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T
A X E S
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in ancient Mesopotamia |
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"Tax
reform means, 'Don't tax me, don't tax thee, tax that fellow behind the
tree!'"--Senator Russell Long
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Sumerian
tablet which records payment of the tax called "burden," circa
2500 B.C.
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 In
comparison with ancient Mesopotamia, perhaps we suffer less than our ancient
counterparts. Since
they didn't have coined money, ancient households had to pay taxes in kind,
and they paid different taxes throughout the year. Poll taxes required each
man to deliver a cow or sheep to the authorities. Merchants transporting
goods from one region to another were subject to tolls, duty fees, and other
taxes. To avoid as many of these as possible, they frequently resorted to
smuggling. One letter from about 1900 B.C. recounts the consequences of
these evasive measures, when a trader from the head office instructed his
employee:
Almost everything was taxed--livestock, the boat trade, fishing, even funerals--but probably the most burdensome obligation a household faced was its labor obligation. This was called "going" or "burden" in Babylonian languages. A free man, head of his household, owed the government many months of labor service. If he were lucky, his service might entail harvesting the government's barley fields or digging the silt out of canals. If he were unlucky, he had to do military service, leaving the security of home to fight wars abroad, perhaps never to return. Not unnaturally men who could afford it avoided this labor service: they either sent a slave or hired someone on their behalf. Technically, substitution was illegal, but we know it was widely practiced. Those who couldn't afford a substitute took more drastic measures. Law No. 30 of Hammurabi's Law Code begins, "If a soldier or sailor abandons his field, orchard or home because of the labor obligation and runs away"--and the consequence was forfeiture of his family's land and livelihood. The almost one million cuneiform tablets which currently survive in museum collections around the world--some 30,000 of these in the University of Pennsylvania Museum--provide insights into topics like taxation. We encourage you to come visit the Mesopotamian galleries again--after all, it beats doing your taxes!
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| Dr. Tonia Sharlach, former researcher in Penn Museum's Babylonian Section, was part of the team of scholars that developed the Sumerian Dictionary Project, the first dictionary of the world's oldest known written language. Dr. Sharlach received her PhD in 1999 from Harvard. Her dissertation focused on Babylonian taxes. The revised version of the dissertation, "Provincial Taxation and the Ur III State," was published in 2004 by Styx-Brill, Leiden. |