In part one of a three-part series on slavery, we'll explore the role of slavery in the ancient world.
We'll explore how slaves were treated legally, some moral objections to slavery, and how forced labour powered many ancient civilisations we look up to.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the start of another three-part mini series, on the sensitive but important topic of slavery.
[00:00:29] In part one, in this episode, we are going to talk about slavery in antiquity, in the ancient world.
[00:00:36] Then in part two, we will look at the transatlantic slave trade, the period in history where over ten million Africans were rounded up, sold into slavery, and packed off on boats to the Americas to labour under the most unimaginable of conditions.
[00:00:51] And in our final part, part three, we are going to talk about the unfortunate reality of modern slavery, of the slavery that still exists today.
[00:01:01] Ok then, we have got a lot to be getting on with, so let’s get right into it.
[00:01:07] If you are a software developer, or you have a technical background, you probably have experience working with masters and slaves.
[00:01:18] This refers to a model of communication and control between two parts of a computer system.
[00:01:25] The master controls, it issues commands, and the slave awaits commands and does whatever the master asks it to.
[00:01:34] This master-slave terminology has been in use for over 100 years, with few people batting an eyelid, thinking that it was in any way problematic.
[00:01:46] It made sense; masters and slaves, those with power and those without, putting aside the ethics for a minute, these are familiar concepts to all of us.
[00:01:58] In fact, this master-slave terminology has only recently come under greater scrutiny, with some prominent software companies pushing to change the language.
[00:02:10] Of course, language matters, and using the terms “master” and “slave” reminds us of one of the oldest, cruellest, and most inhumane practices in human history: the practice of reducing another human being to property, removing their freedoms and forcing that person to work for free for the personal gain of someone else.
[00:02:35] Now, perhaps you might think it surprising that it took so long for these terms to be considered inappropriate, but it reminds us of the sad reality that the practice of slavery has been in existence for practically all of humanity, there have been masters and slaves for much longer than there have not been.
[00:02:56] And evidence of slavery goes back as far as the first civilisations.
[00:03:01] Mesopotamia, back in 3500 BC, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India and Ancient China, there is evidence of slavery in all of these civilisations, strongly suggesting that so long as mankind has lived together in “civilisation”, we have engaged in this most uncivilised of behaviour.
[00:03:22] And this is the kind of slavery that we are going to focus on in this episode, slavery in the ancient world.
[00:03:30] Now, the most dedicated listeners among you may remember an episode about slavery from our mini-series on Ancient Rome, where we talked about slaves in Ancient Rome specifically. That was episode 318, and we even made another member-only episode on Spartacus, which was episode number 193, so if you haven’t listened to those and there isn’t enough slavery in this mini-series for your liking, then you can go back and listen to those ones too.
[00:04:00] Anyway, the reason I’m mentioning this is to explain why this mini-series will be slightly lighter on Ancient Roman slaves, and we’ll be focusing elsewhere.
[00:04:12] Now, you may know the phrase, the old adage, “history is written by the victors”.
[00:04:19] It means that historical records are normally told through the eyes and from the perspective of the powerful, those who win wars and conflicts.
[00:04:30] This most certainly holds true when talking about slaves and slavery, especially in the ancient world, as there are virtually no accounts of what slavery was like from the perspective of the slave, no matter what civilisation we are talking about.
[00:04:46] So, we must look elsewhere.
[00:04:49] From accounts in stories and texts we can hypothesise about what life as a slave might have been like, but one of the best early sources that gives us some idea about the lives of slaves, and how slaves fitted into a particular society, come from legal codes, from how slaves were treated in the eyes of the law.
[00:05:13] Going right back to the first legal code in known history, something called the Code of Ur-Nammu, there is evidence of how slaves fitted into society.
[00:05:23] This code comes from Ancient Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq, and archaeologists believe it dates from around 2100 BC, so over 4,000 years ago.
[00:05:38] This code has various references for the punishments for different sorts of crimes, both against normal members of society and against slaves.
[00:05:50] There are specific laws for what happens when slaves marry other slaves, when slaves marry non-slaves, and even what happens to a man who is found guilty of raping a virgin slave.
[00:06:04] Moving forward a few years, a Babylonian legal text from the 18th century BC goes into even greater detail about the treatment of slaves, including what happened to slaves that tried to escape, what happened if a man harmed the slave of another man, and so on.
