Slavery was part of the foundation upon which Babylonian society rested.
But between slavery as it existed in the ancient oriental world and
slavery in the Roman or modern world there was a great difference. The
slave was often of the same race as his master, sometimes of the same
nationality, speaking the same language and professing the same religion.
He was regarded as one of the family, and was not infrequently adopted
into it. He could become a free citizen and rise to the highest offices of
state. Slavery was no bar to his promotion, nor did it imprint any stigma
upon him. He was frequently a skilled artisan and even possessed literary
knowledge. Between his habits and level of culture and those of his owners
was no marked distinction, no prejudices to be overcome on account of his
color, no conviction of his inferiority in race. He was brought up with
the rest of the family to which he was considered to belong and was in
hourly contact with them. Moreover, the large number of slaves had been
captives in war. A reverse of fortune might consign their present masters
to the same lot; history knew of instances in which master and slave had
changed places with one another. There were some slaves, too, who were
Babylonians by birth; the law allowed the parent to sell his child, the
brother his sister, or the creditor his debtor under certain
circumstances, and the old Sumerian legislation ordained that a son who
denied his father should be shorn and sold as a slave. In times of famine
or necessity a man even sold himself to be quit of a debt or to obtain the
means of subsistence. A slave was always fed and clothed; the free laborer
at times could get neither food nor clothing.
There were three classes of slaves—those who were the property of a
private individual, the serfs who were attached to the soil which they
cultivated, and the temple slaves who had been dedicated to the service of
the gods. Of the second class but few traces are found in Babylonia.
Agriculture was carried on there either by free laborers, or by the slaves
of the private land-owners. Where the land belonged to priests, it was of
course usually the temple slaves who tilled it. What was the exact legal
position of the Jews and other exiles who were transported to Babylonia by
Nebuchadnezzar we do not know, but they were neither serfs nor slaves. The
practice of transportation had been borrowed from Assyria, and under the
Assyrian system the exiled population was treated as a colony. Israelites
appear among the Assyrian officials in contracts of the second Assyrian
empire, and Jewish names are found in the Babylonian contracts of the age
of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors.
The Babylonians were not a military people, and after the Kassite conquest
their wars of aggression were not sufficiently numerous or extensive to
provide them with a supply of captives who could be made into slaves.
Slave-merchants are rarely, if ever, referred to in the Babylonian
contract tablets, and the slaves must have been home-born, the children
and descendants of those who had been slaves before them. In the age of
Abraham it was doubtless different. Then the power of Babylonia extended
throughout Western Asia, and the constant wars in the East and West must
have filled the market with foreign captives. The white slaves brought
from Kurdistan and the north were especially prized. Thus in the reign of
Ammi-Zadok, the fourth successor of Khammurabi, some “white Kurdish
slaves” were sold for 3 homers and 24⅔ _qas_ of oil, which were valued at
20⅔ shekels, and in the time of his son Samsu-ditana “a white slave” from
Suri or Northern Mesopotamia fetched as much as 20 shekels, or £3.
The earliest code of Sumerian laws known to us takes the slave under its
protection. It assumes the principle that the life of the slave is not
absolutely at his master’s disposal, and enacts that, if the slave is
killed, beaten, maimed, or injured in health, the hand that has so
offended shall pay each day a measure of wheat. This must mean that the
payment shall be continued until the slave recovers from his
ill-treatment. Light is thrown upon it by a later Babylonian law,
according to which, if the services of a slave have been hired by a second
person and the slave falls ill or is otherwise rendered incapable of work,
the hirer is fined for as long a time as the illness or incapacity
continues. The object of the law is clear. It was intended to prevent the
slave from being overworked by one who had not, as it were, a family
interest in him. It protected the slave and at the same time protected the
master to whom he belonged.
