Life at the bottom of Babylonian society: Servile laborers at Nippur in the 14TH and 13TH centuries B.C.

摘要

The public servile labor force at Nippur can be identified by standard Middle Babylonian markers of sex-age class and physical condition as well as by other distinctive designations (e. g., qinnu, am ilutu) in a corpus of more than five hundred tablets and fragments dating between 1359 and 1224 B.C. This collection of administrative texts, legal documents, and letters partially illuminates for us several key features of this group, including aspects of its demographic composition, its family and household organization, its occupations, and the administrative structure concerned with maintaining, tracking, and controlling the laborers.;This servile population, numbering in the thousands, has been investigated with traditional philological analysis of the texts as well as with the application of quantitative methods, historical demography, and historical-ethnographic comparisons. Descriptive statistics and sex ratio indicate that the environment of the laboring population favored males over females and that, although its adult sex ratio is close to that of other premodern societies, its all-age sex ratio is consonant with that of a recently established slave population. Likewise, patterns of family and household differ notably from those of other premodern populations. The high percentage of single mothers and female heads of household shows that women played an unusually prominent role in these servile families.;Individual workers could be assigned to a location, to a large institution, to a household, or to a private individual. Occupations listed in the rosters indicate that laborers worked in the care and management of animals, in textile production, and in food preparation, among other tasks. Significant numbers of the workers (mostly males with no family ties) fled the servile system---a problematic situation for officials because the servile population was unable to sustain its size through natural reproduction. Most runaways were successful in their escape attempts; but some were recaptured, placed in prison, and eventually reassigned to a new master.