Slavery in antiquity

Slavery in the ancient world, from the earliest known recorded evidence in Sumer to the pre-medieval Antiquity Mediterranean cultures, comprised a mixture of debt-slavery, slavery as a punishment for crime, and the enslavement of prisoners of war. Masters could free slaves, and in many cases such freedmen went on to rise to positions of power. This would include those children born into slavery but who were actually the children of the master of the house. The slave master would ensure that his children were not condemned to a life of slavery. The institution of slavery condemned a majority of slaves to agricultural and industrial labor and they lived hard lives. In many of these cultures slaves formed a very large part of the economy, and in particular the Roman Empire and some of the Greek poleis built a large part of their wealth on slaves acquired through conquest. The Code of Ur-Nammu, the oldest known surviving law code, written c. 2100 – 2050 BCE, includes laws relating to slaves during the Third Dynasty of Ur in Sumerian Mesopotamia. It states that a slave that marries cannot be forced to leave the household and that the bounty for returning a slave who has escaped the city is two shekels. It reveals that there were at least two major social strata at the time: those free and those enslaved. The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, written between 1755–1750 BC, also distinguishes between the free and the enslaved. Like the Code of Ur-Nammu, it offers a reward of two shekels for returning a fugitive slave, but unlike the other code, states that harbouring or assisting a fugitive was punishable by death. Slaves were either bought abroad, taken as prisoners in war, or enslaved as a punishment for being in debt or committing a crime. The Code of Hammurabi states that if a slave is purchased and within one month develops epilepsy ("benu-disease") then the purchaser can return the slave and receive a full refund. The code has laws relating to the purchase of slaves abroad. Numerous contracts for the sale of slaves survive.