It is an administrative document which contains a survey of cultivatable lands in the late Ramesside Period of the New Kingdom of Egypt.

[2] The Wilbour Papyrus is a rare case of a well preserved look into the economic administration of Ancient Egypt.

Charles Edwin Wilbour purchased seventeen papyri from a farmer when he visited the island of Elephantine near Aswan in 1893.

When Wilbour's property was returned to his family, nearly half a century later, his widow donated the papyri to the Brooklyn Museum.

The area surveyed is not known with complete accuracy but it begins at The Faiyum and ends near Tihna (near Minya in the modern day), a distance of approximately 140 kilometers.

[8] The most numerous occupations of plot-holders in the document are priests (making up 10.6% of the population), soldiers (8.4%), ladies (11.1%), herdsmen (7.7%), stable-masters (17.7%), farmers (8.3%), and scribes (4.3%).

It mostly lists Libyans and Near-Easterners, it is possible they were foreign mercenaries who had descendants who settled on farmland in which they obtained for serving in the military.

Ihwty were small plots held by individual field laborers, cultivators or tenant farmers.

[9] Ihwty are thought to have been small plots privately held by individuals while the other three types seem to be larger state holdings of land that were leased to tenets.

This has allowed for Egyptologists to estimate that 13 to 18 percent of all of Ancient Egypt's farmland during the Ramesside Period was held by temples.

[4] The larger three types of plots that were worked by field workers paid taxes by turning over 30 percent of their harvest.