forthcoming jursa & tost greek and roman slaving in comparative ancient perspective: the state...

Imperium and Officium Working Papers (IOWP)

The State and Dependent Labour in the Ancient Near East

and in the Graeco-Roman World

Version 02

August 2014 Michael Jursa (University of Vienna, Department of Ancient Near Eastern Studies) Sven Tost (University of Vienna, Department of Ancient History, Papyrology and Epigraphy) Abstract: This article surveys the evidence for dependent labour in Ancient Near Eastern societies from a comparative (Graeco-Roman) point of view. It focuses in particular on dependent labour in the state (or institutional) section of economy and society. It aims at challenging Moses Finley’s still influential concept of a fundamental difference in the modes of production in the Ancient Near East on the one hand and in Classical Antiquity on the other. To be published in: The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries, edited by S. Hodkinson, M. Kleijwegt and K. Vlassopoulos.

© Michael Jursa/Sven Tost 2014

mailto:[email protected] mailto:[email protected]

M. Jursa/S. Tost 1

Imperium & Officium: Comparative Studies in Ancient Bureaucracy and Officialdom

Greek and Roman Slaving in Comparative Ancient Perspective:

The State and Dependent Labour in the Ancient Near East

and in the Graeco-Roman World

1. Introduction

This chapter surveys the evidence for dependent labour in Ancient Near Eastern societies

from a comparative (Graeco-Roman) point of view. It focuses in particular on dependent

labour in the state (or institutional) section of economy and society. As a point of departure,

we cite the locus classicus for an evaluation of Ancient Near Eastern labour regimes from the

perspective of Ancient History, Moses Finley’s The Ancient Economy.

“The need to mobilize labour-power (...) is an old one (...) When any society we can trace

attained a stage of sufficient accumulation of resources and power in some hands (whether

king, temple, ruling tribe or aristocracy), so that a labour force was demanded greater than

could be provided by the household or kinship group (...), that labour was obtained not by

hiring it but by compelling it.” (Finley 1973: 66]). In the Ancient Near East, this happened

within a socio-economic framework that “was dominated by large palace- or temple-

complexes, who owned the greater part of the arable, virtually monopolized anything that can

be called “industrial production” as well as foreign trade (...) and organized the economic,

military, political and religious life of the society through a single complicated, bureaucratic,

record-keeping operation for which the word “rationing” (...) is as good a one-word

description as I can think of” (Finley 1992: 28).

This alleged fundamental dichotomy between the Ancient Near Eastern world thus

conceptualised and the Graeco-Roman sphere (“essentially and precisely one of private

ownership”, Finley 1992: 29) has recently been reviewed (critically) (e.g., Morris and

Manning 2005: 12f.). Nevertheless Finley’s argument was repeated by the editors of the

Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World in their justification of their choice

of thematic coverage (Morris et al. 2007: 8). This very influential model of Ancient Near

Eastern societies is based on the dichotomy between a ‘domestic’ mode of production on a

subsistence level, typical of private households and villages, and a ‘palatial’ or ‘institutional’

mode, whose protagonists, temple and palace households, were predominantly urban in origin

(references: Jursa 2010: 18f.); it is they who dominated economy and society. Dependent

labour in the Ancient Near East, according to this model, was a phenomenon of society-wide

importance. It supported the complex agrarian structure of the highly hierarchical river valley

The State and Dependent Labour in the Ancient Near East and in the Graeco-Roman World 2


civilisations of Mesopotamia, whose economic surplus maintained palace and temple elites

who harnessed the labour power of nearly the entire population. The model has often served

as a foil for emphasising the different nature of the “slave societies” of Classical Antiquity

with their “slave-mode of production.” This juxtaposition has been somewhat undermined in

recent years by work which emphasises the chronological and regional differences within the

Graeco-Roman world (Bradley 2010: 625) and the importance of subsistence farming and

wage labour in what were essentially peasant societies: the exceptional ‘slave society’ in

Classical Athens and in Roman Italy and Sicily, especially at the time of the Middle and Late

Republic, need to be contrasted with the more common ‘societies with slaves’ (Turley 2000:

62-100).

In a similar vein, the present chapter does not aim to invalidate entirely the Ancient Near

Eastern side of this comparative model, as it is a useful heuristic tool. Rather, it focuses on

diachronic and diatopic diversity: Ancient Near Eastern labour regimes were far more

variegated than the dominant model predicts; consequently, they lend themselves better to

cross-cultural comparisons not only with the quite similar and therefore comparable palatial

economies in Minoan Crete and Late Helladic mainland Greece, but also with the Graeco-

Roman world in general. These socio-economic matters, however, have to be preceded by the

discussion of terminological issues, in particular with respect to legal-institutional definitions.