There are several instances of its application. Thus in the eighth year of
Cyrus a slave named Nidinti was apprenticed for six years by his master
and mistress to a certain Libludh in order that he might learn the trade
of fulling. It was stipulated that he was to learn it thoroughly, and if
at any time he was unable to work Libludh was to pay each day 3 _qas_ (or
about 4½ quarts) of wheat for his support. At the end of the period, when
the trade had been learned, Libludh was to receive a cloth worth 4 shekels
(12 s.) and hand over Nidinti to the service of the Sun-god of Sippara. In
the same year another slave was apprenticed to the stone-cutter Quddâ, who
was himself a slave and belonged to the heir-apparent, Cambyses. Quddâ
undertook to teach his trade to the apprentice in four years, and if he
failed to do so was to be fined 20 shekels. Six years earlier Qubtâ, the
daughter of Iddina-Merodach, had given the slave of another person to a
weaver for a period of five years, in order that he might be taught the
art of weaving, at the same time agreeing to provide him with 1 _qa_ (1⅗
quarts) of food each day and to pay his teacher something besides. If,
however, he was incapacitated from learning, the weaver was required to
pay a daily fine of half a “measure” of wheat, which we are told was the
wage of the slave. Any infringement of the contract would be punished by a
penalty of 20 manehs.
The slave was able to apprentice himself without the intervention of his
owners. Thus in the sixth year of Cyrus one slave apprenticed himself of
his own accord to another in order to learn a trade. In this case also the
penalty for not being taught the trade was half a “measure” of wheat each
day, which is again stated to be the wage of the slave. The wage, however,
it would seem, had to be paid to the master, at all events in some cases;
this is clear from a document which relates to the conclusion of the
apprenticeship in which Nubtâ took part. The slave she had apprenticed had
learnt his trade, and his master accordingly received from the teacher 5
shekels, which it was calculated were the equivalent of the services the
apprentice had rendered. Ordinarily the 5 shekels would have been
considered a return for the slave’s maintenance during the term of his
apprenticeship; but in this instance, for reasons unknown to us, the
maintenance had been provided by a lady and the payment for the slave’s
services was consequently clear gain.
The slave, however, was allowed to accumulate capital for himself, to
trade with it, and even to become rich enough to lend money to his own
master or to purchase his own freedom. That a similar privilege was
allowed to the slaves of the Israelites we may gather from the fact that
Saul’s slave offered to pay the seer Samuel a quarter of a shekel which he
had about him, though it is true that this might have been the property of
his master. In Babylonia the possession of property by the slave was not
at all uncommon. In the sixth year of Cambyses, for example, a female
slave named Khunnatu received a large quantity of furniture, including
five beds, ten chairs, three dishes, and various other kitchen utensils,
and agreed to pay the rent of the house in which she deposited them. Her
master also lent her 122 shekels of silver, which were expended in buying
fifty casks of beer, besides other things, and upon which she was to pay
interest. Apparently she wanted to set up an inn or drinking-shop; the
fact that the money was lent to her by her master proves that she must
have been engaged in business on her own account. In other contracts we
find the slave taking a mortgage and trading in onions and grain or
employing his money in usury. In one case a slave borrows as much as 14
manehs 49 shekels, or £138 3s., from a member of the Egibi firm. In
another case it is a considerable quantity of grain in addition to 12
shekels of silver that is borrowed from the slave by two other persons,
with a promise that the grain shall be repaid the following month and the
money a year later. The contract is drawn up in the usual way, the
borrowers, who, like the witnesses, are free-born citizens, giving the
creditor a security and assuming a common responsibility for the debt. The
grain, however, was to be repaid in the house of the slave’s master; it
seems evident, therefore, that the slave had no private house of his own.
The slave, nevertheless, could own a house or receive it in payment of a
debt. This is illustrated by an interesting contract in which reference is
made to Ustanni, the Tatnai of the Book of Ezra, who is called “the
governor of Ebir-nâri,” “the other side of the river.” The contract is as
follows:
“Two manehs of silver lent by Kurrulâ, the slave of Ustanni, the governor
of Babylon and Ebir-nâri, to Merodach-sum-ibni, the son of Sula, the son
of Epes-ilu. The house of the latter, which is by the side of the road of
the god Bagarus, is Kurrulâ’s security. No one else has any prior claim to
it. The house is not to be let or interest taken upon the loan.” Then come
the names of five free-born witnesses, and the document is dated at
Babylon in the third year of Darius. The terms of the contract are
precisely the same as those exacted by Cambyses, when he was crown-prince,
from a certain Iddin-Nebo, to whom he had lent money through the agency of
his secretary, receiving a house as security for the debt.
