Early Evidence from Emperor Trajan’s Reign (AD 98-117) on the Taxpayers’ Responsibility for the Deficit Recovery

This paper introduces thirteen pieces of evidence of the deficit recovery, which were registered directly through collecting “deficit tax” (ἐνδέημα) from the tax-payers. All the evidence was written down in the Hermopolis bank's day-book, dated back to AD 98- 101. These attestations of deficit were accumulated from previous fiscal years.
The significance of this paper lies in two points, first, the abovementioned day-book, which was edited in 2014 by Ruey-Lin Chang, dated back to the first years of Emperor Trajan’s reign (AD 98-117), the period which attested Trajan’s financial changes over the responsibility for deficit recovery, since making up the deficit was firstly done by uploading it on the officials, then became from Trajan’s reign on the tax-payers. Second, tracing years of accumulating deficit tax and years of deficit recovery expresses well the economic status in a part of the Hermopolitenome. On the other hand, the article draws the attention to the work of drafting the tax registers and preparing it for the new Egyptian fiscal year through extracting data from other arrears’ registers of theprevious fiscal years.