Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE Oxford Handbooks Online 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 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. Page 1 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE 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.1 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, Page 2 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE 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 Page 3 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE 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.2 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.3 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 Page 4 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE 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.4 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.5 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.6 Slave status in comparative perspective In a recent study of Hellenistic slavery, Thompson has written of the spread of ‘Greekstyle 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 ‘nonGreek’ 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 Page 5 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE believed that the Greeks invented the concept of freedom, allowing a clear distinction between slaves and everyone else that was impossible in societies where status existed as a fluid continuum. A few words need saying on each of these problems. First, the idea that in the Near East slave, or any other, status shaded into other statuses is contradicted by the sources. A good illustration of how status distinctions functioned in practice can be seen in the trial in 548 BCE of a slave named Bariki-ili, who ran away from his owner, was apprehended, and claimed to be a free man. The case went to trial, and Bariki-ili’s owner was able to produce a series of clay tablets documenting his various conveyances from owner to owner over the years. Bariki-ili, in contrast, was unable to produce a tablet of manumission and was therefore returned to his owner. Several similar cases from Babylonian legal documents attest an ability to make such razor-sharp status distinctions.7 Other legal documents from the Near East—such as the Elephantine papyri or the Samaria papyri from Wadi Daliyeh—show that a slave’s position was essentially similar to that of the so-called ‘Greek-style chattel slave’. He or she was the permanent, alienable, heritable property of the owner; and although the owner’s rights over the slave might be restricted in different ways from place to place, the basic legal framework of slavery across the ancient world was fundamentally similar (Porten 1996: 199–201; Gropp et al. 2001). Moreover, we find slaves from the same ‘barbarian’ regions exploited by the Greeks being imported by easterners too: like the Greeks, Phoenicians, Assyrians, and Persians all imported Anatolian (especially Phrygian) slaves.8 Second, on the issue of freedom, Finley believed that a strong causal connection existed between the economic role of slavery and the emergence of a concept of freedom. On this view, in the early Greek world, as well as in the Near East and archaic Rome, slavery played a minimal role in the economy and statuses existed in a fluid continuum. When slavery emerged as the major source of elite wealth in Athens following Solon’s reforms in 594/3 BCE, this putative change at the base level of production spurred a cultural development in the conceptual superstructure, viz. the crisp division of everyone into two categories: free and slave (Finley 1981: 114, 149, 155). There are several problems with this view. The category ‘slavery’ does not require an antonym, ‘freedom’, to be crisp and comprehensible; and in many historical societies where it has been given an antonym, it was not ‘freedom’, but other concepts such as mastery or kinship.9 In fact, concepts of freedom did exist in the Near East, though they had a different currency from their Greco-Roman equivalents.10 There is no reason to insist on a causal relationship between the growing economic role of slavery and the emergence of the concept of freedom.11 The major differences between classical and Near Eastern societies lay not in the sphere of legal praxis, but in culture—and more specifically, in the metaphorical extension of the terminology of slavery to other aspects of social life in which asymmetries of power were in play. In the Greek world, the terminology of douleia (‘slavery’) held generally negative connotations of domination by the superior party and, for the inferior party, the sense of being ensnared into a course of action dictated by the former (be that a tyrant, a more powerful neighbour, or one’s own irresistible appetites).12 In the Near East, in contrast, the terminology of slavery was commonly enlisted into the etiquette of deference in social Page 6 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE interactions between unequals: thus individuals might be described (or describe themselves) as slaves of a god, of a king, or simply of a social superior, despite the fact that they were not legally enslaved to them. This connoted a positive sense of deference to rank as well as loyal service; but such language would have seemed intolerably obsequious to