Maritime Trade and Royal Accountancy in an Erased Customs Account from 475 B. C. E. on the Aḥiqar Scroll from Elephantine

The newly deciphered Aramaic text-the longest nonliterary text discovered so far-is an erased customs account on 11 surviving fragments of the fifth century B. C. E. Aḥiqar scroll from Elephantine. The customs were collected from Ionian and Phoenician ships and handed over to the royal treasury. The text records the dates (day and month) of the ships' arrivals and departures during one sailing season of ten months. Arranging the scroll fragments according to the dates enabled the reconstruction of most of the fragmentary and missing columns of the customs account as well as the rearrangement of the columns of the Aḥiqar proverbs. Information from the customs account concerning the maritime trade includes the kinds of ships sailing to and from Egypt and the kinds of goods they carried, as well as the system of duty collection and royal accountancy in Egypt in the early Persian period.