In the scholarly literature on the oases, we find a variety of assertions about the cities of the Kharga and Dakhla oases: that one was the capital at a particular period, that one did or did not have civic status at some date. On close examination, most of these statements turn out to be based on slender or no evidence, and in many cases we find that we know much less than has been supposed about the administrative organization of the Great Oasis. In what follows, we look more closely at the available evidence for both Kharga and Dakhla, tracing the history of Hibis – often supposed to be the capital of the whole oasis – and then of the two major towns of the Dakhla Oasis, Mothis (modern-day Mut) and Trimithis. We will try as well to see what we can of their interrelationship and of the overall administrative structure.

More than thirty years of excavations in Kharga Oasis yielded a large amount of Demotic ostraca providing information about the tax systems in place in this remote area of the Egyptian Western Desert. In this chapter I propose an overview of the Demotic fiscal documentation emanating from various settlements of the Great Oasis considered (part 1). These texts provide insights on the multiple tax systems set up by state as well as by local temples in the longue durée of the second part of first millennium BC. The king seems to have levied taxes at the district and the village levels while the temples took an amount from the harvests of their tenants. In this context, the temple of Amun of Hibis of Kharga appears as the religious institution that owned the most land in the whole oasis (part 2). It helps also to know the nature of the taxes - in cereal, in oil for lighting - and attests to the existence of a form of banalité required for the use of a mill (part 3).