When did tax start? The earliest evidence of taxation comes from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt in roughly 3300 to 3000 BC. This was long before people paid tax in coins, so tax was usually paid in goods or in labor. Some form of taxation probably existed before the earliest evidence we have, but writing was only just beginning, so there are very few records.
Tax is something that nobody wants to pay but is something that most societies accept as necessary. It is part of our social contract with the government, or whoever rules us. We understand that we need to pay to fund public services and infrastructure for the good of all. The sum of all our small amounts of money can create a much better life for us than we could create on our own. For example, schools. People pay tax, which funds education. If there were no taxes and each family had to fund their children’s education on their own, they would have to pay for teachers or pay for a private school. More people pay, so individuals have to pay less. The same is true for health care and policing, and everything else society depends on.
The social idea of taxation as something for the good of everybody has changed over time, and taxation certainly did not start out like that. In the very beginning of human society, when we moved from a hunter-gatherer existence to a sedentary agricultural existence, tax-like payments probably grew from several different sources. Villages would fight against each other for resources. Some people would work the land and some people might be responsible for fighting. The people who worked the land may have given up some of their produce so that the people who fought had the freedom to fight. Or they may have given food to the leader of the clan in return for protection. They may also have given goods to temples or religious leaders. Taxation probably grew out of this mixture of protection, religion, power, and organization.
In the very early days of ancient states, taxation was something that people owed their ruler or their temple. The ruler could use it as they saw fit, often for their own good and not their people’s. The first evidence of tax-like record keeping comes from Mesopotamia in about 3300 BC, but that was not a modern statewide tax system. Mesopotamian clay tablets that have survived from that date show goods, livestock, grain, and labor recorded in pictographs and numbers. Some of these records show how much was owed to temples or other central institutions. They also show that labor was a valid way of paying what was owed. Labor in place of tax is called corvée labor, and it became one way ancient states built canals, roads, temples, and monuments.
There are tax records from Ancient Egypt in about 3000 BC, and these are a sign of what was probably one of the first state-organized tax systems. Just after Upper and Lower Egypt were unified, something like a nationwide tax system began to appear. This was still paid in goods or labor because there was no coin-based monetary system yet. Accounts were kept by royal workers who traveled around the land working out how much people owned and how much they owed. This royal tour was known as the “Following of Horus”. Horus was the god of the sky and kingship. Egyptians believed that the pharaoh was the living Horus on Earth, so tax collection was connected to both political power and religious authority. It would have been very difficult to refuse to pay.
Once money came into being, it became easier to collect taxes in one way, but more difficult in another because tax collectors needed to know the value of everything. The Roman Republic had a tax called the tributum, which was based on assessments of citizens’ property and was often used to fund war. It was not the same as a modern tax because it varied from year to year and could even be refunded if Rome gained enough money from conquest. Later, as Rome expanded, taxes from provinces became increasingly important. In many areas, private tax collectors paid the government up front for the right to collect taxes and then collected the money from the people later. This made tax collection easier for the government, but it also gave tax collectors a very strong reason to squeeze as much money as they could from the people.
Different countries came up with different ways of taxing their people over the following centuries. The Domesday Book in England from 1086 was basically a way to work out who owned what land and how much tax the king could get from it. Government inspectors were sent out to record land, animals, mills, workers, and other resources. People were taxed on what they owned or what their land was worth. This all changed in Britain in 1799 when William Pitt introduced a modern income tax to help pay for the war against France. Before that, people had often been taxed on land, goods, property, windows, or trade. However, when people moved from agriculture to industry, they did not all produce their own goods and they did not all own land. There needed to be a way to tax the money people earned from their jobs. For the first time in British history, people were charged directly on how much they earned. It started only for people earning over a certain amount, but over time, income tax spread to other countries and the level fell until almost everybody was paying. And that is the system we have today. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax
https://www.history.com/articles/tax-artifacts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax
https://www.nationalbanken.dk/en/what-we-do/notes-and-coins/history-of-money
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