In some instances the slave was merely the confidential agent of his
master, to whom therefore all or most of the profits went. Thus a deed
dated in the ninth year of Cyrus describes a field situated opposite the
gate of Zamama at Babylon, which had been assigned by “the judges” to a
lady named Ê-Saggil-belit, and afterward mortgaged by her to a slave of
Itti-Merodach-baladhu, one of the members of the Egibi firm. The lady,
however, still wanted money, and accordingly proposed to
Itti-Merodach-baladhu that if he would make her a “present” of 10 shekels
she would hand over to him her title-deeds. This was done, and the field
passed into the possession of Itti-Merodach-baladhu, with whom the
mortgage had really been contracted.
In spite of the privileges possessed by the Babylonian slave, he was
nevertheless a chattel, like the rest of his master’s property. He could
constitute the dowry of a wife, could take the place of interest on a debt
or of the debt itself, and could be hired out to another, the wages he
earned going into the pocket of his master. In the age of Khammurabi we
find two brothers hiring the services of two slaves, one of whom belonged
to their father and the other to their mother, for ten days. The slaves
were wanted for harvest work, and it was agreed that a _gur_ (or 180
_qas_) of grain should be paid them. This, of course, ultimately went to
their owners. In the reign of Cambyses a man and his wife, having borrowed
80 shekels, gave a slave as security for the repayment of the loan; the
terms of the contract are the same as if the security had been a house. On
another occasion a slave is security for only part of a debt which
amounted to a maneh and twenty shekels, interest being paid upon the
shekels. His service was regarded as equivalent to the interest upon the
maneh.
When a slave was sold the seller guaranteed that he was not disobedient,
that he had not been adopted by a free citizen, that there was no prior
claim to him, and that he had not been impressed into the royal service,
or, in the case of female slaves, been a concubine of the king. Purchasers
had to be on their guard on all these points. Strict honesty was not
always the rule in the Babylonian commercial world, and a case which came
before the judges in the early part of the reign of Nabonidos shows that
ladies were capable of sharp practice as well as men. The judicial record
states that a certain “Belit-litu gave the following evidence before the
judges of Nabonidos, King of Babylon: ‘In the month Ab, in the first year
of Nergal-sharezer, King of Babylon, I sold my slave, Bazuzu, for
thirty-five shekels of silver to Nebo-akhi-iddin, the son of Sulâ, the
descendant of Egibi; he has pretended that I owed him a debt, and so has
not paid me the money.’ The judges heard the charge, and caused
Nebo-akhi-iddin to be summoned and to appear before them. Nebo-akhi-iddin
produced the contract which he had made with Belit-litu; he proved that
she had received the money and convinced the judges. And Ziria,
Nebo-sum-lisir and Edillu gave (further) evidence before the judges that
Belit-litu, their mother, had received the silver. The judges deliberated
and condemned Belit-litu to (pay) fifty-five shekels (by way of fine), the
highest fine that could be inflicted on her, and then gave it to
Nebo-akhi-iddin.”
The prices fetched by slaves varied naturally. We have seen that in the
Abrahamic age 20 shekels (£3) were given for a white slave from the North,
the same price as that for which Joseph was sold. In the reign of
Ammi-zadok 4½ shekels only were paid for a female slave. In later times
prices were considerably higher, though under Nebuchadnezzar we hear of a
slave given as part of a dowry who was valued at 30 shekels, and of a
female slave and her infant child whose cost was only 19 shekels. In the
first year of Nergal-sharezer a slave-merchant of Harran sold three slaves
for 45 shekels, while a little later 32 shekels were given for a female
slave. The same sum was given for a slave who was advanced in years, while
a slave girl four years of age only was sold for 19 shekels. In the sixth
year of Cambyses an Egyptian and her child three months old, whom the
Babylonian Iddin-Nebo had “taken, with his bow,” was sold by him for 2
manehs or 120 shekels, a bond for 240 _gurs_ of dates being handed over to
him as security for the payment of the sum. The Egyptian, it may be noted,
received a Babylonian name before being put up for auction. In the same
reign we hear of 3 manehs being paid for two slaves, of a maneh for a
single slave, and of 7 manehs 56 shekels for three female slaves. This
would be at the rate of 2 manehs 38 shekels or £23 14s. for each. On the
whole, however, the average price seems to have been about 30 shekels.
