Ever look at your property tax bill and wonder, “Who created this tax?  Whose idea was it to tax property anyway?”  Your wonderment might best be directed towards ancient Egypt.  Starting in 3,500 B.C. Egypt created one of the first pictures of how this property tax thing should work.

Farmers and land holders in Egypt paid property taxes equal to about ten percent of the land production (that sounds like a Texas tax rate to me!).  If the person who was being taxed could not or would not pay he was taken to the courts for justice.  In many of the Ancient Egyptian tombs, wall paintings depict village elders being punished for trying to ignore or evade property taxes.

In Ancient Egypt they even had a god for tax assessors.  His name was Thoth and he took the form of a human body with an ibis head (the ibis is a bird with a long, downward curving beak).  He is often depicted with tools of the trade, such as writing tablets, pigments and a water pot.

Ancient Egypt’s system and need for property taxes is not so different from what we see in our system today (except maybe Thoth).  We really do tax like an Egyptian.