[00:06:22] The fascinating but disturbing thing about these ancient legal codes is that, despite the fact that slaves were afforded some legal protections, it is abundantly clear that slaves were considered property with a monetary value rather than as human beings, they were legally treated as possessions to protect rather than humans with rights to uphold.
[00:06:48] And this is the case for practically every civilisation for which there are surviving legal codes that reference slavery: slaves were the property of another man, and they should be treated as such, more similar to a house or cow than another human being.
[00:07:07] Now, as to the question of how one became a slave in Babylon or Mesopotamia, or even Ancient Greece, Rome or Egypt, there were broadly five different categories of how someone had the misfortune to wind up as the slave of someone else, and these categories perhaps help us understand how it was possible for human beings to treat their fellow humans with such inhumanity.
[00:07:35] The first, and almost certainly the largest, was by being captured in war. A victorious army might round up men, women and children, and bring them back as slaves.
[00:07:49] The second category is the poor children who were born into slavery. The destiny for the children of two slave parents was, in most cases, to become a slave, so this category of slave may never have known freedom, having been born into slavery and dying a slave.
[00:08:09] The third category is of people who were forced into slavery because of debt. They would either have to sell themselves into slavery to pay off their debts, or they would be sold by their creditors, so this category of slave was a curious one, having previously been a free, normal member of society, and being pushed into slavery because of debt.
[00:08:34] The fourth and penultimate category is semi-related, and that’s people who were forced into slavery as a criminal punishment. This happened in Ancient Rome and Greece, and is referenced in the legal codes of Ancient Mesopotamia, and there are multiple references to it in the Bible as well.
[00:08:55] And the final category is of people who were kidnapped or sold by slave traders, people who would raid towns or villages and capture anyone who could be sold into slavery.
[00:09:06] Now, I’m sure it is difficult for anyone today to imagine how human beings, and entire societies, could have tolerated and embraced slavery for so long, but perhaps the fact that most of the slaves were seen as either being from an enemy state or unknown country, or having committed some crime and needing to pay for it, perhaps this helped people rationalise this behaviour to a certain degree.
[00:09:35] And to state the obvious, we’ve been generalising here; while slavery was mostly tolerated and enshrined in legal codes, there were clearly some people who opposed it and thought it was wrong.
[00:09:48] Cyrus The Great, the 6th century Persian king, is often remembered as having great sympathy for slaves, and is credited with freeing Jewish slaves in Babylon.
[00:10:00] But slavery still existed under Cyrus, he may have shown some compassion towards a particular group of people who were enslaved, but there is no evidence that he thought slavery to be morally wrong.
[00:10:14] Even the great Greek philosophers managed to make slavery fit into their worldview.
[00:10:20] Plato and Aristotle, two of the most well-known and respected philosophers in human history, they both managed to reconcile slavery with a healthy and functioning civilisation.
[00:10:33] In Plato’s case, he saw slavery as part of the natural order of the world. Slavery should exist, Plato wrote, and for it not to exist would be contrary to the natural order of the world.
[00:10:49] The only concession he did make was that some people shouldn’t be enslaved, but those people were, surprise surprise, The Greeks, who he saw as “naturally free”, as they were superior to non-Greeks.
[00:11:03] Plato’s student, Aristotle, was even more vocal in his support of slavery. In his work "Politics," he introduces the concept of the "natural slave" - someone who is naturally suited to be ruled over and lacks the rational capacity to govern themselves.
[00:11:22] He believed that some people were slaves by nature and it was beneficial for them to be ruled by a master.
[00:11:32] Of course, we will see this idea of some people being inferior, and thus destined for slavery, in the transatlantic slave trade, but then it's based more on the colour of one’s skin rather than where they come from.
[00:11:46] Now, Plato and Aristotle, these are two of the most well-known and best-regarded philosophers in history, and there you have them finding a way to rationalise a practice that we today find despicable and inhumane.
[00:12:03] Perhaps you could argue that the fact that they felt that they needed to address the issue of slavery showed some kind of subconscious understanding of the fact that it was morally problematic, but both of these world-famous philosophers were able to look at the reality that their society was split between the free and the enslaved and say, “yes, that makes perfect sense to us”.
[00:12:27] Now, as to “day to day” lives of slaves, and what tasks they were given, clearly it was highly variable.