This, at any rate, was the case among the Israelites, not only in the
Mosaic period (Exod. xxi. 32) but also in the time of the Maccabees (II.
Macc. viii. 9, 10).
The fact that slaves sometimes ran away from their masters, like
Barachiel, who pretended to be a free citizen, and that in contracts for
their sale their obedience is expressly guaranteed, proves that they were
not always content with their lot. Indeed, it is not strange that it
should have been so. They were merely chattels, subject to the caprices
and tyranny of those who owned them, and their lives were as little valued
as that of an ox. Thus in the fortieth year of Nebuchadnezzar a judgment
was delivered that, if it could be proved by witnesses that a certain
Idikhi-ilu had murdered the slave of one of the Arameans settled in the
town of Pekod, he was to be fined a maneh of silver; that was all the
slave’s life was worth in the eyes of the law, and even that was paid to
the master to compensate him for the loss of his property. Sometimes the
name of the slave was changed; as we have seen, the captive Egyptian woman
received a Babylonian name, and a contract of the time of Khammurabi,
relating to the female slave of a Babylonian lady, who had been given to
her by her husband, and who, it is stipulated, shall not be taken from her
by his sons after his death, mentions that the name of the slave had been
changed. In this case, however, the reason seems to have been that the
girl was adopted by her mistress, though the adoption was not carried out
in legal form and was therefore technically invalid. The contract
accordingly describes her by her proper name of Mutibasti, but adds that
“she is called Zabini, the daughter of Saddasu,” her mistress.
That the law should nevertheless have regarded the slave as a person, and
as such possessed of definite rights, appears strange. But Babylonian law
started from the principle of individual responsibility and individual
possession of property, and since the slave was a human being and could,
moreover, hold property of his own, it necessarily seemed to place him
more and more on a footing of equality with the free-born citizen. The
causes which brought about the legal emancipation of women worked in the
same direction in favor of the slave. Hence the power he had of purchasing
his freedom out of his own earnings and of being adopted into a citizen’s
family. Hence, too, the claim of the law to interfere between the
slave-owner and his property.
A slave, in fact, could even act as a witness in court, his testimony
being put on the same legal level as that of a native Babylonian. He could
also be a party to a suit. Thus we find a slave called Nergal-ritsua, in
the tenth year of Nabonidos, bringing a suit for the recovery of stolen
property. He had been intrusted by his master with the conveyance of 480
_gur_ of fruit to the ships of a Syrian, named Baal-nathan, who undertook
to carry it to Babylon, and to be responsible for loss. On the way part of
the fruit was stolen, and Baal-nathan, instead of replacing it, absconded,
but was soon caught. The slave accordingly appeared against him, and the
five judges before whom the case was brought gave a verdict in his favor.
A slave could even own another slave. In the twenty-seventh year of
Nebuchadnezzar, for example, the porter of the temple of the Sun-god at
Sippara, who was “the slave of Nebo-baladh-yulid,” purchased a female
slave for two-thirds of a shekel (2s.). The amount was small, but the
purchaser did not possess so much at the moment, and credit was
consequently allowed him. The list of witnesses to the contract is headed
by a slave.
The condition of the slave in Assyria was much what it was in Babylonia.
The laws and customs of Assyria were modelled after those of Babylonia,
whence, indeed, most of them had been derived. But there was one cause of
difference between the two countries which affected the character of
slavery. Assyria was a military power, and the greater part of its slaves,
therefore, were captives taken in war. In Babylonia, on the contrary, the
majority had been born in the country, and between them and their masters
there was thus a bond of union and sympathy which could not exist between
the foreign captive and his conqueror. In the northern kingdom slavery
must have been harsher.
Slaves, moreover, apparently fetched higher prices there, probably on
account of their foreign origin. They cost on the average as much as a
maneh (£9) each. A contract, dated in 645 B.C., states that one maneh and
a half was given for a single female slave. One of the contracting parties
was a Syrian, and an Aramaic docket is accordingly attached to the deed,
while among the witnesses to it we find Ammâ, “the Aramean secretary.”
