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).

The city of Hibis, located at the junction of the caravan roads passing through the northern part of the oasis, is often depicted as the capital city of the Great Oasis. In fact, little is known about the administrative organization of the district, and especially about the history of Hibis. Because areas now under cultivation have not been excavated, the chronology and the topography of the city, apart from the temple, are far from certain: Was there even a city before and independent of the temple? When did it become the capital city of the Great Oasis and what was the status of the oasis of Kharga within the Great Oasis ? The formation of the city of Hibis is studied in relation to the growing importance of the northern part of Kharga Oasis, from the Middle Kingdom onwards, and through the lens of the shifting relationships with the central powers and the political and religious institutions in the Nile Valley. The role played by other oasis metropoleis such as Mothis and Trimithis during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods is also questioned in order to provide a better understanding of the overall administrative structure of the Great Oasis.