Chapter Seven
1. http.sumerianorg/prot-sum.htm, from a “Proto-Sumerian dictionary”
2. Florentius in Justinian’s Institutes (1.5.4.1). It is interesting to note that when attempts are made to justify slavery, starting with Aristotle, they generally focus not on the institution, which is not in itself justifiable, but on the inferior qualities of some ethnic group being enslaved.
3. Elwahid 1931. Clarence-Smith (2008:17n56) notes that al-Wahid’s book itself emerged from within lively debates in the Middle East about the role of slavery in Islam that had been going on at least since the mid-nineteenth century.
4. Elwahid 1931: 101–10, and passim. An analogous list appears in Patterson 1982:105.
5. The sale of children was always felt to be a sign of economic and moral breakdown; even later Roman emperors like Diocletian, notes al-Wahid, supported charities aimed to provide relief for poor families explicitly so they would not have to resort to things like this (Elwahed 1931: 89–91).
6. Mitamura 1970.
7. Debt slavery, he notes, was practiced in early Roman history, but this is because according to the laws of the twelve tablets, insolvent debtors could actually be killed. In most places, where this was not possible, debtors were not fully enslaved by reduced to pawns or peons (see Testart 2000, 2002, for a full explanation of the different possibilities).
8. Al-Wahid cites examples from Athenaeus of Greek patients who offered themselves as slaves to doctors who had saved their lives (op cit:234)
9. Ulpian is precise: “In every branch of the law, a person who fails to return from enemy hands is regarded as having died at the moment when he was captured.” (Digest 49.15.18) The Lex Cornelia of 84–81 bc specifies the need for remarriage.
10. Meillassoux 1996:106
11. Patterson 1982. “Slavery,” as he defines it, “is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” (1982:13)
12. He quotes Frederick Douglass here to great effect: “A man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even that it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.” (in Patterson 1982:13)
13. Presumably an honorable woman as well, though in the case of women, as we shall see, the question became inextricably caught up in questions of fidelity and chastity.
14. Paul Houlm (in Duffy, MacShamhráin and Moynes 2005:431.) True, the balance of trade seems to have shifted back and forth; at some periods Irish ships were raiding English shores, and after 800 ad the Vikings carried off thousands, briefly making Dublin the largest slave market in Europe. Still, by this time, cumals do not appear to any longer have been used as actual currency. There are some parallels here with Africa, where in certain times and places affected by the trade, debts were tallied up in slaves as well (Einzig 1949:153).
15. St. Patrick, one of the founders of the Irish church, was one of the few of the early Church Fathers who was overtly and unconditionally opposed to slavery.
16. Doherty 1980:78–83.
17. Gerriets 1978:128, 1981:171–72, 1985:338. This was in dramatic contrast, incidentally, to Welsh laws from only two or three centuries later, where the prices of all such objects are fastidiously specified (Ellis 1926:379–81). The list of items incidentally is a random selection from the Welsh codes.
18. Doherty 1980:73–74
19. This was true in Irish and in Welsh, and apparently, other Celtic languages as well. Charles-Edwards (1978:130, 1993:555) actually translates “honor price” as “face value.”
20. The one exception being an early ecclesiastical text: Einzig 1949:247–48, Gerriets 1978:71.
21. The main source on the monetary system is Gerriets (1978), a dissertation that unfortunately was never published as a book. A table of standard rates of exchange between cumal, cows, silver, etc, are also to be found in Charles-Edwards 1993:478–85.
22. Gerriets 1978:53.
23. If you had lent a man your horse or sword and he didn’t return it in time for a battle, causing loss of face, or even if a monk lent his cowl to another monk who didn’t return it in time, causing him not to have proper attire for an important synod, he could demand his honor price (Fergus 1988:118).
24. The honor price of Welsh kings was far higher (Ellis 1926:144).
25. Provincial kings, who ranked higher, had an honor price of 14 cumals, and in theory there was a high king at Tara who ruled all Ireland, but the position was often vacant or contested (Byrne 1973).
