ess soldiery are represented as
"running from house to house, dealing blows right and left
with their sticks, ducking the fellahin head downwards in
the water, and not leaving one of them with a whole skin."
This treatment was still resorted to in Egypt not long ago,
in order to extract money from those taxpayers whom beatings
had failed to bring to reason.

One might be tempted to declare that the picture is too dark a one to be
true, did one not know from other sources of the brutal ways of filling
the treasury which Egypt has retained even to the present day. In the
same way as in the town, the stick facilitated the operations of the
tax-collector in the country: it quickly opened the granaries of the
rich, it revealed resources to the poor of which he had been ignorant,
and it only failed in the case of those who had really nothing to give.
Those who were insolvent were not let off even when they had been more
than half killed: they and their families were sent to prison, and they
had to work out in forced labour the amount which they had failed to pay
in current merchandise.*

* This is evident from a passage in the _Sallier Papyrus n deg.
I_, quoted above, in which we see the taxpayer in fetters,
dragged out to clean the canals, his whole family, wife and
children, accompanying him in bonds.

[Illustration: 130.jpg LEVYING THE TAX: THE TAXPAYER IN THE HANDS OF THE
EXACTORS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a picture on the tomb of Khiti
at Beni-Hasan (cf. Champollion, _Monuments de l'Egypte_, pl.
cccxc. 4; Rosellini, _Monumenti civili_, pl. cxxiv. b).

The collection of the taxes was usually terminated by a rapid revision
of the survey. The scribe once more recorded the dimensions and
character of the domain lands in order to determine afresh the amount
of the tax which should be imposed upon them. It often happened, indeed,
that, owing to some freak of the Nile, a tract of ground which had been
fertile enough the preceding year would be buried under a gravel bed, or
transformed into a marsh. The owners who thus suffered were allowed an
equivalent deduction; as for the farmers, no deductions of the burden
were permitted in their case, but a tract equalling in value that of the
part they had lost was granted to them out of the royal or seignorial
domain, and their property was thus made up to its original worth.

[Illustration: 131.jpg LEVYING THE