A fundamental distinction which is frequently overlooked is that between northern and

southern Mesopotamian (or Assyrian and Babylonian) social and economic structures. Partly

rain-farming Northern Mesopotamia was always less urbanised than the south; economic

units were smaller and more fragmented, and in particular the city-based temples never gained

the predominance they had (in some periods) in southern Babylonia: the ‘classic’ model

outlined above never applied to Assyria proper. Likewise, the role of the Assyrian king vis-à-

vis his subjects differed from that of his Babylonian homologues, as did basic social

structures: the Assyrian and Babylonian evidence needs to be kept apart.

The term ‘state,’ as used in the title of the chapter, should be understood somewhat

loosely. From an Ancient Near Eastern viewpoint, the word can be (and occasionally will be)

substituted by king(-dom). The Ancient Near Eastern concept of kingship implies the

existence of a (traditional) order which was religiously ordained and which it was the king’s

primary duty to maintain (e.g. Maul 1999 for Assyria). For this reason it is admissible to

speak of this separate order as the ‘state’, even though this state cannot for this reason be

considered in a modern way “as the sole source of law and legitimate force within its own

territory, and as the sole appropriate object of its citizens’ allegiances” (Skinner 1978: x,

M. Jursa/S. Tost 3


following Max Weber). In third millennium BC southern Mesopotamia, where the ruler and

the elites controlled most of the society through the means of the large institutional

households (the palace(s) and the temples), the ‘state’ was practically co-extensive with the

institutional sphere of the economy; the term can thus be substituted by ‘institutional sector of

the economy/society.’ This phenomenon was probably paralleled, at least to some extent, in

the economic superstructure during the Mycenaean period, and later on in the extra-European

Hellenistic kingdoms; but the Mesopotamian concept of divinely ordained kingship whose

duties consisted largely in maintaining the (divinely ordained) order of the realm does not

find parallels in the Classical world.

In the Ancient Near East, the ‘emic’ (Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian) terminology

consistently distinguished slaves from non-slave categories of dependants. The cuneiform

signs for the Sumerian words for “slave” (ìr and úrdu(.d)) and for “slave woman” (géme) are

combinations of parts meaning “man/woman” and “mountain” and thus suggest a (typical)

origin of the slaves in the highlands to the (north-)east of the Mesopotamian river valleys. The

Babylonian and Assyrian terminology included wardum and variants for “slave,” amtum and

variants for “slave woman,” as well as a range of words literally meaning “boy” or “small

one” (cf. the Greek pais or the Latin puer) or “personnel” (e.g., amēluttu). House slaves are

designated as “house people,” nišū bīti (corresponding to the Latin verna, cf. oiketes,

therapon). Apart from nišū bīti, these Babylonian and Assyrian words have no connotations

regarding the origin of the slaves. The terminology for unfree institutional dependants is less

distinctive; the common words used simply mean “worker(s)” and most often refer to

collectives (guruš, érin; ṣābu). In contrast to slaves, who were always an entirely distinct

category defined by the fact that they were the subject of property law, and not, for instance,

of family law, as was the case in Greece and Rome (Westbrook 2003: 40), the precise legal

and social implications of the status designations for institutional dependents have to be

deduced from context.. In southern Mesopotamia, most clearly in Babylonia in the second and

first millennium BC, social structure and the law recognized a distinction between persons

who were “free” (mār banê in the first millennium), “dependent but not slaves”, or “slaves”,

but terminology was not always precise. A similar distinction between free individuals and

slaves without a clear differentiation between various grades of freedom or dependency is

also found in Classical Antiquity, and in both cases legal terminology did not reflect all social

distinctions. There is, however, no Ancient Near Eastern parallel to the Laconian and

Messenian helotai or the penestai of Thessaly (Cartledge 1988; Ducat 1994), comunally

enslaved groups whose status was sometimes described as ‘between the slaves and the free’



(see ch. 12). The Roman coloni on the other hand, a group of rural dependants without a

distinct ethnic background that owed its existence to certain socio-economic processes, to

some extent do have Ancient Near Eastern fore-runners (see below sub 2.1 in fine). The

typical ambiguity of law that did not fully recognize the effects of the decline of the peasants’

socio-economic standing, is present in both cases. The social and economic importance of

dependent groups in the Ancient Near East varied over time: whereas the highly centralized

state of the Third Dynasty of Ur at the very end of the third millennium BC saw the

subjection of a large part of the population under the authority of institutional households

(see, e.g., Steinkeller 1991 for the structure of this state), free citizens of Babylonian cities in

the sixth century BC demonstrably carried an economic and social weight that matched that of

the institutional sector of the economy (Jursa 2010: 759; 767).