an Athenian of the classical period (Harris 2006: 278–279; cf. Missiou 1993). Political concepts of freedom in the Near East were of minor and restricted importance, whereas in the classical world freedom as a political value became immensely important.13 Not all slavery metaphors in the Greek world were negative, and not all in the Near Eastern world were positive; but in broad terms, the major difference between slavery and freedom in the ancient Near East and in Greece and Rome was located in this cultural sphere. Elite exploitation of slave labour I will now survey several regions of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East where slave labour played a significant role in elite wealth. Slave labour did not play a significant role in all regions: in Egypt, for instance (except under the Persians: see the section on Persia below); and in many other regions we have only a hazy idea of the sources of elite wealth. However, even in those cases (e.g. Assyria and Babylonia) that Finley would not have classified as ‘slave societies’, it will be instructive to consider the evidence in some detail. First, it will show how the gulf in economic praxis between east and west is exaggerated, more a difference between shades of grey than between black and white. Second, it will illuminate the diverse and uneven nature of the documentary evidence and the limits of potential historical reconstructions from region to region. I will focus mainly on elite slaveholdings, which are best attested in the evidence; but, where possible, I will also discuss the distribution of slave ownership further down the wealth spectrum. Page 7 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE Israel Let us begin with Iron Age II Israel, the period of the monarchies in Israel and Judah, roughly the first half of the first millennium BCE. This period can be studied using two main categories of evidence: archaeological data and the Hebrew Bible. The modern state of Israel has since its inception devoted considerable resources to archaeological survey and excavation; consequently, much is known about urbanism, household economies, and settlement patterns in the first half of the first millennium BCE (Faust 2012). The Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, is a complex anthology of individual books which were generally edited over time and comprise material dating to different epochs. In what follows, I will refer therefore mainly to texts that are securely dated to the monarchical period. First, then, the patriarchal narratives of Genesis. Generally regarded as part of Israel’s legendary proto-history, they convey cultural assumptions from the monarchical period in which they were written down (King and Stager 2001: 7). As Hezser (2005: 286–288) notes, the patriarchs are consistently portrayed as wealthy men with large slaveholdings. Other Israelite stories contain the same assumption: for example, the demolition of statues of Baal by Gideon and his ten slaves (Judg. 6:27); or the tale of Gehazi, Elisha’s dishonest servant, who would have spent his ill-gotten gains on olive groves, vineyards, livestock, and slaves, had his master not caught him red-handed (2 Kgs 5:26). Normative texts also presume slave ownership, at least among the elite: from versions of the Decalogue (Exod. 20:2–17; cf. Deut. 5:12–15, 12:18, 16:11) to the vignette of the ideal elite wife in Prov. 31:10–31, whose duties include managing her female slaves and producing a textile surplus for sale to merchants. More traditionally ‘historical’ texts convey a similar picture. The courtier in 2 Sam. 9:1–13 is granted land worked by a bailiff, his fifteen sons, and twenty slaves. In Jer. 34:8–22 the elite of Judah are criticized for holding poor Judahites as slaves contrary to the law (cf. Neh. 5:1–13).14 Hired workers also appear; but there is no sign of agricultural tenancy until New Testament times (de Vaux 1961: 167; cf. Lemaire 2015). Although these texts are short on detail and often hard to assign to an exact date, they convey a consistent picture: rich men often own many slaves and use some hired workers too, a picture not markedly different from that attested in another region of the archaic eastern Mediterranean, Aegean Greece (Harris 2012; Lewis 2018: ch. 5). Assyria The evidence for slavery in Assyria during the eighth to seventh centuries BCE is markedly different. We possess a body of quotidian legal documents, mostly from centres of elite activity, especially royal palaces such as at Nineveh; they provide a detailed (but selective) view of legal transactions of the Assyrian elite.15 The first point of note is the sheer scale of their slave ownership. A few examples will illustrate its upper end. Mušallim-Issar, village manager for the chief eunuch to Tiglath-Pileser III, purchased slaves on at least nine occasions (SAA VI 1–9), with one transaction including nine, Page 8 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE another five, slaves (SAA VI 2, 6). Šumma-ilani, a chariot driver in the royal chariot corps (SAA VI 34–56), overall ‘bought at least 50 slaves, including seven families, attested in 12 legal transactions, in the course of about 30 years (709–680 BC).’16 Nabu-šumu-iškun, chariot driver to Sennacherib, once expended ten silver minas on twenty slaves (SAA VI 