During the Egyptian “Old Kingdom” period, at least from the Second Dynasty through the Sixth, officials kept track of the passing years with records of “cattle counts.” The animals included as “cattle” were all their four-legged farm animals used for food or as beasts of burden. Officials kept these records to determine how much their numbers had increased so they could assess the tax imposed on each farmer.
During that period, they did not keep records of regnal years per se, making studying that period’s chronology challenging. As the Wikipedia article “Cattle Count” states, these records typically read “year of the Xth cattle count under the person of the king Y.” However, many documents read “year after the Xth cattle count.” These records’ features have led many researchers to conclude that the cattle counts were biannual instead of annual. Which was it?
Some scholars have commented that it was not quite that simple. Those records are incomplete, but the number of extant records with ‘regular year’ counts exceeds those labeled “year after.” This fact gives the impression that the counts were neither annual nor biannual; they were irregular. Nevertheless, the fragmentary Palermo Stone entries almost certainly indicate that officials used the biannual method during the Second Dynasty and possibly in the Third.
How can a common-sense approach give us better insights into these matters? One aspect of understanding a problem better involves taking a step back and looking at the broader picture. What could have influenced the pharaohs and their officials to assess cattle counts on a variable basis?
Farming success in Egypt depended on Nile flooding levels. Excessive inundation volumes (or flooding for too long) or insufficient Nile River water flow could result in poor or damaged crops. Therefore, optimum agricultural yields depended on moderate levels of Nile flooding, as did taxation of farm production. However, the same was true of raising farm animals. If the annual Nile flood was too low, the quality and quantity of forage for the animals decreased. If the inundation was too high, it could uproot large swaths of forage plants and even drown animals. When Nile inundations were above or below the range of satisfactory river water volumes, government officials often skipped tax assessments that year. Thus, a “year after cattle count” designation from the Fourth through Sixth Dynasties implies a Nile flood that was either too high or too low.
Second Dynasty officials probably had a policy from the beginning of taxing biannually. As governments grow, the tax burden tends to increase. Therefore, the irregular cattle counts that were apparent in the Fourth Dynasty and later would suggest that the government preferred annual counts, but less than optimum Nile inundations often precluded them. Alternatively, they preferred biannual assessments, but insufficient revenue forced them to collect taxes more often. In either case, yearly assessments became the norm over time, with skipped years likely due to unfavorable Nile floods.
Long-term studies of annual Nile inundation levels show that they are somewhat cyclical. The reason is that they are related to El-Niño oscillations, which affect weather conditions across the planet, especially in tropical zones. Consequently, periods during the Fourth Dynasty and later that seemed regularly biannual likely coincided with multiple years of consecutive unfavorable inundations.
Thus, this common-sense approach helps put to rest the modern myth that Egyptian cattle counts continued biannually after the Second and Third Dynasties. Researchers who believe cattle counts were strictly biannual (or annual) have ignored the link between taxation and annual Nile inundation levels. This understanding, combined with astronomical clues and king list data, can help elucidate the chronology of that era.