26. All of this is a simplification of what’s in fact an endlessly complicated system, and some points, especially concerning marriage, of which there are several varieties, with different integrations of brideprice and dowry, remain obscure. In the case of clients, for example, there were two initial payments by the lord, the honor price being one of them; with “free clients,” however, the honor price was not paid and the client was not reduced to servile status, (See Kelly 1988 for the best general summary.)
27. Dimetian Code II.24.12 (Howel 2006:559). A similar penalty is specified for the killing of public officials from certain districts (Ellis 1926:362).
28. “There is no evidence that goods themselves could be assigned prices. That is, while Irish moneys could quantify the status of an individual, they were not used to quantify the value of goods.” (Gerriets 1985:338).
29. Sutton 2004:374.
30. Gallant 2000. One might also consider here the phrase “affair of honor,” or for that matter, “honor killing”—which also make clear that such sentiments are hardly confined to rural Greece.
31. In fact, one could just as easily turn the question around, and ask: Why is it so insulting to suggest that a man’s sister is trading sex for money in the first place? This one reason I say that concepts of honor still shape our perceptions in ways we’re not aware of—there are plenty of places in the world where the suggestion that a man’s wife is trading sex for profit, or that his sister is engaged with multiple partners, is more likely to be greeted with bemused good humor than with murderous rage. We’ve already seen examples in the Gunwinggu and the Lele.
32. Obviously I am distinguishing the term here from the broader sense of patriarchy used in much feminist literature, of any social system based on male subordination of women. Clearly the origins of patriarchy in this broader sense must be sought in a much earlier period of history in both the Mediterranean and Near East.
33. The “Semitic infiltration” model is already to be found in such classic sources as Saggs (1962). Generally speaking, the pattern seems to be one of periodic urban crisis, the near-breakdown of riverine society being followed by revival, apparently after the advent of a new wave of Semitic pastoralists (Adams et al. 1974).
34. Rohrlich 1980 is a compelling example.
35. This is of course a vast simplification of a thesis mainly identified with the anthropologist Jack Goody (1976, 1983, 1990). The basic principle is that dowry is not so much a payment by the bride’s father (it might come equally from both sides) but a kind of premature inheritance. Goody has had very little to say about Mesopotamia, though, and that little (1990:315–17) focuses almost exclusively on upper-class practice.
36. Wilcke 1985, Westbrook 1988, Greengus 1990, Stol 1995:125–27. For Mari: Lafont 1987; for Old Babylonian practice: Greengus 1966, 1969; for Nuzi, Grosz 1983, 1989.
37. Our best sources are from the city of Nuzi c1500 bc, though Nuzi was atypical in certain ways, mainly due to Hurrian influence. There, marriage payments appear to have been made in stages, for instance, at the birth of a first child (Grosz 1981:176)—a pattern familiar to anthropologists from Melanesia, Africa, and numerous other parts of the world.
38. Finkelstein 1966, VerSteeg 2000:121, 153n91. A father could claim monetary damages against someone who falsely claimed that his daughter was not a virgin, presumably because it would lower the bride-price (Cooper 2002:101).
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p; 39. Bottéro 1992:113.
40. Stol 1995:126.
41. Cardascia 1959 on “matrimonial adoption” (also Mendelsohn 1949:8–12, Greengus 1975). During times of famine, sometimes even the brideprice was dispensed with, and a starving family might turn over their daughter to a rich household in exchange for a promise to keep her alive.
42. Evans-Prichard 1931, Raglan 1931. It’s a little ironic that the debate was occurring in England, since this was one of the few places where it was, technically, legal to sell or even auction off one’s wife (Menefee 1981; Stone 1990:143–48; see Pateman 1988). Stone notes that while public “wife-sales” in English villages were apparently really prearranged divorces, “the details of the ritual were designed to emphasize the final nature of the transfer of property, by imitating as closely as possible the sale of a cow or a sheep. A halter was used to lead the wife from her home to the market, and from the market to the house of her purchaser.” (1990:145) The practice, confined to the popular classes, caused a scandal when documented in Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, but it was only completely abandoned in 1919.
