Research suggests that 1900-year-old Roman Papyrus details about tax evasion

If you thought that you will find few similarities between today's world and the world 2000 years ago, or you feel that you are the only one that you deals with seemingly everyone, think again.

According to Last analysis of 1900-year-old papyrus from ancient RomeMillenia there were taxes and tax avoidance.

“It was an extremely happy discovery that ultimately revealed this publication,” said Anna Dolganov, a historian and papyrologist from the Roman Empire with the Austrian Archaeological Institute This is happening Host Nil Köksal.

“This is extremely historically significant. This is one of those documents that few scholars work on in their entire career.”

Papyrus, found in the desert of Judah in the 1950s, includes a story about two men who lived in a border region between two Roman provinces. The scroll, written by the prosecutor as part of the preparation for the tax evasion process, accuses people of a complicated program including false sales and then Manumission of slave people.

There were at least five types of taxes related to trade, sales, ownership and manum of slaves in the Roman Empire. According to research, the earliest evidence shows that four percent of the tax were charged with the sale of slaves and five percent of the tax on manumism.

“It seems that they did it, it is the armament of the fact that the administrative systems of two Roman provinces did not communicate routinely with each other,” she said.

Dolganov claims that it seems that the sale of slaves on one side of the border has not been verified by the second administration of the province.

“It seems that it was instrumental for slaves to effectively disappear on paper from the view of officials.”

Dolganov said that two men, talk and Saulos, have biblical names that very much indicate that they are Jews.

“The one who played a key role in falsification was the son of a notary public. So he was involved in his father's notarial activities and therefore had access to instruments that need to be created by forged legal documents,” she said.

Possible motifs

The details of the case are visible by the lens of the prosecutor's office, which claims that men are criminals to be condemned.

Dolganov said, however, that it is possible to detect some history.

Dolganov said that one of the mysterious elements of the whole story was that at some point after selling slaves, one of them was released by the original owner who was no longer the owner on paper.

“When it comes to avoiding taxes, why the risk of taking a slave? Because when the slave is in force, their manumission must be registered,” she explained.

He thinks that it could be when the officials became suspicious that something was happening.

Dolganov has several theories about the motives of men in addition to evading trade taxes.

Slaves automatically became Jews if they had Jewish masters and Jewish law has requirements for treating slaves. It says that it is possible that men have tried to avoid their own law.

Another option, according to Dolganeva, may be that the accused people had relations between these slaves, and in the Roman world it customary rewarded faithful slaves of households.

Capital punishment

The rules for avoiding taxes were not specific to Jewish people. They were universal and extremely harsh.

“The Romans did not joke about avoiding taxes. They saw it basically as a crime against the state,” said Dolganov.

The penalty may include significant fine, temporary or permanent exile or hard work in mines or quarries – with the last death sentence, she explained.

“In the worst case, an example could be obtained and in the imagination.

Dolganov said that the text reflects what Roman legal literature about how to advise, said Dolganov.

“This shows that these local lawyers in these provinces on the border were extremely competent in both rhetorical and Roman law, and this is a huge discovery, because it shows that Roman legal knowledge was in fact a very widespread in the entire empire.”

“Scholarship sound”

One of the history experts applauded research, saying that this is an impressive legal history from a less known period. Papyrus comes from the eve of a poorly documented rebellion by the Jewish people against the Roman Empire in Judea – researchers from the period tried to document.

“I think it's a really solid scholarship … This is really important evidence from the times and a place that we just don't know much about it,” said Seth Bernard, a professor of ancient history at the University of Toronto.

He says that there were two aspects of research: the history of slavery in the Empire and the political history of the time and place where historians had a problem with access.

He compared the findings to today's world in which taxes on many goods and services are common.

“You have to pay tax when you buy a slave, you have to pay tax when you have a slave, you have to pay tax when you conclude it and pay tax when you export it,” he said.

“It's as if it was only one activity and it looks like they pay taxes on everything … It's nice to know that we are not the first people dealing with taxes on everything.”