In other parts of the Ancient Near East, especially in Assyria in the first millennium BC,

the strictly patrimonial structure of society blurred these distinctions, and in particular the

dichotomy between slaves who were subjects of property law and other persons who were not

(e.g., Radner 1997: 200-230). In the final count, the overall status of a household and all its

members, slaves included, depended on the status of the head of the household. Similar to the

Roman pater familias, the head of a household (the oldest male family member) customarily

had absolute authority over his relatives as well as over all non-relatives living in his

household - the slaves. Family members - men and women - could be sold like slaves by the

head of the household, while, on the other hand, slaves could engage in all those legal

transactions in which also non-slave members of a household could be involved (a right that

is distinct from the institution of ‘peculium’ [no specific Babylonian term is known] that

allowed Babylonian slaves, similar to Roman slaves [Roth 2010], to engage in a great range

of business activities like the free and even, eventually, to aspire to freedom: e.g., Dandamaev

1984). Strictly speaking, and in contrast to the case of Babylonia, one might even argue that

“freedom” as such is not a useful category in describing Assyrian society at least in the first

millennium BC. De jure the Assyrian king and thus the Assyrian state could, and did, dispose

of property and people without having to recognize any restrictions: all Assyrians were in

fact, and not just in rhetoric (as was the case in contemporary Babylonia), “slaves of the

king,” urdāne ša šarre. Such limits to the king’s power as existed were of social and/or

religious origin: one notes, for instance, differences between the treatment of native Assyrian

farmers and enslaved prisoners of war working the estates of an Assyrian noble in the late

second millennium BC: the Assyrians lived in families and had personal land allotments

(Wiggermann 2000). Some collectives and individuals could even be granted exemptions

M. Jursa/S. Tost 5


from the most important modes in which the king and the state drew on the resources of

society: taxation of agricultural produce and military levies (Fales 2001: 61-63) - we will

point out similar phenomena in some periods of Classical Antiquity. Such taxation and levies

existed also in southern Mesopotamia (e.g., Jursa 2010: 246-255; 645-660), but it is essential

to recognize the principal distinction: on its own terms, the Assyrian empire of the first

millennium BC was founded on dependent, or servile, labour, whereas its later Babylonian

counterpart, the Neo-Babylonian empire founded by Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar in the

late seventh century, or its Achaemenid successor for that matter, was not.

In the legal sphere, the interest of Ancient Near Eastern states and their rulers in the

institution of slavery and of dependent labour is best seen in the Mesopotamian ‘law codes’ of

the late third and the second millennium BC (but note that issues of slavery were also

addressed in occasional royal rulings and proclamations, such as the Persian-period dāta;

Kleber 2010). These compositions are particular expressions of Ancient Near Eastern

common law, reflecting distinct background conditions and social, economic, political and

religious concerns (Westbrook 2003: 16-9). Regarding slavery, the main concern expressed

by law-givers - Sumerian and Babylonian kings from the late third millennium BC onwards -

is securing the slave owners’ property rights, including sexual rights; status questions are

addressed comparatively rarely (with the exception of the contentious issue of the status of

the offspring of slaves and free partners), as are the rights and obligations of slaves: economic

freedom, dress-code, and so on (see Roth 1997: 283 [index]). Legal questions referring to

slavery were frequently discussed in courts of law where slaves could have their status

questioned (Joannès 2000: 264 s.v. esclavage); The subject of forced labour and the issue of

non-slave dependants of the state are rarely represented in the law codes. Only the Code of

Hammurapi addresses the service of holders of land grants and the labour of state tenants

(Roth 1997: 281f. [index]). This comparative neglect of the issue of compulsory state labour

does not reflect its relative unimportance but rather a lack of the need to address the topic

unless with a view towards correcting particular cases of malpractice.

2. Dependent labour in the Ancient Near East

A comprehensive study of compulsory state labour in the Ancient Near East would have to

deal with corvée-style labour for agricultural work (other than ploughing and seeding, which

was done by specialists); canal and irrigation works; brick production and large-scale

building; transportation through the employment of human power (porters, towers of boats),



and military service. Here only a brief survey of certain particularly important and well-

attested kinds of compulsory labour can be given. Attention will be drawn to representative

types of labour arrangements, which will then be put into a comparative perspective by

drawing on data from the Graeco-Roman world.

