An official register or inventory of property ownership, land boundaries, and values used for taxation and legal purposes.
From French 'cadastre,' derived from Italian 'catastro,' from Greek 'kata' (down) and 'stichon' (line). Originally a Ottoman taxation record system, it evolved into the modern European land registry concept.
The oldest cadastral systems trace back to ancient Egypt—the Nile's floods destroyed property boundaries annually, so officials had to constantly re-measure and re-register land, inventing surveying science in the process. Disaster drove innovation!
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