57) and on another occasion spent thirteen silver minas on an unknown (but probably larger) number of slaves (SAA VI 58). According to the palace archives from Kalhu, the palace scribe Nabu-tuklatua purchased at least forty-five slaves (mostly male), including eight slaves in three transactions in the year 788 BCE.17 The slave purchases of Šulmušarri—attested in the detailed archive from his mansion (the so-called ‘Red House’) in Dur-Katlimmu, a provincial settlement on the Khabur River18—show a different pattern, involving more female slaves than males (viz. thirty-five females, fifteen males).19 Note that all these archives document only purchases of slaves and not the extent of prior slaveholding, such as slaves these persons inherited: hence they provide only the minima. The slaveholdings of these elite Assyrians place them, at the very least, in the same league as the wealthiest fourth-century Athenians.20 Slaveholding in eighth to seventh-century BCE Assyria, however, was apparently more upwardly concentrated than in classical Attica. Comparison of slave prices and labouring wages shows that slave ownership was well beyond average Assyrian labourers.21 Furthermore, despite the size of some slaveholdings, it is unclear how important a component of elite wealth production slave labour constituted; and there is good evidence for other forms of labour exploitation: e.g. forms of bound tenancy resulting from the state-run system of mass deportation (Oded 1979). Although elite Assyrian slave purchases were seemingly based to a considerable degree on economic motives,22 Assyria was probably not a ‘slave society’ in Finleyan terms. Nevertheless, slavery was a major, entrenched institution in Assyrian society, a fact that is negated if we simply classify Assyria as a ‘society with slaves’. Babylonia The documentary sources from Babylonia during the so-called ‘long sixth century’ following the downfall of Assyria in 612 BCE display both similarities and contrasts with the Assyrian material. As in Assyria, much of our evidence pertains to the elite; but its quantity and quality are far greater.23 Assyriologists have generally treated the Babylonian elite in terms of two ideal types, ‘prebendaries’ and ‘entrepreneurs’. ‘Prebendaries’ held benefices in urban temples, entitling them to an income for performing sacred duties, and typically drew further income from real estate in and around Babylonia’s major cities.24 ‘Entrepreneurs’ frequently came from less distinguished backgrounds, but through hard work and innovation some acquired considerable fortunes and political connections. The most famous example is the Egibi family, whose income derived from commodity trading, rents on agricultural land and urban real estate, tax farming, and payments from slaves (Wunsch 2007, 2010). Page 9 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE The scale of slave ownership among elite Babylonians is again not vastly different from the elite of classical Athens. As noted above, a document of 508 BCE (Dar. 379) indicates that the Egibis owned around 100 slaves. The inheritance of a younger son of the Bābāya family contained 118 slaves (TCL 13, 223), implying family holdings of at least several hundred (Jursa 2010: 233), reminiscent of the large urban slaveholdings of Romans like Pedianus Secundus (Tacitus, Annals 14.42–5). These families were from the very richest stratum; at a rung below, patrimonies of 30, 27, and 25 slaves are attested (TCL 12, 43; Cyr. 161; Dar. 429).25 More common among the lower echelons of the propertied classes were holdings of 3–5 slaves (Dandamaev 1984: 216; Jursa 2010: 233). We have already noted the problems with discovering the occupations of these slaves, since the documentation mainly captures legal information (such as that contained in contracts, accounts, and promissory notes). However, two points need to be noted. First, as Jursa (2010: 234–235) has observed, the nature of the documentation makes balanced appraisal of agricultural slavery impossible. Slave owners did not generally make contracts with slaves ordered to farm their lands, making them largely invisible; whereas there is ample evidence that families like the Egibis rented out much land to free tenant farmers on a sharecropping basis. Comparison of slave prices in sixth-century Babylonia with the costs of renting land shows that the latter made more economic sense.26 Second, the role of slaves as managers is better attested: from the sixth to the fifth century BCE the range of activities undertaken by entrepreneurial families broadened, creating more need for expert managers. This role was apparently often filled by slaves (Jursa 2010: 240); some, indeed, became fairly wealthy and successful (Dandamaev 1984: 345–371). On balance, then, like eighth- and seventh-century Assyria, sixth-century Babylonia was not a ‘slave society’ in the Finleyan sense; but slavery played a major role in elite economic activities, especially among ‘entrepreneurs’; and their multifarious business dealings were probably heavily reliant upon the managerial support of slaves, even if primary agricultural production was largely performed by free tenants. Again, simply relegating Babylonian slavery to the category of ‘societies with slaves’ leads one to miss the many similarities between slaving