How do I tax thee? Let me count the ways.

The Egyptian pharaohs, who ruled the Nile River Valley from 3150 B.C. to 30 B.C., favored what we call Keynesian macroeconomic theory. That is, they liked big-government projects — obelisks, temples, pyramids.

Of course, the projects had to be paid for. Enter taxes.

The pharaohs imposed a tax on cooking oil, according to “A History of Taxation,” published by TaxWorld.org. Tax collectors, or scribes, as they were known back then, went door to door to audit households to ensure that people were consuming sufficient amounts of taxable oil, and not using oil substitutes in their food. People were also charged taxes on their cattle and crops. They paid the pharaohs in goods or services.

The ancient Romans, too, might be considered Keynesians. They liked large-scale infrastructure projects –– paved roads, aqueducts, sewers, amphitheaters. To keep the Roman coffers full, Caesar Augustus, who ruled the Roman Empire from 27 B.C. until his death in 14 A.D., devised both the inheritance tax (5 percent on all gifts to children and spouses) and the sales tax (1 percent on all goods), according to TaxWorld.

Fast forward to the 18th and 19th centuries. England needed to raise cash. The government wanted to impose an income tax, but the wealthy nobles who ruled the land didn’t want to divulge their true worth, saying it would be an unseemly invasion of their privacy, so the income tax was nixed. In its place, under the reign of King William III, the English devised the window tax of 1696, according to “Ancestral Trails: The Complete Guide to British Genealogy,” by Mark Herber.

The window tax charged the good folks of England, and later Great Britain, based on the number of windows their homes had. Homes with fewer than 10 windows were charged two shillings; homes with 10 to 20 windows, four shillings; and homes with more than 20 windows, eight shillings. The poor paid nothing. People were said to have bricked up their windows to avoid the tax, which remained in place until the mid-19th century, when the British finally introduced the income tax.