It may not have been a tax emissions trial of the century – that is, it was the second century – but it was so gravitational that the defendants faced charges of forgery, financial fraud and fake sales of slaves. Tax evacuation is as old as taxation itself, but these particular crimes were considered very serious under Roman law, so fines ranged from heavy fines and permanent exile in salt mines to intense labor, and in the worst case, damnatio ad bestias were devoured by the denunciated wildlife.
The allegations are laid out in papyrus, which was discovered decades ago in the Jewish Desert, but which was recently analyzed. It includes a preparatory sheet for the prosecutor and minutes that were rushed to draft in minutes from the judicial hearing. According to ancient memos, tax avoidance schemes included tampering with documents, illegal sale and letting go of slaves, or liberation.
The Dodgers in both taxes were male. One of the names Gadalius was the poor son of a notary with ties to the local administrative elite. In addition to his convictions for fear and forgery, his catalogue of misdeeds included bandits, instigation and four times the duties of ju-degree in the courts of the Roman governor. Gadalius’s crime partner was a certain Saurus, his “friends and collaborators”, and the mastermind of Caper. The ethnicity of the accused is not explicitly stated, but their Jewish identity is assumed based on the names of their biblical Gedalia and Saul.
This ancient legal drama unfolded during the reign of Hadrian. It unfolded probably 132 years ago AD after the emperor toured the area around AD 130. The rebellion was violently oppressed, hundreds of thousands of people killed, most of the surviving Jewish population was expelled from Jews, and Hadrian renamed Syrian and Palestine.
“The papyrus reflects the suspicion that Roman authorities saw their Jewish subject,” said Anna Dorganov, a historian of the Roman Empire at the Austrian Archaeological Institute, who deciphered the scroll. She noted that there is archaeological evidence of a coordinated programme of the Bar Cochiba rebellion. “It is possible that tax evasionists like Gadalia and Saurus, who were trying to underestimate the Roman order, were involved in the preparation,” Dr. Dolganov said.
In the current issue of Tyche, an ancient journal published by the University of Vienna, Dr. Dolgano and three Austrian and Israeli colleagues present court proceedings as case studies. Their paper reveals how Roman institutions and imperial law affect the management of justice in a state environment with relatively few Roman citizens.
“This document provides unusual and very interesting evidence of the slave trade in this part of the empire,” said Dennis P. Kehoe, a classicist at Tulane University who was not involved in the study of “the Jews may have slaves.”
Continuing on to the Papil Trail
No one is sure when or who the papyrus was excavated, but Dr. Dolganov said it was discovered by an ancient Bedouin dealer in the 1950s. She suspects the discovery site was Nahal Haver, a steep walled canyon west of the Dead Sea, where the Bar Cobba rebels fleeing the Romans took shelter in a cave of the natural fault line on a limestone cliff. In 1960, archaeologists found documents of the period in one of the Jewish hideouts. Others have been discovered since then.
The 133-line irregular scroll, which was initially misclassified, was unnoticed in the archives of the Israeli Ancient Bureau until 2014, when Hannah Cotton Partiel, a classicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was found to be written in ancient Greek. In light of the complexity and extraordinary length of the document, a team of scholars was assembled to carry out detailed physical examinations and locations with cross-reference names and other historical sources.
He deciphered the papyrus and reconstructed its complicated story, raising a major challenge for Dr. Dolgano. “The letters are small and dense, and the Greek is very rhetorical and full of technical legal requirements,” she said. Unlike documents such as contracts, there was no formula for ease of translation. “It certainly doesn’t help that we only have the second half of the original,” Dr. Dolganov said.
Researchers speculated that the tax system was designed to avoid notifications. This meant that careful detective work was required to connect what happened. “I had to adopt the perspective of the Roman fiscal regime to understand what the text was talking about,” she said. Dr. Drugonov also had to imagine dodging from the point of view of the accused. What has been beneficial to commit tax fraud in the slave trade in the farthest corner of the Roman world?
The ancient plans resonate deeply with modern tax lawyers. A German lawyer told Dr. Dorgonov that Gadalius and Saurus shenanigans aren’t that different from today’s most common form of tax fraud – shifts in assets, fake transactions. And Roman’s method of interrogation was largely in line with the unantipomorphized shaft (investigative custody) for financial crimes with intimidation and often brutal questions.
Brentshaw, a Princeton University classicist who has no connection to the project, said:
Rebel of the cause
The lawsuits against Gadalius and Saurus were strengthened by information provided by informants who overturned the Roman authorities. And the text even suggests that the informant was nothing but Saurus, who denounced his accomplices to protect himself in the looming financial investigation. The most likely scenario is that Saurus, a Jewish resident, arranged for the fake sale of several slaves to Cheleas, who lived in the neighbouring Arabian province, Dr. Druganov said.
By selling across state borders, slaves would have drawn prints from the assets of Saurus, Jewish. However, as they remained physically in Saurus, Chareas, a buyer’s suspicion, was able to choose not to declare them in Arabia. “Therefore, on paper, the slaves disappeared in Jews, but they never arrived in Arabia, making them invisible to Roman administrators,” Dr. Drugonov said. “We could avoid all taxes on these slaves from now on.”
The Empire had a sophisticated system for tracking slave ownership and collecting various taxes. This reached 4% in slave sales and 5% in means. “To free the empire slaves, we had to officially register documentary evidence on the current and previous ownership of the slaves,” Dr. Dolgano said. “If the documents are missing or suspected, the Rome administrator will investigate.”
To conceal Saurus’ double dealings, Gadalius, the son of a notary, clearly forged bills of sale and other legal agreements. When authorities noticed the problem, the defendant allegedly paid the local city council for protection. At the trial, Gadalius blamed his late father for forgery, and Saurus fixed the manuscript for Chaireas. Papyrus does not provide insight into their motivations. “The reason why men risked freeing slaves without a valid paper remains a mystery,” Dr. Dolgano said.
One possibility is that by forging the sale of slaves and then liberating them, Gadalis and Saurus were observing the Jewish biblical obligation to free those who were enslaved. Or perhaps there was a profitable benefit to capturing people across the border, perhaps gladly captured participants across the border, took them to the empire, freeing them from “slavery” and becoming free Romans. Or Gadalia and Saurus were human traffickers, and they could have been simple and simple. Dr. Dolgano emphasized that the alternative storyline was completely speculative, as he did not support anything in the text.
She said that what surprised her most about the trial was the professionalism of the prosecutor. They adopted clever rhetorical strategies suitable for Cicero and Quintilians, and presented excellent commands of Roman legal terms and concepts in Greek. “This is the edge of the Roman Empire, and the boom, we see a capable, highly capable legal practitioner in Roman law,” Dr. Drugonov said.
Papyrus has not revealed a final verdict. “If a Roman judge was convinced that these were hardened criminals and that the executions were sorted out, Gadalius, as a member of his local civic elite, could have suffered a more benevolent death by decapitation,” Dr. Drugonov said. “Anyway, it’s better than just something that can be eaten by a leopard.”