practices in Babylonian cities and those in urban centres in the Greco-Roman world. Page 10 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE Persia Slavery played a more dominant role in elite wealth in several regions of the Persian Empire. During the late fifth century BCE the Persian satrap of Egypt, Aršama, used slaves, many of them Cilicians, on his Egyptian estates. In one letter, TAD A6.10, Aršama excoriates his subordinate for mismanaging his property, and demands that workers— who must be slaves—be acquired for his estates and branded (or tattooed) with his mark, as on other Persian noble estates in the satrapy (Tuplin 2013: 77–78). A similar situation is apparent c.400 BCE in another region, Anatolia, regarding a wealthy Persian named Asidates. Xenophon relates how he and a band of Greek mercenaries conducted a nightraid on Asidates’s estate in the Caicus valley (Anabasis 7.8.7–22). Most of Asidates’s slaves escaped; but some 200 were captured, hinting at much larger slaveholdings. This ties in with the fact that the Greeks acquired many slaves from Anatolia. Asidates, living closer to the supply source, would have been able to acquire slaves even more cheaply (de Ste. Croix 1981: 508). In Fars, the Persian heartland, a different forced labour system existed, attested mainly in the so-called Persepolis Fortification Texts. These texts, mostly written in Elamite, document inter alia ration disbursements to an estimated population of c.10–15,000 forced labourers (kurtaš, ‘workers’) at the beginning of the fifth century (Aperghis 2000: 138–139). Their work gangs were drawn from across the empire and included Greeks, Thracians, Lycians, Egyptians, and Cappadocians. Their scanty rations indicate that they were not working in Fars voluntarily; and the bonuses paid to pregnant mothers suggests an incentive system for the long-term reproduction of the workforce (Dandamaev 1975; Briant 2002: 435). Most of the kurtaš were probably enslaved war captives and their descendants; but some of the workers may have held a different status, drafted in as temporary corvée labourers (Dandamaev and Lukonin 1989: 173–174). According to Diodorus (17.69.2–9), as he approached Persepolis, Alexander the Great met a gang of 800 Greeks, many of them mutilated, whose ancestors had been carried off to Persia. As Dandamaev noted, ‘it is obvious that these Greeks comprised part of the kurtaš’ (Dandamaev and Lukonin 1989: 171; cf. Briant 2002: 434). Carthage Shortly before Alexander invaded the Persian Empire, a serious slave revolt erupted in the Phoenician city state of Tyre.27 But it is Tyre’s colony, Carthage, that constitutes our last case study. Carthage dominated trade in the western Mediterranean for several centuries before its destruction by Rome in 146 BCE. Although there is some Punic epigraphical evidence for slavery, the most telling accounts were written by classical authors (Lemaire 2003: 219–222). They describe large numbers of enslaved war captives being brought to work in Carthage’s hinterland,28 which was intensively farmed and irrigated during the Hellenistic period (Diodorus 20.8.2–4). The size of Carthage’s slave population was proverbial (e.g. Justin 21.4.6); and its scale was noted in a speech in the Page 11 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE Roman senate during the debate over Carthage’s surrender in the Second Punic War (Appian, Punica 9.59). Evidence for elite slaveholdings is lamentably limited to single source (Polybius 38.8.4). In the year before its destruction, the Roman general Scipio offered a deal to a Carthaginian aristocrat named Hasdrubal, including allowing him to keep a hundred of his slaves: evidently a small fraction of his overall slaveholdings (cf. Polybius 38.8.11). The richest Carthaginians clearly had slaveholdings well in excess of their classical Athenian counterparts. As Flaig (2009: 56) notes, the evidence for Carthaginian slavery, though patchy, is sufficient to indicate a major slave society. Page 12 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE Understanding regional variation in the economic role of slavery I have argued that when one employs a common standard of comparison to elite exploitation of slaves in different regions of the ancient world and pays close attention to the differing quantity, quality, and generic attributes of the evidence for different locales, the socio-economic differences in the exploitation of slave labour between the GrecoRoman world and ‘non-classical’ societies are revealed as far less stark than Finley asserted. But this revisionist view still presents a far from uniform picture, and this requires explanation. Why, for instance, was slavery deployed to a far greater extent in agriculture in Athens in the fifth century BCE, or Carthage (and then Italy) in the second century BCE, than in Roman Egypt during the first few centuries CE, or Assyria and Babylonia in the eighth to sixth centuries BCE? Why was slave ownership practised by many, perhaps most, citizens in classical Attica, whereas in Assyria and Babylonia it was largely restricted to the propertied elite? Any answer to this complex problem must currently be provisional; but a number of shifting variables affecting the overall economic prominence of slavery can be noted.29 One key variable is the