2.1. Unskilled mass labour

By far the best Ancient Near Eastern evidence for the use of forced mass labour comes from

the archives of the Ur III state at the very end of the third millennium BC. Ecological and

economic constraints in the area, as well as social patterns (the representational needs of the

elites), created a huge demand for a labour force employed by the state or large institutional

households (in particular, the temples) for certain seasonal tasks: unskilled mass labour was

nearly always employed on a temporary base for harvesting, public building activities

(usually restricted to the dry season), sheep-shearing, irrigation works, and so forth. The

seasonality of demand implies that rather than maintain a work-force of permanent

dependants only; it was cheaper in times of peaks in labour requirements to exact temporary

labour services from workers who otherwise maintained themselves from other resources.

The Ur III archives are characterised by their meticulous bureaucratic control over labour

and its output: input of labour and input of raw materials was balanced against the output

according to a system of equivalences. The ubiquitous presence in these records of numerous

guruš labourers (and their female equivalent, géme) prompted scholars of Marxist orientation

(such as V.V. Struve and I.M. Diakonoff) to postulate the existence of a huge class of

permanently enslaved state labourers who were distinguished from privately owned slaves

only by the fact that they could not be sold. I.J. Gelb, on the other hand, argued that the guruš

were only temporarily in state service and should be seen as a group of half-free “serfs” (see,

e.g., Englund 1990: 65-8). In actual fact guruš were socially diverse. Some of them held land

which had been granted to them by the institutions or which was even private property. Such

guruš had to do state service only for a certain part of the year, while others (especially the

UN-íl workers) served throughout the year and were maintained by institutional payments.

Others were prisoners-of-war, yet others had specific professional backgrounds - the variety

was considerable. The majority of the guruš lived in families; specific professions and/or

tasks were determined by this family background. There was a certain social and economic

mobility among this class of workers; salaries paid in kind depended on responsibility; some

men even demonstrably moved from manual work to supervisory tasks. The state (the

M. Jursa/S. Tost 7


institutions) maintained a tight and direct hold over a very large part of the population that

could be mobilised for its needs. However, the considerable socio-economic variation attested

among the guruš precludes taking their uniform legal status – i.e., the fact that the state

controlled the use of their time and labour, or of parts thereof, and could constrain them in

various ways – as sufficient grounds for assuming that they formed a homogeneous class of

more or less enslaved forced labourers, or of semi-free serfs liable for service for their

institutional masters at certain times of the year (Postgate 1994: 234-9; Sallaberger 1999: 323-

30, 342-3; Englund 1998: 178 n. 408). Recent research has also shown that (as in the Graeco-

Roman world) the role of free wage labour in the Ur III state has probably been significantly

under-rated (Wilcke 2006). In general, socio-economic complexity that counteracts the

implications of legally- or ideologically- motivated uniformity is typical of Ancient Near

Eastern labour regimes.

Evidence from southern Mesopotamia predating the Third Dynasty of Ur suggests that

similar regimes based on different types of constrained labour existed already at the beginning

of the third millennium BC. The earliest lists of labourers (male and female) in the ‘Archaic’

proto-cuneiform documentation from the end of the fourth millennium BC follow the format

of accounts of animals; one study therefore speaks of “herded humans” under control of an

institution (Englund 1998: 176-81; 2009). In later periods too, in the second and first

millennia BC, the state maintained its ability to draw on the labour resources of significant

parts of society, which however does not necessarily mean the existence of large groups of

dependent labourers.

In the Old Babylonian period (the first half of the second millennium BC) the state secured

the service of many men (and their families) by granting them land in return for labour or

military service (ilku; see Stol 2004: 732-76). Originally, such service had to be rendered in

person, but compensatory payments and the hiring of substitute workers/soldiers are attested

from early on. Service periods varied. Most often service was owed for one month per year,

but military campaigns could of course last much longer. The state could perhaps also draft

those parts of the population that had not been given land grants for particularly strenuous

earthworks (tupšikku; Stol 2004: 751). The liability to do ilku or tupšikku service in this

period does not imply a particular (low) legal or social status, in fact the opposite may be true:

the protection guaranteed by law for the life and property of individuals without obligations

towards the state (muškēnu) was less strong than that of ‘normal’ free citizens liable to be

called up for ilku (Stol 2004: 732; 761, Postgate 1994: 239f.). In any case there were no large

labour gangs of semi-free serfs recruited from the local population; the bulk of state service



was rendered by the holders of ilku grants. Prisoners of war, on the other hand, were used in

large numbers in state-owned workshops for very strenuous work, such as the milling of grain

with hand mills (Stol 2004: 790 and Rositani 2003).

