>The University of Chicago will be presenting The Sixth Annual University of Chicago Oriental Institute Seminar. The Seminar will take place on March 5 and 6. The following description of the Seminar was provided by the Oriental Institute:

Slavery is a reality of history that has been attested since the earliest cuneiform documents from Ancient Mesopotamia. This seminar engages new approaches to the study of slaves in the Near East and seeks to open new conversations about this ubiquitous yet complicated topic.

The Oriental Institute has also provided an overview and goals of the symposium. The following is an excerpt of the goals of the Seminar. The excerpt deals with slavery in Mesopotamia:

The Study Slavery in Mesopotamia and the Near East in Brief

Studies to emerge recently and over the course of the twentieth century have already provided a considerable and invaluable basis for undertaking new approaches. In ancient Near Eastern studies, scholars have long examined the economic function of slaves, with emphasis on value, sale, labor, and reinforcement of state structures (for example, see the venerable works of I.M. Diakonoff, I.J. Gelb, and successors). Criticism has been expressed, however, for models of slavery that fail to contextualize slaves in social, political, and cultural contexts. Even as early as the 1950’s, some anthropologists renounced the economy-focused perspectives, declaring them materialist, functionalist, and positivistic, and it was argued that the extraction of slaves from social hierarchies impedes analysis (e.g., Siegel 1945, see also the overviews of Patterson [1970] and Kopytoff [1982]). Prolific legal studies on Mesopotamian and biblical slavery have produced an indispensable corpus on the legal nature of slaves and the terminology of function, status, sale, and legal rights, in ancient Israel and Mesopotamia, such as those undertaken by Mendelsohn (for example 1949) and Chirichigno (1993). A more inclusive comparison of slavery across ancient Mesopotamian states is still needed, but faces difficulty without a common focal point and without the benefits to be gained from comparison with other states that have yielded different types of data.

Recently, a number of important monographs have appeared on medieval and pre-modern Near Eastern slavery that introduce new case studies and approaches, including, to name but a few key examples Marmon (1999), Babaie et al. (2004), and Toledano (1993, 2007). Such contributions reflect a shift away from traditional issues in favor of dynamics and socio-political context. Because scholars of ancient and medieval Near Eastern states have different types of written sources at their disposal while dealing with similar complex states, fruitful analysis results from comparison.

For decades, scholars have been keenly aware of the enormous influence that the Greek, Roman, and New World systems of slavery (the salient monographs of which are too numerous to be listed here) have impressed upon studies of other ancient and pre-modern societies (e.g., Bakir 1951). While the Classical and New World systems shall no longer be considered paradigmatic, such external scholarship still aids in developing methodologies and conducting comparison. Some of the papers in this symposium build on the works of scholars who have explicitly adopted new approaches to slavery in these fields.

Read the overview of the symposium in its entirety by clicking here. The conference will cover three historical periods: The Early Mesopotamian States, The Second and First Millennium Empires, and The Islamic Near East.

For a list of the participants and the schedule as well as the references for the works cited in the excerpt above, visit the web page for the Oriental Institute by clicking here.

The seminar is open to the public. I am planning to attend this seminar and I invite you to be there too.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Ancient Near East, Households, Slaves

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