real costs of slave labour relative to other forms of labour available in a region’s labour market. Scheidel (2005, 2008) has shown that the real costs of slavery in classical Athens were lower relative to wages and subsistence costs than in Imperial Rome or the nineteenth-century US South; and, conversely, that tenancy and wage costs were low in Roman Egypt relative to slave prices. A similar comparison applied to Assyria and Babylonia shows that slaves cost far more in terms of average wage units than in Athens (Lewis 2018: 228–229, 239). This does not mean that slavery in Mesopotamia was necessarily unprofitable, but that it was a viable option for a narrower section of the wealth spectrum, and that in certain sectors of the economy where it was in competition with wage labour, tenancy, or other forms of labour, its role will have been rather muted. This, for example, is precisely why sharecropping tenancy was so important to Babylonian propertied families in the sixth century BCE. That said, these various forms of labour were not simple, fungible substitutes for one another in the labour market; for their differing legal, institutional attributes placed them at an advantage in certain sectors of the economy and at a disadvantage in others (Harper 2011: 149–179). For example, the legal tools possessed by slaveholders in classical Athens enabled them to compel slaves to work in the Laureion mines in a manner impossible with free wage labourers. Hired labour, on the other hand, was preferable for short-term labour needs (Epstein 2008). This institutional dimension adds another layer of complexity to the issue. These observations constitute only the first step in explaining regional difference. To progress further, we must next ask why slaves were relatively cheap in Athens, and relatively expensive in other locations. This lay partly in the relationship between demand and supply. It also depended on the nature of the broader labour market, viz. what other Page 13 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE options were available to those who were seeking to employ extra-familial labour, and at what costs. Regarding the slave supply, demand and supply is partly a matter of demography: i.e. how many potential slave-buyers there were relative to the number of available enslaveable persons. It is also partly one of political arrangements: some ancient societies banned the enslavement of their own people, creating what Fynn-Paul (2009) has called ‘no-slaving zones’, while other ancient societies did not. Classical Athenians, for example, were banned from enslaving free persons in Athenian territory, and therefore had to rely on reproduction by existing slaves as well as imports from the ‘slaving zones’ of Thrace and Anatolia. Access to enslaveable persons, then, was structured by political geography and differing degrees of state formation. We must also take into account differing cultural traditions regarding what was considered honourable employment, for this might limit the intrusion of free hired labour into certain occupations that were considered demeaning. Transport costs add a further layer of complexity. Slaves required supervision and feeding on their journey from their point of origin to the end buyer: every day spent travelling meant more food consumed by the slaves, greater supervision costs, and the potential for their physical deterioration. Travel by sea lessened the expense, whereas land travel exacerbated it; but routes could be affected by climatic conditions. We must also note the effect of resale of slaves along the route, which increased the end buyer’s costs at each iteration, as did tolls on slave sales by states where resales took place (Lewis 2015). Let us envisage the operation of these variables in geographical terms: where were ‘slaving zones’ located relative to ‘no-slaving zones’? How developed or underdeveloped were these regions’ economies? How populous were they, and what routes linked them together? This static perspective then needs augmenting by the dynamic forces of historical change, taking into account various shifting processes: the effect of seasonal changes on maritime and overland traffic; population movements; demographic changes resulting from war and famine; political changes shaped by exogenous and endogenous forces such as warfare and civil strife; and growing market integration as Roman control increased across the Mediterranean world. That is hardly an exhaustive list, but it conveys some indication of the complexity of the issues, and the fixed and moving parts of the processes behind the price variants noted above. It is through considering this complex matrix of shifting variables that we might begin to understand some aspects of regional variation visible in the evidence for ancient slavery. Athens, for instance, had two enormous reservoirs of slave labour, Thrace and Anatolia within easy maritime reach; and market fragmentation in the pre-Roman Mediterranean limited the competition the Aegean Greeks faced for supplies of Thracian and Anatolian slaves. Carthage was in a similar position during the early Hellenistic period, with a hegemonic command of extensive trade networks and ready access to slave-rich hinterlands in politically undeveloped regions of the western Mediterranean. The