A Demotic Receipt for the Cubit Tax on Pigeon Houses from Dryton’s Family Archive: Turin O. dem. Suppl. 12791 (= TM 44876)

in Dryton’s family archive, the content of the text is examined in the light of what we know about the cubit tax on pigeon houses: the demotic and Greek terminology, the amount of the tax and its extra-charge of 20%, the location of the pigeon houses in residential areas, and the advantages of breeding pigeons. The author finally turns to the specific case of pigeon houses of Dryton’s family members and Senminis’ co-ownership.

Sometime between 18 March and 16 April 108 BCE, Senmouthis daughter of Dryton, her sisters, and Senminis daughter of Stotoetis paid the tax on their pigeon house. The Turin demotic ostracon Suppl. 12791 (P. Dryton 54 descr. = TM 44876) is the receipt of the payment drawn up by Patseous son of Pates. The text was already available to the scholarly community in a first translation. The present work provides a transliteration, photos and a facsimile, and a detailed commentary. After an overview of the ostraca from Pathyris (modern Gebelein) in the Museo Egizio and the ostraca in Dryton's family archive, the content of the text is examined in the light of what we know about the cubit tax on pigeon houses: the demotic and Greek terminology, the amount of the tax and its extra-charge of 20%, the location of the pigeon houses in residential areas, and the advantages of breeding pigeons. The author finally turns to the specific case of pigeon houses of Dryton's family members and Senminis' co-ownership. The Turin ostraca did not constitute a homogeneous corpus, but originated from several public and private archival contexts. Thus, presumably not all were found at the site of the Ptolemaic fortress and temple: it is likely that Schiaparelli found some of them in the residential area of Pathyris -which between the 2 nd and 1 st century BCE extended from the valley between the two hills of Gebelein to the top of the southern hill. In Schiaparelli's inventory list, "Fortress and sanctuary" could be a metonymic way to identify the southern hill, and to easily distinguish it from the northern hill, where the mission was also digging in the same year. However, if Schiaparelli was literally referring to the site of the fortified citadel, then the ostraca were found somewhere in the southern neighbourhood of Pathyris, which lay entirely on the top of the southern hill, and some houses were within the temple precinct. 3

A Demotic Receipt for the Cubit Tax on Pigeon
The Turin demotic ostraca from Pathyris mainly consist of court oaths, letters, lists, accounts, contracts,  Interestingly, in the demotic tax name only the singular "pigeon house" is attested, 14 in contrast to the Greek formulation where the indefinite plural "pi-  The fact that the tax amount had not changed in almost a decade confirms that the object of the taxation was not the income from breeding or selling pigeons (which depended on commercial performance), but the building in which they were bred. The pigeon house tax paid by Dryton's family members was not the one-third tax on the income, 22 but the cubit tax on the dimensions of the building. This is confirmed by the name of the tax in the Greek receipts TM 44878 and 44879: πηχ(ισμοῦ) Παθύ(ρεως) "the cubit tax (on the pigeon house) of Pathyris" (πῆχυς = cubit).
The unit of measurement was the cubit, not the a roura, because the building was not in the agricultural area (whose dimensions were measured in arouras), but in the residential area of Pathyris, where fallow plots were measured in cubits. The pigeon house must have been a modest construction, probably located close to the owner's house, used for private, non-profit purposes: it did not produce an income, but possibly food for the family. Furthermore, in a recent paper, Vandorpe and Vannopré 23

The pigeon houses of Dryton's family members
As explained, the demotic denomination of the tax does not distinguish between the singular, "pigeon house", and the plural: therefore, based on the demotic terminology, there is no indication of how many pigeon houses taxpayers paid the cubit tax on. Individual taxpayers may well have owned several dovecotes each, but the cubit tax receipts do not distinguish the tax burden on each of them, but merely record the total amount. Thus, the tax receipt under consideration may have been for several pigeon houses, which may explain why the amount is so high.
In the last will of 126 BCE mentioned above, Dryton bequeathed to his eldest son Esthladas two pigeon houses, one of which was half finished, and to his five daughters a building plot close to their house.
The sisters were to build another pigeon house there and share the building costs and taxes. Esthladas would financially support them, if necessary. This seems to have already happened before 108 BCE, since in the Turin ostracon under study the pi- show the regularity of the cubit-based urban plan and include houses, streets and specific buildings, such as ovens and pigeon houses. 26 These maps will soon be scanned and released in a digital, open-access version. 27 The author's forthcoming PhD project 28 will provide an opportunity to study the maps to seek to identify in them the house of Dryton's family members in the residential area of Pathyris.