The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Laura D. Steele —
as large as the population of private slaves in the Roman Empire. I will focus on
slave women in private households; much more could be said about institutionally
owned slave women, who likely had very different rights, responsibilities, and
experiences than their domestic counterparts (cf. Kuhrt 1989).
A few Babylonian texts reveal the usual duties of slave women in domestic
households, and, for the most part, their duties parallel those of free wives: in a
Sumerian love song preserved in Old Babylonian copies dating to 2000–1600 BCE,
(Ni2377 = DI C 1 ; translation in Sefati 1998), Dumuzi assures his new wife Inanna
that she need not perform household duties – i.e., weaving cloth, spinning flax, carding
wool, and baking bread – as if she were a slave woman. The association of slave
women with household textile production appears in two Old Babylonian letters as
well: in the first (AbB VAS 2, 12, p. 14), the author instructs his associate to purchase
a slave woman “if [she] is house-born and knows how to weave” (cf. Diakonoff 1974:
n. 63); and the author of the second (VAS 188, 6) mentions an apparently anomalous
“slave girl who is not a weaver” (cf. CAD, A/II, 81). Though Babylonian law generally
treated slaves as though they were not legal persons (Finkelstein 1966: 359; Westbrook
1998), both male and female slaves were able to testify in courts of law and often
served as witnesses of their owners’ business transactions in the Neo-Babylonian period
(Dandamaev 1984: 308ff.), even though free women could not do so (see above).
Indeed, a Neo-Babylonian slave woman ran a tavern on behalf of the Egibi family,
which supplied her with the necessary materials (Baker 2001: 23).
Mesopotamian sources of all periods embrace the stereotype of rivalry between free
and slave women, and they seem to single out female slaves as more inattentive than
their mistresses, who themselves are not portrayed as overly vindictive or “hysterical.”
Mesopotamian literary texts might have insisted upon this distinction precisely because
slave women who bore their master’s children threatened the cultural and economic
status of free women in several tangible ways. The legal distinction between wives
and slave women was not entirely clear in the first place: according to LH §141, for
example, if a wife decides to leave her husband and “appropriates goods, squanders
her household possessions, or disparages her husband” (translation in Roth 1997:
108) a man may marry another woman and keep his first wife “like a slave,” even if
she is not legally a slave (cf. Westbrook 1988: 66). Thus, we find a number of texts
that reinforce the authority of the free woman who owns or supervises slaves, such
as an Old Babylonian bilingual proverb text (UET 6/2: 386–387; translation in Alster
1997) that states, “I, a slave girl, have no authority over my lady. Let me go!”
Two specific documents of the Old Babylonian period describe cases in which the
treatment of a slave attracted the attention of a third party: the author of an Old
Babylonian letter (AbB 1, 18) questions whether a man who hired a slave woman
can beat her with a stick to “make her talk” when she has said something slanderous,
presumably because this punishment has already been meted out, and a slave woman
named Shala-ummi is said in another letter (AbB 1, 27) to have been “thrashed” by
the slave-trader Awil-Adad, though she was apparently able to defend herself by
finding protectors (cf. Diakanoff 1974; see further below). It is possible that fugitive
slave women were punished particularly harshly by their owners, but few texts discuss
such treatment. 19
Several sale documents (cited in Mendelsohn 1949: 52–53) record the purchase
of slaves for the express purpose of “marriage” to other slaves, much like the slave
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