rarely have such deposits been found in situ. Excavated by Ambrose Lansing on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1915-16, the integrity and context of this find are critical to the proper understanding of the texts it contained. Through the publication and analysis of this archive of Demotic and Greek texts recorded on ostraca, the authors reconstruct the microhistory of Thotsutmis, son of Panouphis, and his family, who worked in Egypt on the west bank of Thebes as priests in the mortuary industry during the early Ptolemaic Period in the third century BC. The forty-two ostraca published in this volume provide a rare opportunity to explore the intersections between an intact ancient archive of private administrative documents and the larger social and legal contexts into which they fit. What the reconstructed microhistory reveals is an ancient family striving to make it among the wealthy and connected social network of Theban choachytes and pastophoroi, while they simultaneously navigated the bureaucratic maze of taxes, fees, receipts and legal procedures of the Ptolemaic state.

This book is the first economic history of ancient Egypt covering the entire pharaonic period, 3000-30 BCE, and employing a New Institutional Economics approach. It argues that the ancient Egyptian state encouraged an increasingly widespread and sophisticated use of writing through time, primarily in order to better document and more efficiently exact taxes for redistribution. The increased use of writing, however, also resulted in increased documentation and enforcement of private property titles and transfers, gradually lowering their transaction costs relative to redistribution. The book also argues that the increasing use of silver as a unified measure of value, medium of exchange, and store of wealth also lowered transaction costs for high value exchanges. The increasing use of silver in turn allowed the state to exact transfer taxes in silver, providing it with an economic incentive to further document and enforce private property titles and transfers.

The author lays out the early Ptolemaic tax system, describes the changes in the capitation taxes during the reign of Ptolemy II, discusses the other state and temple revenues, and then reconstructs the prosopography and provenance of thirty-nine tax payers whose names occur frequently in these initial studies. Having then set the stage, the author provides editions of sixty-one ostraca from Harold Nelson's collection that include an important group of early Ptolemaic Demotic, Greek, and bilingual ostraca, mostly tax receipts. One late Ptolemaic account ostracon (Cat. no. 3) is also published here since it concerns the business of choachytes, who figure prominently in the group of early Ptolemaic ostraca. The book concludes with full indices, and each of the ostraca is illustrated in drawing and photograph.