Fictional Misery
I have an uneasy feeling when writing one of my favorite secondary characters, a sometime groom named Kety with amazing abilities to calm any animal or person. He’s a slave, after all, a miserable status that I have attached to him. I didn’t know, to be honest, how fond of him I was going to become. When I needed someone to drive a very important wagon full of golden treasures for King Hattu, up Kety popped from my imagination, taken in slavery from the pharaoh’s camp during the war. So now I’m the evil writer who made such a nice guy live as one of the lowest of the low.
Except…
Separating Race from Slavery
While no one would say slavery in the ancient Near East was a desirable social status, it wasn’t necessarily the lowest status of all. What could possibly be worse?
It’s almost impossible for me to think about the concept of slavery without thinking of it in terms of race. I’m American, so that’s the history and current legacy that I live within. However, ancient slavery was disconnected to race. Slaves were not rendered less than human in the mind of the owner by the dishonest process of racist thinking. Humans are frequently cruel to each other. But we’re even worse when we can convince ourselves the other human is a “demon.” Or somehow an animal not a person. Racism dehumanizes. And that is one missing element from ancient slavery. So I keep that in mind as I understand the reality of life for my fictional slave.
Understanding Slavery in the Ancient Near East
I have sensed that I was missing something when it came to the nature and roles of ancient slaves. I’ll note at the outset some exceptions, mostly in the context of much later Rome. However, the cues I heard from the texts and the archaeological evidence didn’t indicate a life distinctly different from free working people. How could that be?
And then there’s that surprising thing Achilles says when Odysseus goes down into the underworld and speaks with his shade. I’ll paraphrase because my books are still packed up from my recent move, and I can’t pull Homer off the shelf as I should.
Odysseus exclaims how great it is for Achilles to be so honored among the dead. Achilles answers he’d rather be the lowest day laborer alive on earth than king of all the dead. Achilles uses the word for free laborer (modern equivalent of contract or gig worker?) not slave. He says that because as a Greek slave, he’d have been fed, clothed, and generally supplied with a safety net. But no such luck for the laborer. (If being dependent on someone else to “give” you the basic essentials can be called luck, which, of course, it can’t.)
War and Slave Markets
But, I always assumed people became slaves, especially in the pre-Roman periods, primarily by being captured in war. Like my fictional Kety. That would mean they lost everything first. That they entered slavery in a state of extraordinary trauma. And I also assumed that the slave markets that we know existed in the classical Greek and Roman periods, for example on the island of Delos, also existed in the ancient Near East of the earlier period in which I set my fiction. To my fascination, both those assumptions appear not to be the case for seemingly a large portion of slaves in the ancient Near East. I discovered a fascinating nuanced complexity when I read this article in Ancient Near East Today, “Rethinking Slavery in the Ancient Near East.”
Something Worse?
I still owe Kety an apology for giving him such a rotten life. He really misses his family. I promise to be a nicer author soon. But, my instincts as a historian were leading me true. Achilles wasn’t being an irrational spoiled brat. He was making a true observation. Life could be so precarious and painful in the ancient Near East, that even slavery, as practiced in that era, might be a better “sure” thing. Yikes.
But if it meant a life of labor little different from that of the rest of the household, and support with major life steps like a dowry for marriage or for the marriage of one’s children, and if corporal punishment and family separation were by no means “normal,” then I kind of see Achilles’ point. On the other hand, slaves were viewed as loan collateral and other debt cancellation devices. Hard to wrap my head around all this, but I am fascinated by the evidence laid out in this short, clear piece. Read the article to find an unexpected window into the past.
Here for a review of an excellent novel about American slavery, All Different Kinds of Free by Jessica McCann.