A different picture emerges from texts dating to the subsequent Middle Babylonian period.

In the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries we know of large groups of dependent labourers in

the central Babylonian city of Nippur. The most recent study (Tenney 2009) speaks of servile

labourers, while noting that their precise status is far from clear. They are sometimes

explicitly distinguished from “slaves” (ardu); but just as slaves, they could only escape their

condition by flight, death, or by being granted their freedom (the verb used in this context is

the same for slaves and dependent labourers, zakû). These labourers worked for the state

under duress and under severely stressful conditions - flight of unattached males was a

constant problem. The rosters of labourers reveal that the number of males in this population

exceeded that of females (an all-age sex ratio of 1.37 in favour of males), as in other cases of

recently-established slave populations (Tenney 2009: 174). The labourers lived in families

(but the sex ration suggests that there were numerous unattached males); the lack of three-

generation households implies very short life-spans. This population group could not

reproduce itself without the import of individuals from outside. Some labourers explicitly

originate from regions on the (north-)eastern borders of Mesopotamia; they may have been

bought or captured as prisoners of war. The Babylonian system of forced labour in this period

may have had some resemblance to that of contemporary Assyria. There, much, if not most,

of the agricultural land was in the hands of the king and his family or of high-ranking

officials. Their large estates were worked by two groups of workers: villagers recruited from

the local population, who were tied to the land, worked their lords’ fields and were supposed

to make their living from the yields of small personal land allotments; and a more amorphous

group of foreign workers, deportees or prisoners of war (šiluhlū), who did not (normally) live

in families and had no land of their own to support themselves, but were paid subsistence

rations (note a similar division in Greece between self-subsisting and supported labourers:

Ducat 1994: 90-1). For all intents and purposes, these šiluhlū can be considered to have been

state slaves, so here there is one Ancient Near Eastern case of servile labour indeed forming

the mainstay of agricultural production and hence of the economy in general (Wiggermann

2000).

The first millennium BC brought important changes in the social and economic fabric of

Babylonia, in particular in the (very well documented) sixth and fifth centuries (Jursa 2010;

Dandamaev 1984; Ragen 2006). The population expanded rapidly, larger cities grew at the

M. Jursa/S. Tost 9


expense of smaller settlements, more land was taken under cultivation, and agrarian

production was intensified. Economic exchange was increasingly monetized, the overall

importance of the large institutions, in particular of the temples and their holdings of land,

decreased, while that of the free, institutionally unattached urban population increased. The

contribution of the urban ‘upper class’ of land-owning citizens to the economic output of

Babylonia was decisive; they therefore also bore the bulk of the burdens (a bulk which

apparently increased throughout the period in question) placed on society by the state. The

system was similar to that of the Old Babylonian period: the free urban population was called

up for temporary service and tax payments as holders of land allotments, or as members of tax

units formed on the basis of residential patterns or professional affiliation. Actual labour (or

military) service was, however, rendered by substitutes hired for money wages, either directly

by those owing the service or, on a slightly higher level of the administration, by supervisors

of public building sites or by military officers, using the money payments made by those

obliged to serve. Compulsory unfree labour was found mostly in the realm of the temples.

These had a substantial workforce of širkū, literally “oblates” (Wunsch and Magdalene 2014).

Much of the evidence suggests a picture similar to that given above for the Middle

Babylonian workforce. The širkū lived in families, they worked under duress, they could not

be sold, but neither could they extricate themselves from their bond to the temple, unless by

fleeing, which was a very common occurrence. In fact, however, the group of širkū was fairly

heterogeneous and their status more complex than assumed by the traditional view (e.g.,

Dandamaev 1984) which sees them as “temple slaves” or “temple serfs.” Ragen 2006

suggests that the institution had its origin in royal grants made to the temples: these were

given prisoners of war and other unattached individuals, as well as entire villages, including

their inhabitants; the temples were to enjoy the service of these ‘oblates,’ who, on the other

hand, were freed from obligations towards the king (or the state). As a collective, the širkū

nevertheless had to work for the crown frequently, as soldiers or on public building sites, in

order to fulfil their temple’s obligations to the state. Otherwise, they worked for the temple as

craftsmen, farmers, herdsmen, and so forth. In return they received salaries, normally paid in

kind, sometimes in money. The numbers of širkū available to the Neo-Babylonian temples for

the large-scale labour service owed to the state were always insufficient. In a particularly

well-documented case, two-thirds of the temple’s work force were free hirelings; the temple’s

compulsory labour force accounted for less than a third of the workers (Jursa 2010: 663-8).

