The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Women and gender in Babylonia —
20 Legal texts clearly treat the unapproved rape of slave women outside the household as a violation
of their owner’s rights: one of the Babylonian laws of Esˇnuna considers the same legal situation
in the context of economic deprivation, not of sexual offense. The latter case resembles those
involving the rape of free women except insofar as the slave’s consent is not an issue, probably
because “the slave girl is not a legal person” (Finkelstein 1966: 360).
21 This passage is followed by an even longer section on the unsuitability of harimtu as wives,
implying both that they were grouped together with slave women in a sexually liminal class,
just as they were in the Middle Assyrian laws (MALA §40), and that this class threatened the
social order.
22 Cf. CAD A/II 84A; M/I 346A; Langdon 1906.
23 The passive language of §171 leaves open the question of whether the owner is expected to
release his slave-concubine during his lifetime, and because responsibility for such a manumission
is not placed on any particular agent, the law is unlikely ever to have been enforced.
24 Nothing is said about Nubtâ’s sons, whose status as either free men or as slaves apparently
went without saying (Dandamaev 1984: 409–410), despite the contradictory Mesopotamian
legal precedents.
25 The clause prohibiting Shamash-zer-ushabshi from “desiring” Nubtâ also suggests that Neo-
Babylonian courts were willing to involve themselves in domestic affairs, at least insofar as
Shamash-zer-ushabshi did not have the right to maintain a sexual relationship with a slave
woman who did not legally belong to him. This stricture may have been related to rules
governing the treatment of women who were pledged as collateral for debt, although we know
relatively little regarding the latter.
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