[00:12:35] But as a general rule of thumb, slaves in antiquity, whether that be in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Rome or Mesopotamia, they were charged with doing all the manual and often back-breaking labour that their masters did not want to do.
[00:12:51] From farming to household labour, construction to working on ships, slaves powered much of the economies of these ancient civilisations which we now revere, which we look up to.
[00:13:03] But, contrary to what many people believe, slaves in the ancient world were not always limited to manual labour.
[00:13:11] Given that being taken as a prisoner of war was a major way in which people became slaves, teachers, accountants and other skilled professionals could find themselves enslaved, and there is plenty of evidence of their new masters making the best possible use of their new slaves’ skills.
[00:13:30] And as you might expect, when slaves were bought and sold, the price was determined by the perceived value of their labour. If someone was old and sick and would be good for some basic manual tasks, they would command a much lower price than a young and healthy slave, who might be put to work in the fields if he was a man, or sent into the household if she was a woman.
[00:13:54] And on this note, the role of female slaves was often a dual one, being forced to act as sexual slaves for their masters.
[00:14:04] Or perhaps even worse, given that slaves were the legal property of their masters, a particularly cruel master could force a female slave into prostitution, and would collect the money that she made as a prostitute. As prostitution was legal in Ancient Rome, there is evidence of this being the fate for some poor female slaves.
[00:14:27] Now, what is abundantly clear is how ingrained slaves were in many ancient societies.
[00:14:34] These economies were based heavily on slavery - the relatively luxurious lives that one might imagine of the Ancient Greeks or Romans or Egyptians, or we could even expand this to Ancient China, these were made possible by the unpaid and enforced labour of the slave underclass.
[00:14:53] It was how the world worked, nobody had known anything different, and even the most well-known philosophers and kings of the ancient world found ways to rationalise it and profess that it was the “natural” order of the world.
[00:15:09] In fact, not owning slaves would put you at a large disadvantage. Having many slaves was often a sign of your high social status, and it also meant that you had a fleet of people who would do your bidding for free.
[00:15:25] It is, of course, hard to find a perfect modern comparison, but if we think of something that is as instrumental to the smooth running of the modern world as slavery was to the ancient world, perhaps we could take the extreme example of electricity.
[00:15:43] If, in 2024, you state that you have a moral objection to electricity, and you decide to not use anything electric because you are concerned about global warming, let’s say, or some other moral problem with using electricity.
[00:15:58] Clearly, this puts you at a large disadvantage to the rest of society, as electricity makes everything easier: it powers our telephones, it heats our water, it cooks our food.
[00:16:11] People used electricity before you were born, people have been using it all your life, of course you’re going to use it too.
[00:16:19] Now, this is obviously an imperfect comparison - electricity has approximately 0% of the same moral problems as slavery - but perhaps it gets us one step closer to understanding why there is so little evidence of people in the ancient world taking issue with slavery, and also helps remind us how pivotal this cruel behaviour was for the successful-functioning of economies from Rome to Alexandria, Babylon to Athens.
[00:16:50] So, to wrap things up, slavery powered the ancient world, and it would only really be with the fall of Rome in the 5th century that this cruel practice started to evolve, at least.
[00:17:03] Die out it would not, but for a thousand years or so, at least in Europe, its nature changed, and the worst of the barbarity was over.
[00:17:14] Then, like a phoenix from the ashes, in the 16th century slavery would return in an industrialised and factory-like manner, go on for hundreds of years, and leave a mark that still defines much of the world today.
[00:17:29] That is the translatlantic Slave Trade, and that is what we’ll cover in part two of this mini-series.
[00:17:38] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Slavery in the Ancient World.
[00:17:43] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and that it has laid some groundwork for what is to come in parts two and parts three of this mini-series.
[00:17:52] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:55] Why do you think so many people were able to justify this for so long?
[00:17:59] Are there any similar behaviours in the modern world that you think historians will look back on in a similar way?
[00:18:06] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:10] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:17] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:22] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the start of another three-part mini series, on the sensitive but important topic of slavery.
[00:00:29] In part one, in this episode, we are going to talk about slavery in antiquity, in the ancient world.
[00:00:36] Then in part two, we will look at the transatlantic slave trade, the period in history where over ten million Africans were rounded up, sold into slavery, and packed off on boats to the Americas to labour under the most unimaginable of conditions.
[00:00:51] And in our final part, part three, we are going to talk about the unfortunate reality of modern slavery, of the slavery that still exists today.
