On Human Bondage

After Slavery and Social Death

John Bodel, Walter Scheidel, John Bodel, Walter Scheidel

• Éditeur: Wiley-Blackwell
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119162520
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literature
• Sous-sujet: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism

On Human Bondage —a critical reexamination of Orlando Patterson's groundbreaking Slavery and Social Death —assesses how his theories have stood the test of time and applies them to new case studies.

• Discusses the novel ideas of social death and natal alienation, as Patterson first presented them 35 years ago and as they are understood today
• Brings together exciting new work by a group of esteemed historians of slavery, as well as a final chapter by Patterson himself that responds to and expands upon the other contributions
• Provides insights into slave societies around the world and across time, from classical Greece and Rome to modern Brazil and the Caribbean, and from Han China and pre-colonial South Asia to early modern Europe and the New World
• Delves into a wide range of topics, including the reformation of social identity after slavery, the new historicist approach to slavery, rituals of enslavement and servitude, questions of honor and dishonor, and symbolic imagery of slavery

1
Slavery and Personhoodin the Neo‐Assyrian Empire¹

Heather D. Baker

Introduction

In a brief letter that may be dated c. 672–69 BCE, the chief exorcist Adad‐šumu‐us&c.dotbl;ur wrote to the Assyrian king (Esarhaddon) concerning an untested drug, “Let us make those slaves drink first, and let the crown prince drink only afterwards” (SAA 10 191: 11–r. 1). The scenario is one that might plausibly be envisaged for any pre‐modern court society. The letter sheds little light on the actual conditions of palace slaves during the Neo‐Assyrian period, and yet the basic idea of the slave as a person inferior even to the point of being entirely dispensable is one that will be familiar to students of slavery in all periods of history. Yet, the topic of Neo‐Assyrian slavery has received relatively little attention from scholars in comparison with other periods of the region’s history, especially the (admittedly better documented) Ur III and Neo‐Babylonian eras. The present article examines the nature and function of slavery in Neo‐Assyrian society in the light of Orlando Patterson’s characterization of slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons,” put forward in his seminal book, Slavery and Social Death (Patterson 1982: 13).

In recent studies of slavery in the Ancient Near East, Orlando Patterson’s work has often been cited, and the breadth and vision of his scholarship have been rightly acknowledged, but only rarely have his ideas been engaged with in any depth.² The reasons for this lie, I think, mainly in the nature of our sources. We are dealing primarily with cuneiform legal and administrative documents, therefore studies of slavery have tended to be dominated by discussion of slaves’ legal status and the extent to which this can be distinguished from that of other low‐status dependent groups, and with their role in the society and economy. The legal‐historical approach has played a central role in the discussion, and cross‐cultural comparison is problematic. Recent studies of Near Eastern slavery have noted the difficulty of approaching the subject from a more theoretical standpoint (Culbertson 2011: 3), or from a perspective aligned with current interests in issues such as the realities of the slave experience (Seri 2011: 50). Personal stories as such are difficult – in fact, usually impossible – to recover. We lack the narrative accounts of the classical authors: narrative, such as it is, is largely restricted to the royal inscriptions but these are hardly ever concerned with slavery (except in a metaphorical sense, in relation to royal power). Literary compositions such as “The Dialogue of Pessimism,” which involves a slave and his master, are interesting but can hardly be taken as a reflection of actual conditions of slavery.³ The only time we come close to hearing the voice of a Mesopotamian slave is in the relatively few Neo‐Babylonian records of court proceedings that deal with legal actions brought by slaves (or ex‐slaves) who wished to challenge their conditions of servitude or those of their offspring.⁴ These factors have made it difficult for scholars of Mesopotamian slavery to engage in cross‐cultural comparison.

