Faculty

Brian Muhs received his B.A. in Egyptian Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985, and his Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. He has taught as University Lecturer in the Papyrological Institute at Leiden University in the Netherlands from 1997 to 2011, as Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures and the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago since 2011, and as Professor of Egyptology since 2026. 

Brian is interested in the history of ancient Egyptian social, economic and legal institutions, particularly but not exclusively during the transition from Pharaonic to Ptolemaic and Roman rule. He is also interested in language contact and interaction, particularly between Demotic and Greek, and in the reconstruction of ancient Egyptian textual archives that have been dispersed by antiquities dealers and collectors. 

Brian has examined the roles of tax receipts in the ancient Egyptian system of taxation in his books Tax Receipts, Taxpayers and Taxes in Early Ptolemaic Thebes (2005), and Receipts, Scribes and Collectors in Early Ptolemaic Thebes (2011). He has employed New Institutional Economics models in his book The Ancient Egyptian Economy, 3000-30 BCE (2016) to explain how the spread of written documentation influenced the development of systems of taxation and of enforcement of property titles in ancient Egypt, and how the increasing availability of silver gradually drove out other media of exchange and prepared the way for the adoption of coinage. He has also studied the interactions between Egyptian and Greek traditions of banking and lending in the Ptolemaic Period in his book Lending in Ptolemaic Egypt (2025). 

Brian is currently studying the history of institutional accounting in Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt, and the history of police and imprisonment.