Mesopotamian slave systems of Assyria and Babylonia, in contrast, were mostly surrounded by politically developed neighbours and geographically separated from the nearest ‘slaving zones’ by lengthy, inefficient overland routes. There is much work to be done in refining this approach; and we should not be overly sanguine about how much of Page 14 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE the picture will prove explicable, given the highly lacunose and uneven nature of the evidence. But it provides the basic components for tentative answers as to why slavery’s economic role differed across the regions of the ancient world. This question can no longer be tackled within the balkanized fields of Classics and Near Eastern Studies: progress requires inter-disciplinary collaboration. Suggested Reading Everything covered in this chapter is discussed in greater detail and with reference to extensive bibliography in Lewis 2018. On slave status in the Near East, see Dandamaev 1984: 67–80; Westbrook 1995. On the issue of freedom, see Snell 2001; von Dassow 2011. On Israel, see Levinson 2005 and 2006 on the so-called ‘slave laws’ of the Torah; on the economy, see Lemaire 2015. On Assyria, see Radner 1997: 219–248; Fales 2001: 170–178; Baker 2016. On Babylonia, see Dandamaev 1984; Ragen 2006; Head 2010; Kleber 2011; Wunsch and Magdalene 2012 and 2014; and for an overview of the Babylonian economy, Jursa 2010. On Persia, see Dandamaev 1963 and 1975; on the kurtaš, see Aperghis 2000; Briant 2002: 422–448. On Carthage, see Mattila Vicente 1977; Lemaire 2003; Ameling 2012. On the drivers of the economic importance of slavery, see Hahn 1971; Scheidel 2005 and 2008; Harper 2011: 100–200. Bibliography Ahmad, A. and Postgate, N. (2007), Archives from the Domestic Wing of the North-West Palace at Kalhu/Nimrud, London. Ameling, W. (2012), ‘Karthago’, in H. Heinen (ed.), Handwörterbuch der antiken Sklaverei, CD-ROM, Mainz. Andreau, J. and Descat, R. (2006), Esclave en Grèce et à Rome, Paris; English translation, The Slave in Greece and Rome, Madison 2011. Aperghis, G. (2000), ‘War Captives and Economic Exploitation: Evidence from the Persepolis Fortification Tablets’, in J. Andreau, P. Briant, and R. Descat (eds), La guerre dans les économies antiques, Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, 127–144. Baker, H.D. (2004), The Archive of the Nappāḫu Family, Vienna. Baker, H.D. (2016), ‘Slavery and Personhood in the Neo-Assyrian Empire’, in J. Bodel and W. Scheidel (eds), On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death, Malden MA, Oxford, and Chichester, 15–30. Bayram, S. and Çeçen, S. (1996), ‘The Institutions of Slavery in Ancient Anatolia in the Light of New Documents’, Belleten 229, 605–630. Page 15 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE Bradley, K.R. and Cartledge, P.A. (eds) (2011), The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Vol. I: The Ancient Mediterranean World, Cambridge. Briant, P. (2002), From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, Winona Lake, IN. Carr, D. (2010), The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction, Oxford and New York. Culbertson, L. (ed.) (2011), Slaves and Households in the Near East, Ann Arbor, MI. Dandamaev, M.A. (1963), ‘Foreign Slaves on the Estates of the Achaemenid Kings and Their Nobles’, in Труды двадцать пятого Международного конгресса востоковедов, Москва 1960 (Proceedings of the 25th Congress of Orientalists, Moscow 1960), August, Moscow, 147–154. Dandamaev, M.A. (1975), ‘Forced Labour in the Palace Economy of Achaemenid Iran’, Altorientalische Forschungen 2, 71–78. Dandamaev, M.A. (1984), Slavery in Babylonia: From Nabopolassar to Alexander the Great (626–331 BC), trans. by V.A. Powell, rev. edn, Dekalb. Dandamaev, M.A. and Lukonin, V.G. (1989), The Culture and Social Institutions of Ancient Iran, Cambridge. de Ste. Croix, G.E.M. (1981), The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, London. de Vaux, R. (1961), Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, London. Elayi, J. (1981). ‘La révolte des esclaves de Tyr relatée par Justin’, Baghdader Mitteilungen 12, 139–150. Epstein, S. (2008), ‘Why Did Attic Building Projects Employ Free Labourers Rather Than Slaves?’ Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 166, 108–112. Fales, F.M. (2001), L’Impero assiro. Storia e amministrazioni (IX-VII secolo a.c.), Bari. Faust, A. (2012), The Archaeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II, Winona Lake, IN. Finley, M.I. (1980), Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, London. Finley, M.I. (1981), Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, edited by B. D. Shaw and R. P. Saller, London. Flaig, E. (2009), Weltgeschichte der Sklaverei, Munich. Fynn-Paul, J. (2009), ‘Empire, Monotheism and Slavery in the Greater Mediterranean Region from Antiquity to the Early Modern Era’, Past & Present 205, 3–40. Page 16 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE Galil, G. (2007), The Lower Stratum Families in the Neo-Assyrian Period, Leiden and Boston, MA. Goody, J. (2006), The Theft of History, Cambridge. Gropp, D. et al. (2001), Wadi Daliyeh II: The Samaria Papyri from Wadi Daliyeh, Oxford. Hahn, I. (1971), ‘Die Anfänge der antiken Gesellschaftsformation in Griechenland und das Problem der sogennanten