[00:01:01] Ok then, we have got a lot to be getting on with, so let’s get right into it.
[00:01:07] If you are a software developer, or you have a technical background, you probably have experience working with masters and slaves.
[00:01:18] This refers to a model of communication and control between two parts of a computer system.
[00:01:25] The master controls, it issues commands, and the slave awaits commands and does whatever the master asks it to.
[00:01:34] This master-slave terminology has been in use for over 100 years, with few people batting an eyelid, thinking that it was in any way problematic.
[00:01:46] It made sense; masters and slaves, those with power and those without, putting aside the ethics for a minute, these are familiar concepts to all of us.
[00:01:58] In fact, this master-slave terminology has only recently come under greater scrutiny, with some prominent software companies pushing to change the language.
[00:02:10] Of course, language matters, and using the terms “master” and “slave” reminds us of one of the oldest, cruellest, and most inhumane practices in human history: the practice of reducing another human being to property, removing their freedoms and forcing that person to work for free for the personal gain of someone else.
[00:02:35] Now, perhaps you might think it surprising that it took so long for these terms to be considered inappropriate, but it reminds us of the sad reality that the practice of slavery has been in existence for practically all of humanity, there have been masters and slaves for much longer than there have not been.
[00:02:56] And evidence of slavery goes back as far as the first civilisations.
[00:03:01] Mesopotamia, back in 3500 BC, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India and Ancient China, there is evidence of slavery in all of these civilisations, strongly suggesting that so long as mankind has lived together in “civilisation”, we have engaged in this most uncivilised of behaviour.
[00:03:22] And this is the kind of slavery that we are going to focus on in this episode, slavery in the ancient world.
[00:03:30] Now, the most dedicated listeners among you may remember an episode about slavery from our mini-series on Ancient Rome, where we talked about slaves in Ancient Rome specifically. That was episode 318, and we even made another member-only episode on Spartacus, which was episode number 193, so if you haven’t listened to those and there isn’t enough slavery in this mini-series for your liking, then you can go back and listen to those ones too.
[00:04:00] Anyway, the reason I’m mentioning this is to explain why this mini-series will be slightly lighter on Ancient Roman slaves, and we’ll be focusing elsewhere.
[00:04:12] Now, you may know the phrase, the old adage, “history is written by the victors”.
[00:04:19] It means that historical records are normally told through the eyes and from the perspective of the powerful, those who win wars and conflicts.
[00:04:30] This most certainly holds true when talking about slaves and slavery, especially in the ancient world, as there are virtually no accounts of what slavery was like from the perspective of the slave, no matter what civilisation we are talking about.
[00:04:46] So, we must look elsewhere.
[00:04:49] From accounts in stories and texts we can hypothesise about what life as a slave might have been like, but one of the best early sources that gives us some idea about the lives of slaves, and how slaves fitted into a particular society, come from legal codes, from how slaves were treated in the eyes of the law.
[00:05:13] Going right back to the first legal code in known history, something called the Code of Ur-Nammu, there is evidence of how slaves fitted into society.
[00:05:23] This code comes from Ancient Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq, and archaeologists believe it dates from around 2100 BC, so over 4,000 years ago.
[00:05:38] This code has various references for the punishments for different sorts of crimes, both against normal members of society and against slaves.
[00:05:50] There are specific laws for what happens when slaves marry other slaves, when slaves marry non-slaves, and even what happens to a man who is found guilty of raping a virgin slave.
[00:06:04] Moving forward a few years, a Babylonian legal text from the 18th century BC goes into even greater detail about the treatment of slaves, including what happened to slaves that tried to escape, what happened if a man harmed the slave of another man, and so on.
[00:06:22] The fascinating but disturbing thing about these ancient legal codes is that, despite the fact that slaves were afforded some legal protections, it is abundantly clear that slaves were considered property with a monetary value rather than as human beings, they were legally treated as possessions to protect rather than humans with rights to uphold.
[00:06:48] And this is the case for practically every civilisation for which there are surviving legal codes that reference slavery: slaves were the property of another man, and they should be treated as such, more similar to a house or cow than another human being.
[00:07:07] Now, as to the question of how one became a slave in Babylon or Mesopotamia, or even Ancient Greece, Rome or Egypt, there were broadly five different categories of how someone had the misfortune to wind up as the slave of someone else, and these categories perhaps help us understand how it was possible for human beings to treat their fellow humans with such inhumanity.