Despite the link that has often been made between the Orient and slavery, in particular by the influential ancient historian Moses Finley, it has long been accepted among scholars of the Ancient Near East that slavery played a restricted part in Mesopotamian society at all periods, and that the state did not rely on slavery to any significant extent to fulfil its needs for labor.⁵ Having said that, there were at all times various categories of dependent peoples who, while not necessarily slaves, were certainly not free either.⁶ These groups could be quite large, though they still made up only a small sector of the overall population: accurate quantification is problematic, if not impossible. The native terminology concerning these different groups is notoriously difficult to elucidate with precision: a single word can be used to refer to many different conditions of servitude and dependency, including – but not limited to – slavery. Thus, it is not for nothing that the words of the late Govert van Driel are often cited in studies of Near Eastern slavery. According to him, the term urdu is “a word which may designate everybody from the lowest slave to the most exalted servant of the king, and even the king himself in relation to the gods” (van Driel 1970: 174). The Mesopotamian world‐view, then, held that everyone, including the king himself, was subject to a higher authority and this relationship of subordination was expressed using the term for a common slave, urdu. Yet cutting across these nested hierarchical relationships implicit in the use of the word urdu, in practice a clear distinction was appreciated between free men, who (in theory at least) enjoyed autonomy based on economic self‐sufficiency and who were liable to render military or labor service and other obligations to the state, and those in a condition of servitude, who depended on their master for food and other necessities and who were not liable for state conscription or labor service (Von Dassow 2011: 212).

The notion of the “chattel slave” has played a central role in discussions of Ancient Near Eastern slavery, because at various periods slave‐sale documents feature prominently among the relevant sources. In spite of Patterson’s argument against defining slavery in terms of property, this approach has persisted (and is likely to continue to do so) because it presents us with a neatly circumscribed group of people whom we can confidently judge to have really been slaves, in contrast to others of contested status who occupied the grey areas near the bottom end of the social scale in various conditions of dependency. These issues will be discussed below in relation to the Neo‐Assyrian material.

A further reason for the relative silence within Ancient Near Eastern studies with regard to Slavery and Social Death is the fact that in the three decades since the book was published only rather few studies have attempted to address wider‐ranging issues surrounding slavery in Mesopotamia. This dearth of attention has changed quite recently, with the appearance of two significant publications. The first is an innovative demographic study of servile laborers in the central Babylonian city of Nippur during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, as documented in administrative rosters kept by the city administration (Tenney 2011a). The second major recent publication comprises the proceedings of a symposium held at the Oriental Institute in Chicago in March 2010 with the theme “Slaves and Households in the Near East” (Culbertson 2011). A few words about these two volumes are warranted.

In his study Tenney uses the term “servile” to describe the large public workforce of Kassite‐period Nippur, thus avoiding the label “slave” since the civil status of these workers remains quite uncertain. In fact, very occasionally individuals are described in his text corpus by the conventional Babylonian terms for slave (ardu and andu, for male and female, respectively), but this restricted usage suggests that other members of the workforce were not considered to be slaves by those who wrote the documents, and it is unclear why only a few workers should be singled out in this way.⁷ Nevertheless, all of the workers appear to have been subject to common conditions, in particular, abnormal population stress, relative poverty, and working under duress (Tenney 2011a: 135). In his study Tenney rejects Patterson’s defining characteristic of a slave as a socially dead person deprived of all natal ties, on the grounds that the Nippur servile laborers were allowed to marry and have families, and also they sometimes identified themselves by patronyms (Tenney 2011a: 130–131, n. 219). However, this may be imposing too literal an interpretation on Patterson’s characterization, since Patterson himself stresses that slaves in both ancient and modern societies “had strong social ties among themselves. The important point, however, is that these relationships were never recognized as legitimate or binding” (Patterson 1982: 6). There is no doubt that in ancient Mesopotamia slaves, like other members of so...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Slavery and Personhoodin the Neo‐Assyrian Empire
• 2 Orlando Patterson, Property, and Ancient Slavery
• 3 Slaves or Serfs?
• 4 Death and Social Death in Ancient Rome
• 5 Freedom, Slavery, and Female Sexual Honor in Antiquity
• 6 Becoming Almost Somebody
• 7 Ottoman Elite Enslavementand “Social Death”
• 8 The Locked Box in Slavery and Social Death
• 9 Honor and Dishonor in the Slavery of Colonial Brazil
• 10 (Child) Slavery in Africa as Social Death?
• 11 Slavery and Freedom in Small‐Scale Societies
• 12 Rituals of Enslavement and Markers of Servitude
• 13 Slavery from Rome to Medieval Europe and Beyond
• 14 Revisiting Slavery, Property, and Social Death
• Index
• End User License Agreement