43. Finley 1981:153–55; Stienkeller 2003; Mieroop 2005:27–28. Mieroop notes that the earliest such contract is documented from twenty-first-century Babylonia. This is an interesting example for the early history of wage labor. As I’ve written elsewhere (Graeber 2006:66–69; 2007:91–94), wage-labor contracts in the ancient world were primarily a matter of the rental of slaves—a practice that in Mesopotamia is first documented only in neo-Babylonian times (Oppenheim 1964:78, VerSteeg 2000:70–71; for an Egyptian parallel VerSteeg 2002:197).
44. The entire issue has been complicated by Herodotus’ claim (1.199) that all Babylonian women other than daughters of the elite were expected to prostitute themselves at temples, once, to earn the money for their dowries. This was certainly false, but it has caused the terms of debate to become rather confused between people insisting on the importance of “hierodules” or even claiming that all prostitution was effectively sacred (e.g., Kramer 1969, Lambert 1992) and those rejecting the entire notion as Orientalist fantasy (Arnaud 1973, Westenholz 1989, Beard & Henderson 1997, Assante 2003). However, recently published texts from Kish and Sippar make clear that sexual rituals involving temple women, at least some of whom were paid for their services, definitely did take place (Gallery 1980; Yoffee 1998; Stol 1995:138–39) The devadasi analogy incidentally was first to my knowledge proposed in Yoffee 1998:336. On devadasis in general: Orr 2000, Jordan 2003, Vijaisri 2004.
45. Kramer 1963:116, Bahrani 2001: 59–60.
46. A similar reading can be found in Bottéro 1992:96, but without the ambivalence, which Lerner (1980:247) emphasizes.
47. See Lerner 1980, Van Der Toorn 1989, Lambert 1992.
48. Also, in many places, small-scale female traders are likened to or confused with prostitutes, simply because they have multiple ongoing relationships with unrelated men (for a contemporary Kazakh example: Nazpary 2001)—and the roles can sometimes overlap.
49. Diakonoff (1982). Loose bands of pastoral nomads or refugees, who also sometimes doubled as soldiers, were often referred to generically as hapiru or habiru, both in Mesopotamia and to the West. This might be the origin of the term “Hebrew,” another group that according to their own histories had fled from bondage, wandered with their flocks in the desert, and eventually descended as conquerors on urban society.
50. Herodotus 1.199, also Strabo 16.1.20.
51. Revelations 17.4–5. Revelations seems to follow the perspective of the followers of Peter more than those of Paul. I observe in passing that Rastafarianism, the main prophetic voice today that makes use of the image of Babylon as corruption and oppression—though it does tend to play down the imagery of sexual corruption—has in practice been very much about the reassertion of patriarchal authority among the poor.
52. 1980:249–54; 1989:123–40. The main textual source is Driver & Miles 1935; also Cardascia 1969.
53. In Sumerian weddings, a bride’s father would cover her with a veil, and the groom would remove it—it was by this act that he made her his wife (Stol 1995:128). Not only does this demonstrate the degree to which the veil was a symbol of encompassment in some man’s domestic authority; it might also have been the source from which the later Assyrian practice was eventually adopted.
54. My take on Confucianism follows Deng’s (1999) somewhat unconventional approach. See Watson 1980 on the commoditization of women; Gates 1989 on its relation to general decline of women’s freedoms during the Song; there seems to have been another major setback during the Ming dynasty—for a recent overview, Ko, Haboush, and Piggott (2003). Testart (2000, 2001:148–49, 190) emphasizes that the case of China confirms his “general sociological law,” that societies that practice brideprice will also allow debt slavery (Testart, Lécrivain, Karadimas & Govoroff 2001), since this was a place where the government vainly tried to stop both. Another aspect of Confucianism was that male slavery was seen as much more dubious than female slavery; though it never went as far as in Korea, where after the invasion of Hideyoshi, a law was passed decreeing that only women could be enslaved.
55. Tambiah (1973, 1989) was the first to make what is now the standard critique of Goody’s argument. Goody prefers to see these as indirect dowry payments since they were normally passed to the family (1990:178–97).
