Receipt for rent paid by transfer of bank deposit

Description

A woman named Tasis, resident of Dionysias, which was located in the division of Themistes at the western end of Lake Moeris, has rented a farm plot belonging to her to one Anoubas who lived in the village of Philoteris. The latter village lay some miles to the southeast of Dionysias along the road leading into the Faum from the Small Oasis. In the month Epeiph, sometime between July 14 and 23, Anoubas piad the rent on this plot. Since the receipt was made out by the village bank of Palamedes, the rent must have been paid by the lessee to the bank. Whether both the peasant Anoubas and the lessee Tasis had deposits at this bank, and the rent was paid by a mere transfer of the necessary amount upon the bank's books from one account to the other, or whether the lessee Anoubas brought the actual money and deposited it to the account of Tasis, does not appear from the document. The form of the receipt has a costomary characteristic of the statements of deposit-transfers made out by the Egyptian banks, namely that the usual greeting (xairein) is lacking, and that the fact of the transfer is put in the accusative-infinitive construction without the governing verb. BGU 70 is an example of such a transfer statement and happens to be from the same bank.