Brian Muhs 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.

Brian is currently studying the interactions between Egyptian and Greek traditions of banking and lending in the Ptolemaic Period. Some of his students are currently exploring the histories of textual corpora such as the Pyramid Texts and the Sacerdotal Decrees.

For more details on his research and publications, please visit his profile page at the University of Chicago.