56. On Homeric honor: Finley 1954:118–19, Adkins 1972:14–16 Seaford 1994:6–7. Cattle are again the main unit of account, and silver. Is also apparently used As Classicists have noted, the only actual acts of buying and selling in the Homeric epics are with foreigners (Von Reden 1995:58–76, Seaford 2004:26–30, Finley 1954:67–70). Needless to say, Homeric society lacked the legalistic precision of the Irish notion of “honor price” but the principles were broadly the same, since tīme could mean not only “honor” but “penalty” and “compensation.”
57. Tīme is not used for the “price” of commodities in the Iliad or the Odyssey, but then prices of commodities are barely mentioned. It is, however, used for “compensation,” in the sense of wergeld or honor-price (Seaford 2004:198n46). The first attested use of time as purchase price is in the slightly later Homeric Hymn to Demeter (132) where, as Seaford notes, it seems significant that in fact it refers to a slave.
58. Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 2.2. He is referring to the great crisis leading to Solon’s reforms, the famous “shaking off of burdens” of c. 594 bc.
59. Greek chattel slavery was in fact much more extreme than anything that appears to have existed in the ancient Near East at the time (see e.g., Westermann 1955; Finley 1974, 1981; Wiedemann 1981; Dandamaev 1984; Westbrook 1995), not only because most Near Eastern “slaves” were not technically slaves at all but redeemable debt pawns, who therefore at least in theory could not be arbitrarily abused, but because even those who were absolute private property had greater rights.
60. “Self-sufficiency is an end and what is best” (Aristotle Politics 1256–58; see Finley 1974:109–11, Veyne 1979, for classic discussions of what this meant in practice.)
61. The argument here follows Kurke 2002. On the public brothels, see Halperin 1990, Kurke 1996. There actually were Temple prostitutes in Greece too, mostly famously in Corinth, where Strabo (8.6.20) claimed that the Temple of Aphrodite owned a thousand of them, apparently, slaves who had been dedicated to the temple by pious worshippers.
62. As noted in the quote from David Sutton (2004) above. For a sampling of the anthropological literature on honor in contemporary Greek society, see: Campbell 1964, Peristiany 1965, Schneider 1971, Herzfeld 1980, 1985, Just 2001.
63. On the impropriety of women’s work outside the household, see Brock 1994. On segregation of women in general: Keuls 1985, Cohen 1987, Just 1989, Loraux 1993.
64. The evidence is overwhelming, but until recently has been largely ignored. Llewellyn-Jones (2003) notes that the practice began as an aristocratic affectation, but that by the fifth century, all respectable women “were veiled
daily and routinely, at least in public or in front of non-related men” (ibid:14).
65. van Reden 1997:174, referencing Herodotus 7.233, Plutarch’s Pericles, 26.4.
66. A woman who one of them, Achilles, had personally reduced to slavery. Briseis was from the Trojan town of Lyrnessus, and after Achilles killed her husband and three brothers in the Greek attack on the town, she was awarded to him as a prize. (On learning of this, her father later hanged himself.) In the Iliad, Achilles insists he loves her. Briseis’ opinions were not considered worth recording, though later poets, uncomfortable with the idea that the greatest epic of antiquity was a celebration of simple rape, concocted a story whereby Briseis had actually long been in love with Achilles from afar, and somehow manipulated the course of events so as to cause the battle to begin with.
67. Homeric warriors weren’t really aristocrats at all, or if they were, as Calhoun puts it (1934:308) they were aristocrats “only in the loosest sense of the word.” Mostly they were just a collection of local chieftains and ambitious warriors.
68. See Kurke 1997:112–13, 1999:197–98 for Greek elaborations on the theme. So too Seaford: “Whereas the Homeric gift is invested with the personality of its heroic donor, the only kind of person that money resembles is the prostitute. For Shakespeare it is ‘the common whore of all mankind’ ” (2002:156, emphasis in the original. For what it’s worth, Seaford is slightly off here: Shakespeare described the earth as the “common whore of all mankind,” whose womb produces gold, which is money [Timon of Athens 4.3.42–45].)
69. Seaford 2002 in his review of Kurke notes that Greek sources regularly go back and forth on this.
70. In the Odyssey (11.488–91), famously, Achilles, when trying to invoke the lowest and most miserable person he can possibly imagine, invokes not a slave but a thete, a mere laborer unattached to any household.