The Cost of Death, part II

Egypt, Israel, and the Ancient Mediterranean World. Studies in Honor of Donald B. Redford, G.N. Knoppers & A. Hirsch, eds., 2004

P.Briant, W.Henkelman & M.W.Stolper (edd.), L’archive des fortifications de Persépolis dans le contexte de l’empire achéménide et ses prédécesseurs (Paris, 2008), 317-386.

When this colloquium was announced, I thought it a good chance to revisit some of the evidence about taxation or tribute in the Persepolis Fortifi cation archive. The words "taxation" and "certainty" having thus come together, the word "death" was inevitably close behind. What follows is a paper of modest intent and outcome -an analogue to the old start-of-session school essay "What I did during my holidays", the holiday in question here being a period of virtual sojourn in the Persepolis archive. Starting with so much to learn, I have surely succeeded in educating myself -though travel does not always broaden the mind, and prolonged engagement with the Persepolis material can seem more likely to suck it into a black hole -and my best hope is that it may prompt others to continue my education by correcting or developing its contents.

Espacio Tiempo y Forma. Serie III, Historia Medieval, 2024

The present article aims to analyze the social representativeness of post mortem inventories as a valuable source for studying consumer behavior and standards of living in pre-industrial Europe. Specifically, this article examines the possibilities that Catalan after-death inventories have to offer considering their lack of monetary valuations. With the aim to understand the nature and limits of this source, this paper will use the town of Vic and its rich archives as its case study. For this purpose, this article starts by examining the institutional framework that regulated the elaboration of after-death inventories in late medieval Catalonia. This theoretical approach will be complemented with a cross-analysis of the after-death inventories of Vic, alongside the burial records and the tallas or direct taxation on wealth of this same town, in order to determine the 'actual' coverage of late medieval Catalan after-death inventories. Finally, the study will assess the possibilities that alternative wealth indicators may offer to socially classify after-death inventories without monetary