Classical and Near Eastern slavery in th

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Abstract and Keywords
Twentieth-century scholarship, guided in particular by the views of M. I. Finley, saw
Greece and Rome as the only true ‘slave societies’ of antiquity: slavery in the Near East
was of minor economic significance. Finley also believed that the lack of a concept of
‘freedom’ in the Near East made slavery difficult to distinguish from other shades of
‘unfreedom’. This chapter shows that in the Near East the legal status of slaves and the
ability to make clear status distinctions were substantively similar to the Greco-Roman
situation. Through a survey of the economic contribution of slave labour to the wealth
and position of elites in Israel, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, and Carthage, it is shown that
the difference between the ‘classical’ and ‘non-classical’ worlds was not as pronounced as
Finley thought, and that at least some of these societies (certainly Carthage) should also
be considered ‘slave societies’.
Keywords: Greece, Rome, Israel, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Carthage, slavery, freedom, economy
Abbreviations
Cyr.
= Inschriften von Cyrus, König von Babylon (538-529 v.Chr.), by J.N. Strassmeier,
Leipzig 1890.
Dar.
= Inschriften von Darius, König von Babylon (521-485 v.Chr.), by J.N. Strassmeier,
Leipzig 1897.
Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First
Millennium bce
David M. Lewis
The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries
Edited by Stephen Hodkinson, Marc Kleijwegt, and Kostas Vlassopoulos
Subject: Classical Studies, Ancient Greek History, Ancient Roman History, Social and Economic
History, Middle Eastern Languages and Culture
Online Publication Date: Dec 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.42
Oxford Handbooks Online

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SAA VI
= Legal Transactions of the Royal Court of Nineveh, Part I: Tiglath-Pileser III through
Esarhaddon, ed. T. Kwasman & S. Parpola, Helsinki 1991. (State Archives of Assyria
Volume VI.)
TAD
= Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, by B. Porten & A. Yardeni,
Jerusalem 1987-1999. In 4 volumes.
TCL 12
= Contrats néo-babyloniens I: de Téglath-phalasar III à Nabonide, by G. Conteneau,
Paris 1927.
TCL 13
= Contrats néo-babyloniens II: achéménides et séleucides, by G. Conteneau, Paris
1929.
Introduction
A surge of interest in ancient slavery since World War II has bequeathed to current
scholars a robust field marked by numerous advances, both in the understanding of the
historical aspects of Greco-Roman slavery and in methodological approaches to the
analysis of ancient evidence. But it has also bequeathed a set of fixed horizons that are
rarely if ever questioned. One key assumption, which has profoundly shaped the
contours of enquiry, is that slavery was qualitatively different, and—quantitatively
speaking—vastly more significant in Greece and Rome than in the ‘non-classical’ cultures
of both the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East. This contrast is firmly articulated
by the most influential twentieth-century student of ancient slavery, M. I. Finley:
The pre-Greek world—the world of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and
Assyrians; and I cannot refrain from adding the Mycenaeans—was, in a very
profound sense, a world without free men, in the sense which the west has come
to understand that concept. It was equally a world in which chattel slavery played
no role of any consequence. That, too, was a Greek discovery (1981: 114–115).
For many classical historians, this claim remains valid. The recent Cambridge World
History of Slavery, Volume I: The Ancient Mediterranean World (Bradley and Cartledge
2011) provides an apt example of how Finley’s view of Greco-Roman exceptionalism has
set the agenda of ancient slavery studies. Although purporting to cover the
Mediterranean world, it is overwhelmingly focused on Greco-Roman subject matter: of its
509 pages of text, only two are devoted to Iron Age Israel, one and a half to pre-Ptolemaic
Egypt, and, most remarkably of all, a single footnote to Carthage’s large-scale slave
system. Despite the complexity of the ancient Mediterranean world, Greece and Rome,
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according to this approach, constitute the only civilizations that really matter for
antiquity’s place in the global history of slavery.
This chapter will argue that this framework ought to be abandoned. First, it will outline
the methodological background to the received picture of Greco-Roman exceptionalism.