Ammâ means a native of the land of Ammo, where Pethor was situated. About
the same time 3 manehs, “according to the standard of Carchemis,” were
paid for a family of five slaves, which included two children. Under
Esar-haddon a slave was bought for five-sixths of a maneh, or 50 shekels,
and in the same year Hoshea, an Israelite, with his two wives and four
children, was sold for 3 manehs. With these prices it is instructive to
compare the sum of 43 shekels given for a female slave in Babylonia only
four years later.
As a specimen of an Assyrian contract for the sale of slaves we may take
one which was made in 709 B.C., thirteen years after the fall of Samaria,
and which is noticeable on account of the Israelitish names which it
contains: “The seal of Dagon-melech,” we read, “the owner of the slaves
who are sold. Imannu, the woman U——, and Melchior, in all three persons,
have been approved by Summa-ilâni, the bear-hunter from Kasarin, and he
has bought them from Dagon-melech for three manehs of silver, according to
the standard of Carchemish. The money has been fully paid; the slaves have
been marked and taken. There shall be no reclamation, lawsuit, or
complaints. Whoever hereafter shall at any time rise up and bring an
action, whether it be Dagon-melech or his brother or his nephew or any one
else belonging to him or a person in authority, and shall bring an action
and charges against Summa-ilâni, his son, or his grandson, shall pay 10
manehs of silver, or 1 maneh of gold (£140), to the goddess Istar of
Arbela. The money brings an interest of 10 (_i.e._, 60) per cent. to its
possessors; but if an action or complaint is brought it shall not be
touched by the seller. In the presence of Addâ the secretary, Akhiramu the
secretary, Pekah the governor of the city, Nadab-Yahu (Nadabiah) the
bear-hunter, Bel-kullim-anni, Ben-dikiri, Dhem-Istar, and Tabnî the
secretary, who has drawn up the deed of contract.” The date is the 20th of
Ab, or August, 709 B.C.
The slaves are sold at a maneh each, and bear Syrian names. Addâ, “the man
of Hadad,” and Ben-dikiri are also Syrian; on the other hand, Ahiram,
Pekah, and Nadabiah are Israelitish. It is interesting to find them
appearing as free citizens of Assyria, one of them being even governor of
a city. It serves to show why the tribes of Northern Israel so readily
mingled with the populations among whom they were transported; the exiles
in Assyria were less harshly treated than those in Babylonia, and they had
no memories of a temple and its services, no strong religious feeling, to
prevent them from being absorbed by the older inhabitants of their new
homes.
In Assyria, as in Babylonia, parents could sell their children, brothers
their sisters, though we do not know under what circumstances this was
allowed by the law. The sale of a sister by her brother for half a maneh,
which has already been referred to, took place at Nineveh in 668 B.C. In
the contract the brother is called “the owner of his sister,” and any
infringement of the agreement was to be punished by a fine of “10 silver
manehs, or 1 maneh of gold,” to the treasury of the temple of Ninip at
Calah. About fifteen years later the services of a female slave “as long
as she lived” were given in payment of a debt, one of the witnesses to the
deed being Yavanni “the Greek.” Ninip of Calah received slaves as well as
fines for the violation of contracts relating to the sale of them; about
645 B.C., for instance, we find four men giving one to the service of the
god. Among the titles of the god is that of “the lord of workmen;” and it
is therefore possible that he was regarded as in a special way the patron
of the slave-trader.
It seems to have been illegal to sell the mother without the children, at
all events as long as they were young. In the old Sumerian code of laws it
was already laid down that if children were born to slaves whom their
owner had sold while still reserving the power of repurchasing them, he
could nevertheless not buy them back unless he bought the children at the
same time at the rate of one and a half shekels each. The contracts show
that this law continued in force down to the latest days of Babylonian
independence. Thus the Egyptian woman who was sold in the sixth year of
Cambyses was put up to auction along with her child. We may gather also
that it was not customary to separate the husband and wife.(5) When the
Israelite Hoshea, for instance, was put up for sale in Assyria in the
reign of Esar-haddon, both his wives as well as his children were bought
by the purchaser along with him. It may be noted that the slave was
“marked,” or “tattooed,” after purchase, like the Babylonian cattle. This
served a double purpose; it indicated his owner and identified him if he
tried to run away.