asiatischen Produktionsweise’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 2, 29–47. Harper, K. (2011), Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425, Cambridge. Harris, E.M. (2006), Democracy and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens, Cambridge and New York. Harris, E.M. (2012), ‘Homer, Hesiod, and the ‘Origins’ of Greek Slavery’, Revue des Études Anciennes 114, 345–366. Head, R. (2010), ‘The Business Activities of Neo-Babylonian Private “Slaves” and the Problem of Peculium’, Dissertation, Johns Hopkins. Hezser, C. (2005), Jewish Slavery in Antiquity, Oxford. Hodkinson, S. (2015), ‘Transforming Sparta: New Approaches to the Study of Spartan Society’, Ancient History: Resources for Teachers 41–44, 2011–2014 (pub. 2015), 1–42. Hopkins, K. (1978), Conquerors and Slaves, Cambridge. Jursa, M. (2005), Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Archives: Typology, Contents, and Archives, Münster. Jursa, M. (2010), Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC, with contributions by J. Hackl, B. Janković, K. Kleber, E.E. Payne, C. Waerzeggers and M. Weszeli, Münster. King, P.J. and Stager, L.E. (2001), Life in Biblical Israel, Louisville, KY and London. Kleber, K. (2011), ‘Neither Slave nor Free: The Status of Dependents of Babylonian Temple Households’, in L. Culbertson (ed.), Slaves and Households in the Ancient Near East, Chicago, IL, 101–112. Kuhrt, A. (2014), ‘Even a Dog in Babylon is Free!’, in T. Cornell and O. Murray (eds), The Legacy of Arnaldo Momigliano, London, 77–88. Lemaire, A. (2003), ‘L’esclave’, in J. Á. Zamora (ed.), El hombre fenicio: estudios e materiales, Rome, 219–222. Page 17 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE Lemaire, A. (2015), ‘Esclavage pour dettes et autres formes de travail dépendant au Levant: tradition biblique et épigraphie (Xe-Ve s.)’, in J. Zurbach (ed.), La main-d’oeuvre agricole en Méditerranée archaïque: Statuts et dynamiques économiques, Paris, 67–84. Lenski, N. (2018a), ‘Framing the Question: What is a Slave Society?’, in N. Lenski and C. Cameron (eds), What is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective, Cambridge, 15–57. Lenski, N. (2018b), ‘Ancient Slaveries and Modern Ideology’, in N. Lenski and C. Cameron (eds), What is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective, Cambridge, 106–147. Lenski, N. and Cameron, C. (eds) (2018), What is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective, Cambridge. Levinson, B. (2005), ‘The Birth of the Lemma: The Restrictive Reinterpretation of the Covenant Code’s Manumission Law by the Holiness Code (Leviticus 25:44–46)’, Journal of Biblical Literature 124, 617–639. Levinson, B. (2006), ‘The Manumission of Hermeneutics: The Slave Laws of the Pentateuch as a Challenge to Contemporary Pentateuchal Theory’, in A. Lemaire (ed.), Congress Volume Leiden 2004, Vetus Testamentum Supplements 109, Leiden, 281–324. Levinson, B. (2010), Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel, Cambridge. Lewis, D.M. (2015), ‘The Market for Slaves in the Fifth- and Fourth-Century Aegean: Achaemenid Anatolia as a Case Study’, in E.M. Harris, D.M. Lewis, and M. Woolmer (eds), The Ancient Greek Economy: Markets, Households and City-States, Cambridge and New York, 316–336. Lewis, D.M. (2018), Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c. 800– 146 BC, Oxford. Matilla Vicente, E. (1977), ‘Surgimiento y desarrollo de la esclavidad Cartaginesa’, Hispania antiqua 7, 99–103. Missiou, A. (1993), ‘Δοῦλος τοῦ Βασιλέως: The Politics of Translation’, Classical Quarterly 43, 377–391. Oded, B. (1979), Mass Deportations and Deportees in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Wiesbaden. Ollier, F. (1933–1943), Le mirage spartiate. Étude sur l’idéalisation de Sparte dans l’antiquité grecque, 2 vols, Paris and Lyon. Porten, B. (1996), The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Exchange, Leiden. Page 18 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE Radner, K. (1997), Die neuassyrischen Privatrechtsurkunden als Quelle für Mensch und Umwelt, Helsinki. Radner, K. (2002), Die neuassyrischen Texte aus Tall Šēḫ Ḥamad, Berlin. Radner, K. (2015), ‘Hired Labour in the Neo-Assyrian Empire’, in P. Steinkeller and M. Hudson (eds), Labor in the Ancient World, Dresden, 329–343. Radner, K. (2017), ‘Economy, Society, and Daily Life in the Neo-Assyrian period’, in E. Frahm (ed.), A Companion to Assyria, Malden, MA, 209–228. Ragen, A. (2006), ‘The Neo-Babylonian Širku: A Social History’, Dissertation, Harvard. Roth, U. (2005), ‘No More Slave-Gangs: Varro, De re rustica 1.2.20–1’, Classical Quarterly 55, 310–315. Scheidel, W. (2005), ‘Real Slave Prices and the Relative Cost of Slave Labour in the Greco-Roman World’, Ancient Society 35, 1–17. Scheidel, W. (2008), ‘The comparative economics of slavery in the Greco-Roman world’, in E. Dal Lago and C. Katsari (eds), Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern, Cambridge, 105– 126. Snell, D.C. (2001), Flight and Freedom in the Ancient Near East, Leiden. Thompson, D. (2011), ‘Slavery in the Hellenistic world’, in K. R. Bradley and P. A. Cartledge (eds), The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume I: The Ancient Mediterranean World, Cambridge, 194–213. Tuplin, C. (2013), The Arshama Letters from the Bodleian