Second, it will focus on slave status, Finley’s conception of freedom, and the supposed
qualitative difference between ‘classical’ and ‘Near Eastern’ slavery. Third, it will discuss
the exploitation of slaves in several regions of the Near East, and will argue for a more
nuanced, less stark picture than that of Finley. Finally, it will conclude by examining the
variables and processes that lay behind differentials in the economic significance of
slavery across various ancient societies.
Methodological considerations
A key analytical tool of twentieth-century scholarship on ancient slavery was the notion of
‘slave society’. This concept was used by Finley as a benchmark for assessing the
structural, socio-economic importance of slavery. Whereas others (e.g. Hopkins 1978: 99–
102) argued that the distinction between ‘slave societies’ and ‘societies with slaves’ ought
to be marked by a specific percentage of the overall population constituted by slaves,
Finley provided a more flexible definition that was more applicable to societies for which
little hard statistical data survived. Finley’s definition focused on the location of slavery in
the socio-economic structure. More specifically, a society could be called a ‘slave society’
if its elite derived a significant proportion of its wealth from slave labour (Finley 1980:
80–82). As a basic yardstick of the economic importance of slavery, this heuristic tool was
extremely useful. However, its repeated use—without adequate attention to its
shortcomings—has caused a number of problems. What was perhaps originally intended
as a means to an end (assessing the relative importance of slavery in different societies)
has at times become an end in itself (was X a slave society?). Hence, the category of
‘slave society’ has been treated (to borrow a Greek distinction) more as physis, a
primordial fact, than nomos, an invented category (e.g. Andreau and Descat 2006: 17–20).
More hazardous is the lack of explicit acknowledgement of the blind spots that
mechanical use of this category can create. To classify a given society as a ‘slave society’,
historians need to be able to identify its elite and that elite’s full range of income sources,
and then to determine the importance of slave labour to the elite’s overall wealth. This
operation can be undertaken only for ancient societies for which we possess abundant
sources. Where we lack such sources, the society in question, rather than being treated
as a ‘possible’ slave society, is typically dismissed as a ‘society with slaves.’ When Finley
wrote that ‘although slaves have been exploited in most societies as far back as any
records exist, there have been only five genuine slave societies’ (1980: 9); that positivistic
sorting of societies into two boxes was implicit in his reasoning. The mechanical
application of this concept produces a black-and-white picture of the importance of slave

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labour in ancient societies. Unsurprisingly, Athens and Rome—with their large and varied
bodies of evidence—emerge as the only ‘slave societies’ of antiquity.
So the idea of ‘slave society’ is a useful tool, but one with serious limitations that need to
be confronted explicitly. A more useful approach has recently been proposed by Lenski,
who argues for an ‘intensification’ model, a sliding scale running from societies in which
slavery existed but played no important economic role, to those in which it was an
economically central institution. This approach is better adapted to capturing the full
range of historical circumstances without straitjacketing them in two absolute, inflexible
categories. Yet the epistemological problem, viz. the huge gaps in our knowledge caused
by the relative lack of evidence for slavery and its role in many parts of the ancient world,
remains.
Other problems have arisen through scholars of the ancient Near Eastern not using the
concept of ‘slave society’ at all, but instead evaluating their societies by a different,
essentially Marxist standard, the ‘slave mode of production’, viz. the contribution of slave
labour to the aggregate production of a given society. This standard, paired with a
popular but misleading stereotype of Greece and Rome as teeming with vast numbers of
slaves, has led to exaggeration of the difference between these regions. For instance,
Roland de Vaux wrote that ‘in Israel and the neighbouring countries, there never existed
those enormous gangs of slaves which in Greece and Rome continually threatened the
balance of social order’, but also that slave labour was a key source of elite income in
Israel. Faust (2012: 15), citing de Vaux, has recently written that ‘the economy of the
kingdoms of Israel and Judah was probably not slave-based’. Dandamaev (1984: 218–219)
wrote of Babylonia in the mid-first millennium BCE that ‘it is possible that the free
population was only two or three times that of the slaves’ (a guess, but one that would
have remarkable implications), but also that Babylonian slavery was much less developed
than in classical societies. These views not only depend on unrealistically high estimates
of Greco-Roman slave numbers; they also look at the problem differently from classical
historians of the last half century. Classical historians have long admitted that slave
labour was negligible in terms of overall production, placing stress rather on its role in
the production of elite wealth. The fact that historians of the classical and Near Eastern
world have been using different criteria for the importance of slave labour has added to
the general confusion and mutual misapprehension.