In a country where slaves were so numerous the wages of the free workmen
were necessarily low. There were, however, two classes of free workmen,
the skilled artisan and the agricultural laborer. The agricultural
character of the Babylonian state, and the fact that so many of the
peasantry possessed land of their own, prevented the agriculturist from
sinking into that condition of serfdom and degradation which the existence
of slavery would otherwise have brought about. Moreover, the flocks and
cattle were tended by Bedâwin and Arameans, who were proud of their
freedom and independence, like the Bedâwin of modern Egypt. In spite,
therefore, of the fact that so much of the labor of the country was
performed by slaves, agriculture was in high esteem and the free
agriculturist was held in honor. Tradition told how Sargon of Akkad, the
hero of ancient Babylonia, had been brought up by Akki the irrigator, and
had himself been a gardener, while the god Tammuz, the bridegroom of
Istar, had tended sheep. Indeed, one of the oldest titles of the
Babylonian kings had been that of “shepherd.”
At the same time there was a tendency for the free laborer to degenerate
into a serf, attached to the soil of the farm on which he and his
forefathers had been settled for centuries. A contract dated in the first
year of Cyrus is an illustration of the fact. It records the lease of a
farm near Sippara, which belonged to the temple of the Sun-god, and was
let to a private individual by the chief priest and the civil governor of
the temple. The farm contained 60 _gur_ of arable land, and the lease of
it included “12 oxen, 8 peasants, 3 iron plough-shares, 4 axes, and
sufficient grain for sowing and for the support of the peasants and the
cattle.” Here the peasants are let along with the land, and presumably
would have been sold with it had the farm been purchased instead of being
let. They were, in fact, irremovable from the soil on which they had been
born. It must, however, be remembered that the farm was the property of a
temple, and it is possible that serfdom was confined to land which had
been consecrated to the gods. In that case the Babylonian serfs would have
corresponded with the Hebrew Nethinim, and might have been originally
prisoners of war.
We learn some details of early agricultural life in Babylonia from the
fragments of an old Sumerian work on farming which formed one of the
text-books in the Babylonian schools. Passages were extracted from it and
translated into Semitic for the use of the students, and difficult words
and expressions were noted and explained. The book seems to have resembled
the “Works and Days” of the Greek poet Hesiod, except that it was not in
verse. We gather from it that the agricultural year began, not with Nisan,
or March, but with Tisri, or September, like the Jewish civil year; at all
events, it was then that the tenure of the farmer began and that his
contract was drawn up with the landlord. It was then, too, after the
harvest, that he took possession of the land, paying his tax to the
government, repairing or making the fences, and ploughing the soil.
His tenure was of various kinds. Sometimes he undertook to farm the land,
paying half the produce of it to the landlord or his agent and providing
the farming implements, the seeds, and the manure himself. Sometimes the
farm was worked on a co-operative system, the owner of the land and the
tenant-farmer entering into partnership with one another and dividing
everything into equal shares. In this case the landlord was required to
furnish carts, oxen, and seeds. At other times the tenant received only a
percentage of the profits—a third, a fourth, a fifth, or a tenth,
according to agreement. He had also to pay the _esrâ_ or tithe.
The most common form of tenure seems to have been that in which a third of
the produce went to the lessor. Two-thirds of the rent, paid either in
dates or in their monetary equivalent, was delivered to the landlord on
the last day of the eighth month, Marchesvan, where the dates had been
gathered and had been laid out to dry. By the terms of the lease the
tenant was called upon to keep the farm buildings in order, and even to
erect them if they did not exist. His own house was separate from that in
which the farm-servants lived, and it was surrounded by a garden, planted
for the most part with date-palms. If the farm-buildings were not built or
were not kept in proper repair a fine was imposed upon him, which in the
case quoted by the writer of the agricultural work was 10 shekels, or 30s.
The tenant was furthermore expected to pay the laborers their wages, and
the landlord had the power of dismissing him if the terms of the contract
were not fulfilled.