The increasing importance of free wage labour (paid in silver money) at the expense of forced

labour (free and unfree) is typical of Babylonia in this period. It does not fit the long-held



view of Mesopotamian state labour as predominantly forced labour: structurally, this is one of

the many points that divide Babylonian society and economy in the Iron Age from their

Bronze Age precursors.

In contrast to Babylonia, Iron Age Assyria represents a case of structural continuity, as far

as its labour regime is concerned. The rural population was (always?) bound to the land; royal

land grants and property transactions among the rich elites with links to the palace also

routinely refer to the transfer of ownership of the villagers tilling the land in question. Just as

the head of a household had full control over all his dependants and assets, the kings could

draw directly on the resources of the whole society. A case in point is the construction of the

new capital city, Dūr-Šarru-kīn, by King Sargon (Šarru-kīn) between 717 and 705 BC (Fales

2001: 146-55). Sargon could draw on the resources of the entire Assyrian empire, just as the

Babylonian kings of the sixth century drew on the economic power of the institutions of their

empire for their ambitious building programmes. But while the Babylonians used some forced

labour and more hired workers paid by monetary contributions from the various institutions of

the state, the Assyrian king, being the apex of a strictly patrimonial society, simply called his

peoples up for large-scale forced corvée service.

In the world of Classical Antiquity, as well as its preceding Minoan and Mycenaean

civilisations, the state, through warfare and the market place, played a crucial role in the

provision and distribution of labour force; nevertheless, the vast majority of such slaves ended

up in private service. Still, there are several cases of unskilled dependent mass labour, in

particular within an agricultural context, that can be compared with Ancient Near Eastern

labour systems. The large institutional households of Minoan Crete and Late Helladic

mainland Greece have repeatedly been named in this context, but here too more recent work

stresses diachronic and diatopic diversity (Bennet 2008: 188-9). The evidence is now taken to

suggest that the overall Mycenaean socio-economic system relied on patrimonial structures

for mobilizing the resources of the majority of a semi-dependent local population for the

needs of the elites, the palace and other institutions, while ‘real’ dependants or slaves with

specialised tasks were only to be found in the core area of the palatial or institutional

household - a view not dissimilar from current interpretations of Neo-Assyrian palace

households. Systems of bondage and dependency affecting entire groups (be they defined on

ethnic, geographical or linguistic grounds) comparable to helotage, viz. a kind of ‘state

serfdom’ resulting from the military conquest and continuous repression of local population

groups undertaken by Spartan citizens in Laconia and Messenia (Luraghi and Alcock 2003),

M. Jursa/S. Tost 11


are not found in the Ancient Near East (the closest parallel may be the case of the Middle-

Assyrian state slaves designated as šiluhlū mentioned above; Wiggermann 2000).

A looser form of dependency in an agricultural environment comparable to similar Ancient

Near Eastern systems is the Ptolemaic georgoi basilikoi and the Seleucid laoi, i.e., crown

peasants and tenants in the service of a Hellenistic king or his royal household. Their position

is characterised by a patrimonial mixture of specific obligations towards the monarch as the

master and certain privileges granted by him. Similar to the Old Babylonian period, the crown

also granted small lots of land (kleroi) exclusively to Greek and Macedonian militiamen and

their families in return for military service, thereby creating a new class, the cleruchs

(kleruchoi). We find here a grounding in local administrative traditions and in Achaemenid

governmental procedure that in turn has clear Ancient Near Eastern antecedents (van Driel

2002). The Roman colonate (Whittaker 1987), as a condition of servitude and bondage that

developed as the status of free tenant labourers deteriorated under increasing debt (Jones

1958), may also have a structural parallel in the Ancient Near East. Rural debt and resulting

debt slavery were widespread phenomena, especially in the late Bronze age in Northern

Mesopotamia, where impoverishment of the rural population went hand in hand with, or in

fact caused, the expropriation of estates owned by smallholders and the tying of (parts of) the

rural population to the land they had lost to city-based creditors (e.g., Zaccagnini 2001).