Library, vol. 3: Commentary, available at http://arshama.classics.ox.ac.uk, accessed 1 May 2018. Van de Mieroop, M. (1997), ‘Why Did They Write on Clay?’, Klio 79, 7–18. van der Spek, R.J. (1990), Review of Dandamaev 1984, Mnemosyne 43, 247–252. van Koppen, F. (2004), ‘The geography of the Slave Trade And Northern Babylonia in the Late Old Babylonian Period’, in H. Hunger and R. Pruzsinszky (eds.) Mesopotamian Dark Age Revisited, Vienna, 9–33. Vlassopoulos, K. (2011), ‘Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back again’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 131, 115–130. Vlassopoulos, K. (2016a), ‘Does Slavery Have a History? The Consequences of a Global Approach’, Journal of Global Slavery 1, 5–27. Vlassopoulos, K. (2016b), ‘Que savons-nous vraiment de la société athénienne?’, Annales HSS 71, 659–681. Page 19 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE von Dassow, E. (2011), ‘Freedom in Ancient Near Eastern Societies’, in K. Radner and E. Robson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, Oxford, 205–224. Westbrook, R. (1995), ‘Slave and Master in Ancient Near Eastern Law’, Chicago Kent Law Review 70.4, 1631–1676. Wunsch, C. (2007), ‘The Egibi Family’, in Gwendolyn Leick (ed.), The Babylonian World, New York and London, 232–243. Wunsch, C. (2010), ‘Neo-Babylonian Entrepreneurs’, in D. S. Landes, J. Mokyr, and W. J. Baumol (ed.), The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times, Princeton, NJ, 40–61. Wunsch, C. and Magdalene, F.R. (2012), ‘A Slave Is Not Supposed To Wear Such a Garment!’, Kaskal 9, 99–120. Wunsch, C. and Magdalene, F.R. (2014), ‘Freedom and Dependency: Neo-Babylonian Manumission Documents with Oblation and Service Obligation’, in W. F. Henkelman, C. E. Jones, M. Kozuh, and C. Woods (eds), Extraction and Control: Studies in Honor of Matthew W. Stolper, Chicago, IL, 337–346. Notes: (1.) This chapter condenses much of my discussion in a larger study, Lewis 2018. I thank the editors for their useful suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter. (2.) Lenski 2018a. On the ‘slave society’ issue, Vlassopoulos 2016a: 8–11; Lenski and Cameron 2018; Lewis 2018: ch. 4. (3.) de Vaux 1961: 80; cf. 167. The ‘slave gang’ model has rarely been accepted for the Greek world; and it has been disproven for the Roman world: Roth 2005. (4.) Ollier 1933–1943. For the methodology required to uncover the historical Sparta, Hodkinson 2015: 11–34. (5.) Van de Mieroop 1997. On sixth-century Babylonian archives, Jursa 2005. (6.) Recent work on sixth-century Babylonian economy and society (e.g. Wunsch 2010) provides a good exemplar. (7.) Dandamaev 1984: 221–2, 440–3; further discussion in Lewis 2018: ch. 3. (8.) Phoenicians: Ezek. 27:13; Assyrians: Radner 1997: 227–30; Persians: TAD A6.7, A6.9, A6.15. (9.) Antonym not needed: Goody 2006: 58; mastery/kinship: Vlassopoulos 2016a: 10; see also Lewis 2018: ch. 3. Page 20 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE (10.) van der Spek 1990: 249. See also Wunsch and Magdalene 2014; Lewis 2018: ch. 3. (11.) Vlassopoulos 2016b: 10; Lenski 2018b; Lewis 2018: ch. 3. (12.) For differing views on this issue, Vlassopoulos 2011; Lewis 2018: ch. 2. (13.) On freedom in the Near East, Snell 2001; von Dassow 2011; Kuhrt 2014. (14.) The so-called ‘slave laws’ of the Torah aimed to reserve slave status sensu stricto for foreigners, and restrict the bondage of Israelites to a limited form of indenture: Lewis 2018: ch. 9. (15.) For a detailed overview of Assyrian slavery in legal and economic terms, Lewis 2018: ch. 10, with references to the specialist literature. (16.) Galil 2007: 50. (17.) Ahmad and Postgate 2007: xi, with a conspectus of the slave sales in these archives at p. x. (18.) For Šulmu-šarri’s archive, Radner 2002: 70–146; for a useful vignette of Šulmu-šarri, Radner 2017: 220–1. (19.) Summary in Radner 2002: 71–2. (20.) Demosthenes 27.9, 37.4; Plato, Republic 9.578d–e; cf. Lysias 12.19. (21.) Lewis 2018: ch.10. Compare the slave prices in Radner 1997: 230–48 with the wages discussed in Radner 2015. (22.) Discussion in Lewis 2018: ch. 10. (23.) Conspectus of the sources in Jursa 2005. (24.) Baker 2004. In general see Jursa 2010: 155–65. (25.) Dandamaev 1984: 215–16. (26.) On slave prices, Dandamaev 1984: 200–6; Jursa 2010: 745 n. 3780. On the more economical exploitation of land by tenants, Dandamaev 1984: 270–8 with the notes of Jursa 2010: 234–5. (27.) Justin 18.3.1–19, with Elayi 1981. (28.) Diodorus Siculus 15.38; Appian, Punica 15; Polybius 3.24.4–14; cf. Appian, Punica 1.3; Diodorus 20.13.1. (29.) What follows summarizes several parts of Lewis 2018: ch. 14. Page 21 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018 Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium BCE David M. Lewis David M. Lewis is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham, and works on Greek socio-economic and legal history in its wider eastern Mediterranean context. He has published a number of articles on these subjects, and co-edited (with E.M. Harris and M. Woolmer) The Ancient Greek Economy: Markets, Households and City-States (Cambridge and New York 2015). He is the author of Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c. 800-146 BC (Oxford 2018). Page 22 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 December 2018