It is necessary, then, to use a single standard of comparison (whether ‘slave society’,
‘intensification’, or another metric), and yet to be aware of the limitations that any
criterion for defining ‘slave society’ will have. It is also crucial to be aware of the huge
differences in the quality, quantity, and generic attributes of the evidence for slavery in
different ancient societies. As Vlassopoulos (2016b) has recently discussed regarding
Athens, the sources’ generic features privilege certain ‘normative discourses’ and ‘fields
of vision’. In other words, they illuminate only certain aspects of ancient realities, leaving
other aspects in the dark; and that illumination is often refracted and distorted through
generic lenses to produce certain kinds of discourse. For slavery at Sparta, the problem is
compounded; for not only are the sources far fewer than at Athens, they are generally
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written by non-Spartans and conform to the well-known ‘Spartan mirage’, a particularly
pronounced version of the ‘normative discourse’ problem that focuses on the unusual and
exotic.
The evidence for slavery in the ancient Near East is no less diverse than for Greece,
varying in quantity and type from region to region. For example, the cuneiform
documentary record of sixth-century Babylonia, mainly private legal documents, poses a
complex set of problems. The dry, legal, and private nature of much of this documentation
means that the ‘normative discourse’ problem is less acute than for Athens; but the ‘field
of vision’ problem is much worse. Instead of a multiplicity of genres, Babylonian legal
documents are generically quite homogeneous in the kind of information they convey,
leaving much in the dark. For example, a document concerning the division of
inheritance within the Egibi family indicates that this family owned around 100 slaves;
but the work assigned to those slaves is not well documented (Dandamaev 1984: 249;
Jursa 2010: 233). The evidence for Iron Age II Israel, on the other hand, poses different
challenges. The epigraphic record is comparatively sparse, and the texts of the Hebrew
Bible comprise a series of layered sources, resulting from a long process of editing and
redaction, a problem exacerbated by the tendency of biblical scribes not to sign their
individual contributions, in order to maintain the text’s authoritative, canonical status
(Carr 2010; Levinson 2010). These differences in source material need to be constantly
borne in mind. Rather than simply presenting their ‘final results’, the most useful studies
rigorously illustrate their workings and explicitly show their readers the problems of the
source material.
Slave status in comparative perspective
In a recent study of Hellenistic slavery, Thompson has written of the spread of ‘Greek-
style chattel slavery’ throughout the east following Alexander’s conquests, and of ‘the
introduction of chattel slavery to areas where previously it had not formed part of the
culture’. She treats Dandamaev’s book on Babylonian slavery as an exception to the rule
where Asiatic societies were more generally characterized by ‘non-Greek forms of
dependence’ (2011: 194, 195, 202). But what was specifically ‘Greek’ about chattel
slavery, and what was specifically ‘non-Greek’ about ‘non-Greek forms of dependence’?
The reduction of outsiders to the status of property and their trade over great distances
can be found in the east long before the first millennium BCE; the slave trading by
Assyrian merchants at Kaneš in the twentieth century BCE is just one example (Bayram
and Çeçen 1996; cf. van Koppen 2004). The Finleyan line on eastern forms of dependence
followed by Thompson has puzzled scholars of the Near East (Dandamaev 1984: 67–80;
van der Spek 1990). The supposed distinction between ‘Greek’ chattel slavery and ‘non-
Greek’ forms of dependence rests on two problematic premises. First, although Finley
admitted that slavery sensu stricto existed in the Near East, he claimed that status there
existed in a continuum, with one status shading into the next (1981: 132). Second, he
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