Mining in the Greco-Roman world was unthinkable without slaves, even when the state

leased the exploitation of mines to private entrepreneurs. In cases where the state chose to

operate mining activity directly it furthermore drew on convicted criminals as forced

labourers as well (Lenski 2006). This is without Ancient Near Eastern parallel, as expected,

given the near total absence of mineral resources in the area well covered by the extant texual

documentation. Nevertheless a useful parallel might be drawn to large-scale grain farming on

state and temple lands in sixth century BC Babylonia. There forced labour as well as labour

by contract sustained an organizational super-structure that displayed a similar interplay of

state-controlled central planning and the activities of entrepreneurial subcontractors and

managers (Jursa 2010: 193-206).

2.2. Specialist slave and forced labour in state service

Again, the Ur III period furnishes the best Ancient Near Eastern evidence. Many specialists -

above all, craftsmen, such as weavers, smiths or carpenters, as well as hunters, fishermen or

merchants - were compelled to serve the institutional households and the state (e.g., van Driel



2002: 3-30 for the merchants; Englund 1990 for the fishermen; Neumann 1993 for

craftsmen). In principle, their service was organized along the same lines as that of the

ordinary labourers discussed above: many specialists were granted fields for their livelihood

and in return had to do labour service; others received food rations throughout the year. Their

social and legal status, which is also reflected in their remuneration, was diverse and wide-

ranging. Service was defined as a certain output within a given time-frame: a fisherman was

required to catch a certain quantity of fish per year, and so forth. Service requirements were

high, but in general the state contented itself with more or less realistic demands, leaving the

specialists free to profit from whatever they managed to achieve over and above what was

demanded by the state: here, as in all other periods of Mesopotamian history, there is no

fundamental contradiction between specialist labour for the state or its institutions and the

pursuit of private profit: the one did not exclude the other, in fact they usually went together.

In later periods, some professions, such as that of merchant, were clearly associated with

high social prestige and were usually restricted to free men; but most crafts could, and were

frequently, pursued by institutional dependants. The Neo-Babylonian ‘temple serfs’ (širkū),

for instance, are known to have worked in basically every profession found in the temple

household (excluding the priestly professions which were restricted to free men). As in the Ur

III period, these specialists were given a pre-defined workload that allowed them a certain

freedom also to pursue business on their own account. Furthermore, when such men were

given important tasks in temple administration, such as the independent management of its

flocks or fields, the goal set for the manager was phrased in analogous terms, thereby opening

up the possibility to acquire substantial profit by overachieving the temple’s pre-set demands.

Such managerial tasks implied considerable risk, as the managers’ private property could be

requisitioned to compensate for shortfalls. The rent-farming (and occasionally tax-farming)

undertaken by temple serfs are most often considered an entrepreneurial activity, but in fact

such activities might be better described as liturgies (Wilcke 2006: 113, Jursa 2010: 291-2).

In general, institutional dependants could work alongside free men, as well as on their own

account, and received similar (or identical wages), as is the case in Classical Athens, where

artisan slaves did the same work and receive the same wages as free craftsmen (see IG I3 474-

9, referring to the construction of the Erechtheion at the Acropolis). Generally, the system of

labour obligations of the free population is structurally comparable to the Graeco-Roman

system of liturgies in the form it took in Late Antiquity, when it underwent a significant

expansion through the inclusion of commoners (rather than only rich citizens) as well as of

collectives such as corporations of craftsmen, who were supposed to undertake certain

M. Jursa/S. Tost 13


administrative tasks and physically exhausting activities, like dike maintenance, as a munus

personale (Heuft 2013).

Royal slaves and generally institutional dependants could work as scribes, clerks and

administrators, but in Babylonia most offices, and all high offices, in the state, palace and

temple administration were restricted to free men.. There is no close parallel to the public

slaves (demosioi) owned by most Greek poleis, who worked not only as scribes and

accountants, but also in various supervisory functions in the market or as members of the

police force (see, e.g., Brockmeyer 1979: 109 and Hansen 1991: 123-4 for Athens, Weiß 2004

for public slaves in the Roman empire). This is also true for Assyria in that chattel slaves,

explicitly designated as such, are not found in the higher echelons of the administration; but

as stated above, the concept of ‘free men’ is not easily applicable to the Assyrian social

structure, all of whose members could in principle be conceived as the king’s slaves.

