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    The Taxes in Grain in Ptolemaic Egypt. Granary Receipts from Diospolis Magna 164-88 B.C. The American Society of Papyrologists, New Haven / Toronto, 1968. 84,23p. Original red cloth. Spine gilt titled. Spine a bit discoloured. Pencil markings, underlinings and annotations from TR. 'This is a study of some 108 grain-tax receipts issued from the royql granary of Dispolis Magna and written on ostraca. All the receipts have been gathered from published collections of ostraca, and therefore the originality of this study (first presented as a Ph.D. dissertation) does not consist in making available a new collection of granary receipts, but in subjecting long-known material to a new examination which is based, to a large extent on statistical methods. In the first part of Mrs. Packman's study the receipts are subdivided, according to the so-called 'tax-phrases' into eight groups. (...) In each group information is given about the sources which have been used, the formula of the receipts, the names appearing in signatures and countersignatures, the amounts of payment and their central tendencies (median size and mean size), the season of payment, the names of taxpayers. Part II contains a discussion of the evidence gathered in part I (...). I cannot understand why, in her statistical tables, she had maintained the initial subdivision of available documents in seven or eight groups, after she had concluded (p.74) that an analysis of the phrases used to describe the grain taxes indicates that there were only three sorts of taxes (...). The statistical foundations of this study would be more reliable 1. if the data concerning the same tax had been combined instead of being scattered over various groups (...), 2. if Mrs. Packman had not limited her research to the area of Diospolis Magna.' (T. REEKMANS in Bibliotheca Orientalis, 1971, 1/2, pp.59-60). (Antiquarian)  (approx. delivery time: undeliverable)

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