Burdened by taxes? Measuring the tax load in Hellenistic Egypt (332-30 BC)

The special documentation of Ptolemaic Egypt (thousands of papyri and potsherds containing among other things tax receipts and tax lists) informs us in detail about the complex fiscal system. Hence the country is known for its many taxes and its bureaucracy. But does that imply that the tax burden was high? The project wants to measure, for the first time, the tax burden in Egypt by using a new typology of taxes combined with representative research on archives. This research will be an indispensable complement to a running project that tries to find out what people received in return for the payment of their taxes and in which domains (important for wellbeing) the Ptolemaic government invested. This kind of research is new to the field of Ancient History.