The Elamite tablets recovered from Persepolis, which originate from the very heart of the

Achaemenid empire and date to the late sixth and early fifth century BC document a

particular case of the use of specialised (and non-specialised) dependent labour for state

purposes. The great king Darius I had his huge palatial complex built with the help of

numerous skilled and unskilled foreign workers drawn from all parts of the Achaemenid

empire. In part these men were forced labourers, but some may have worked on a contractual

basis; their status designation (kurtaš) is not entirely clear. The use of foreign specialists

according to their ‘ethnic’ skills is typical for the Iron Age empires; it is already attested

(albeit on a somewhat smaller scale) in the Assyrian and Babylonian empires (Briant 2002:

429-39).

There is no strict parallel in the Ancient Near East for the extensive use made by

Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors of qualified slaves at their royal/imperial courts and in

their administration. In Imperial Rome, these men belonged to the familia Caesaris and could

gain considerable influence and power by advising the monarch. The slave eunuchs that

emerged from their ranks in Late Antique Byzantium could be seen as being part of a tradition

harking back to the Ancient Near East, but it should be noted that the family-less eunuchs

found in Ancient Near Eastern courts (in high and low positions) were not technically slaves.

This distinction may be attributable to the Ancient Near Eastern bias against granting slaves

formal power; the expedient (especially in the Assyrian case) of relying on eunuchs and other

courtiers who had been removed from their family contexts and insterted into the royal

household being sufficient.



2.3. Military service

In the third and second millennia BC, Ancient Near Eastern recruitment procedures for

military service were identical to those used for unskilled mass labour service (2.1 above).

The terminology frequently makes no difference between the two: Babylonian and Assyrian

ṣābu, a collective term, can be translated as “workers” or as “soldiers”, according to context.

Chattel slaves in the narrow sense of the word had no role to play in the Sumerian,

Babylonian and Assyrian armies. A new element came into play in the first millennium, when

non-Mesopotamian ethnic groups were integrated into the Assyrian and Babylonian armies.

Many of these were considered specialists and brought their own armour and weaponry (e.g.

Postgate 2000). Some of these foreigners and foreign groups were mercenaries, most

famously the Greek and Carians who make their appearance in Near Eastern sources already

early in the seventh century (Rollinger and Korenjak 2001); but others were forced to serve,

notably so in the case of Assyria, whose kings annexed large parts of the Near East and

deported into the heartland of Assyria large groups of non-Assyrian ethnic origin, whose

military service was of great importance and whose enforced loyalty a source of considerable

anxiety (Fales 2001: 76-8). The military organization of the Achaemenid empire was likewise

characterized by the presence of native (Persian) core units, non-Persian compulsory levies

and mercenaries (Briant 2002: 783-800).

The Ancient Near Eastern evidence certainly displays structural similarities to the

organization of military service in Classical Antiquity, where military service was likewise

either based on a kind of militia system (the Hellenistic cleruchs with their probable Ancient

Near Eastern antecedents) or on professional standing armies (in the Hellenistic and post-

Hellenistic periods), with the (occasional) inclusion of mercenary forces (again, in the

Hellenistic East, perhaps prompted by the Achaemenid example). We do not find cases of

chattel slaves or other enslaved groups being forced into military service unless they opted for

joining the combat troops in order to gain freedom, as happened occasionally in Classical

Antiquity in times of political threat and crisis, most notably during the Peloponnesian war or

Rome’s civil wars (Bradley 2010: 633).

3. Conclusions

Returning to the Finleyan paradigm, its usefulness as a heuristic tool is compromised by its

being over-simplified to the point of being seriously misleading: neither was the Ancient Near

M. Jursa/S. Tost 15


East dominated throughout its history by large temple and palace complexes, nor was the hold

of the large institutions on their dependants as tight as is often imagined, even in those periods

in which temple and palace households played a decisive role in economy and society. In all

periods, a substantial part of the population was independent of the state sector, or could

pursue some of its activities without institutional interference. The existence of private

property, of land or of slaves, was always recognized.

Owing to the ecological conditions in Mesopotamia, states (institutions) were dependent

on the seasonal availability of a large labour force. The mobilization of this labour force -

which never consisted predominantly of chattel slaves - was achieved through compulsion of

dependants, through an exchange mechanism by which land grants were offset against labour

and service obligations, and through simple hiring of free labourers. There was no uniform

Ancient Near Eastern labour regime, and there is a good case for making a fundamental

distinction between the Near Eastern economies and societies of the Bronze age and those of

the Iron Age. The latter were not as different from the economies and societies of the Graeco-

Roman world as assumed by the Finleyan model, and in any case had a direct continuation in

the Hellenistic kingdoms of the East.

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