The laborers were partly slaves, partly freemen, the freemen hiring
themselves out at so much a month. A contract of the age of Khammurabi,
for instance, states that a certain Ubaru, had thus hired himself out for
thirty days for half a shekel of silver, or 1s. 6d., but he had to offer a
guarantee that he would not leave his master’s service before the
expiration of the month. In other cases it was a slave whose services were
hired from his owner; thus, in a document from Sippara, of the same age as
the preceding, we read: “Rimmon-bani hires Sumi-izitim as a laborer for
his brother, for three months, at a wage of one shekel and a half, 3
measures of grain and 1½ _qa_ of oil. There shall be no withdrawal from
the agreement. Ibni-A-murru and Sikni-Ea have confirmed it. Rimmon-bani
hires the laborer in the presence of Abum-ilu (Abimael), the son of
Ibni-Samas, Ilisu-ibni, the son of Igas-Rimmon, and Arad-Bel, the son of
Akhuwam. (Dated) the first day of Sivan.” The wages evidently went to the
slave, so that he was practically in the position of a free laborer.
When we come down to a later period, we find in contract, dated at the end
of the second year of a Cyrus, Bunene-sar-uzur, “the son of Sum-yukin,”
hired, as a servant for a year, “from the month Nisan to the month Adar,”
for 3 shekels of silver. These were paid beforehand to a third person, and
the payment was duly witnessed and registered. Bunene-sar-uzur was not a
slave, though 9 shillings does not seem much as wages for a whole year.
However, three years later only 1 _pi_, or about 50 quarts of meal, were
given for a month’s supply of food to some men who were digging a canal.
The hours of work doubtless lasted from sunrise to sunset, though we have
a curious document of the Macedonian period, dated in the reign of
Seleucus II., in which certain persons sell the wages they receive for
work done in a temple during the “sixth part” of a day. The sum demanded
was as much as 65 shekels.
The Aramean Bedâwin, who acted as shepherds, or cattle-drovers, probably
received better wages than the native Babylonians. They were less numerous
and were in more request; moreover, it was necessary that they should be
trustworthy. The herds and flocks were left in their charge for weeks
together, on the west bank of the Euphrates, out of sight of the
cultivated fields of Babylonia and exposed to the attacks of marauders
from the desert. Early Babylonian documents give long lists of the
herdsmen and shepherds, and of the number of sheep or oxen for which they
were responsible, and which were the property of some wealthy landowner.
In the seventeenth year of Nabonidos, five of the shepherds received one
shekel and a half of silver, as well as a _gur_, or about 250 quarts, of
grain from the royal granary.
Some of the songs have been preserved to us with which the Babylonian
laborer beguiled his work in the fields. They probably formed part of the
treatise on agriculture which has already been described; at any rate, we
owe their preservation to the educational text-books, in which they have
been embodied, along with Semitic translations of the original Sumerian
text. Here is one which the peasants sang to the oxen as they returned
from the field:
My knees are marching,
My feet are not resting;
Taking no thought,
Drive me home.
In a similar strain the ploughman encouraged his team with the words:
A heifer am I,
To the mule I am yoked.
Where is the cart?
Go, look for grass;
It is high, it is high!
Or again, the oxen, while threshing, would be addressed with the refrain:
Before the oxen,
As they walk,
Thresh out the grain.
Ploughing, harrowing, sowing, reaping, and threshing constituted the chief
events of the agricultural year. The winters were not cold, and the
Babylonian peasant was consequently not obliged to spend a part of the
year indoors shivering over a fire. In fact fuel was scarce in the
country; few trees were grown in it except the palm, and the fruit of the
palm was too valuable to allow it to be cut down. When the ordinary
occupations of the farmer had come to an end, he was expected to look
after his farm buildings and fences, to build walls and clean out the
ditches.
The ditches, indeed, were more important in Babylonia than in most other
parts of the world. Irrigation was as necessary as in Egypt, though for a
different reason. The Chaldean plain had originally been a marsh, and it
required constant supervision to prevent it from being once more inundated
by the waters and made uninhabitable. The embankments which hindered the
overflow of the Euphrates and Tigris and kept them within carefully
regulated channels, the canals which carried off the surplus water and
distributed it over the country, needed continual attention. Each year,
after the rains of the winter, the banks had to be strengthened or re-made
and the beds of the canals cleared out. The irrigator, moreover, was
perpetually at work; the rainy season did not last long, and during the
rest of the year the land was dependent on the water supplied by the
rivers and canals. Irrigation, therefore, formed a large and important
part of the farmers’ work, and the bucket of the irrigator must have been
constantly swinging. Without the irrigator the labors of the farmer would
have been of little avail.