“The fundamental basis of human society has not shifted in 5,000 years,” Wilkinson explains. “You can recognize a variety of techniques of government invented in ancient Egypt that haven’t changed [today]…”
— from ‘Stressed About Taxes? Blame the Ancient Egyptians’ by Kate McMahon, in Smithsonian Magazine, April 2024.
I’ve been hankering for a reason to blame the ancient Egyptians, and now I have one. They developed the world’s first known tax system, around 3000 BC.
That’s how long we’ve been paying taxes. Like, 5,000 years.
Not that I, personally, have been paying taxes for that long. In fact, I try to avoid paying taxes whenever possible, as do so many people — including a very wealthy presidential candidate whom I admire, who paid just $750 in federal income tax… both in 2016, the year he ran for the US presidency, and in his first year in the White House. He paid zero taxes in 11 of the 18 years researched by The New York Times.
I bet he would have paid zero taxes in ancient Egypt, too.
Any type of highly organized government needs to pay its employees, and the Egyptians figured that out even before the Mesopotamians. You had to wake up pretty early in the morning to beat the Mesopotamians at growing a bloated government administration, but somehow the Egyptians managed it. The result was a broad system of taxes, including income taxes and customs taxes.
Thanks to this tax idea, the Egyptians engaged in plenty of royal building projects. Do you know what it costs to build a pyramid? I don’t either, but I’m sure it requires a lot of tax money.
Another change arrived with the invention of taxes: The kings became “Pharaohs”, who were actually understood to be divine, and able to act as intermediaries between the people and the various Egyptian gods.
Again, sort of like our President. Or rather, certain of our Presidents.
By the time of Djedefre (26th century BC), the Pharaohs ceased to have fathers, because their mothers were magically impregnated by the solar deity Ra. So the Pharaoh couldn’t easily rely on Dad to bail him out. The solution to that problem was, apparently, to tax the hell out of the peasants. At first, the taxes were assessed against whole villages, and the villagers had to lump their tax payments together. Later on, the Pharaoh decided it would be more profitable to tax individuals, which in turn led him to employ tax collectors, who kept meticulous records of who had paid their taxes, and who hadn’t.
An ancient Egyptian version of “The IRS” in other words.
This came with obvious requirement that the tax collectors knew how to read and write, and do math. So public schools were invented. That’s a surprising idea, to me. That the actual justification for free public education is to ensure the government has enough tax collectors.
Most of the existing archaeological evidence, about taxation in ancient Egypt, dates from the peak of the civilization’s record keeping: the New Kingdom (1550 to 1070 BC), when a fleet of tax collectors and scribes kept the Royal Treasury’s coffers fully stocked. Many New Kingdom pharaohs used the taxes to erect major monuments to themselves, and throw grandiose jubilee parties.
Of course, the invention of taxes produced a parallel invention: tax evasion. The ancient IRS agents would often cooperate to under-report numbers to the government and keep the surplus… or charge peasants more than their fair share. At the same time, taxpayers invented creative ways to avoid paying their dues.
Weighted scales used to measure grain, for instance, could be easily cheated. People would add rocks to the sacks of grain, to meet the taxed weight for their fields. The problem grew so common, there were royal edicts issued, telling people not to cheat the system.
Unfortunately, this technique no longer works. Modern governments can tell right away, if you’ve enclosed rocks with your tax payment.
Nevertheless, we have our clever little ways of paying only $750 a year.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.