[00:07:35] The first, and almost certainly the largest, was by being captured in war. A victorious army might round up men, women and children, and bring them back as slaves.
[00:07:49] The second category is the poor children who were born into slavery. The destiny for the children of two slave parents was, in most cases, to become a slave, so this category of slave may never have known freedom, having been born into slavery and dying a slave.
[00:08:09] The third category is of people who were forced into slavery because of debt. They would either have to sell themselves into slavery to pay off their debts, or they would be sold by their creditors, so this category of slave was a curious one, having previously been a free, normal member of society, and being pushed into slavery because of debt.
[00:08:34] The fourth and penultimate category is semi-related, and that’s people who were forced into slavery as a criminal punishment. This happened in Ancient Rome and Greece, and is referenced in the legal codes of Ancient Mesopotamia, and there are multiple references to it in the Bible as well.
[00:08:55] And the final category is of people who were kidnapped or sold by slave traders, people who would raid towns or villages and capture anyone who could be sold into slavery.
[00:09:06] Now, I’m sure it is difficult for anyone today to imagine how human beings, and entire societies, could have tolerated and embraced slavery for so long, but perhaps the fact that most of the slaves were seen as either being from an enemy state or unknown country, or having committed some crime and needing to pay for it, perhaps this helped people rationalise this behaviour to a certain degree.
[00:09:35] And to state the obvious, we’ve been generalising here; while slavery was mostly tolerated and enshrined in legal codes, there were clearly some people who opposed it and thought it was wrong.
[00:09:48] Cyrus The Great, the 6th century Persian king, is often remembered as having great sympathy for slaves, and is credited with freeing Jewish slaves in Babylon.
[00:10:00] But slavery still existed under Cyrus, he may have shown some compassion towards a particular group of people who were enslaved, but there is no evidence that he thought slavery to be morally wrong.
[00:10:14] Even the great Greek philosophers managed to make slavery fit into their worldview.
[00:10:20] Plato and Aristotle, two of the most well-known and respected philosophers in human history, they both managed to reconcile slavery with a healthy and functioning civilisation.
[00:10:33] In Plato’s case, he saw slavery as part of the natural order of the world. Slavery should exist, Plato wrote, and for it not to exist would be contrary to the natural order of the world.
[00:10:49] The only concession he did make was that some people shouldn’t be enslaved, but those people were, surprise surprise, The Greeks, who he saw as “naturally free”, as they were superior to non-Greeks.
[00:11:03] Plato’s student, Aristotle, was even more vocal in his support of slavery. In his work "Politics," he introduces the concept of the "natural slave" - someone who is naturally suited to be ruled over and lacks the rational capacity to govern themselves.
[00:11:22] He believed that some people were slaves by nature and it was beneficial for them to be ruled by a master.
[00:11:32] Of course, we will see this idea of some people being inferior, and thus destined for slavery, in the transatlantic slave trade, but then it's based more on the colour of one’s skin rather than where they come from.
[00:11:46] Now, Plato and Aristotle, these are two of the most well-known and best-regarded philosophers in history, and there you have them finding a way to rationalise a practice that we today find despicable and inhumane.
[00:12:03] Perhaps you could argue that the fact that they felt that they needed to address the issue of slavery showed some kind of subconscious understanding of the fact that it was morally problematic, but both of these world-famous philosophers were able to look at the reality that their society was split between the free and the enslaved and say, “yes, that makes perfect sense to us”.
[00:12:27] Now, as to “day to day” lives of slaves, and what tasks they were given, clearly it was highly variable.
[00:12:35] But as a general rule of thumb, slaves in antiquity, whether that be in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Rome or Mesopotamia, they were charged with doing all the manual and often back-breaking labour that their masters did not want to do.
[00:12:51] From farming to household labour, construction to working on ships, slaves powered much of the economies of these ancient civilisations which we now revere, which we look up to.
[00:13:03] But, contrary to what many people believe, slaves in the ancient world were not always limited to manual labour.
[00:13:11] Given that being taken as a prisoner of war was a major way in which people became slaves, teachers, accountants and other skilled professionals could find themselves enslaved, and there is plenty of evidence of their new masters making the best possible use of their new slaves’ skills.
[00:13:30] And as you might expect, when slaves were bought and sold, the price was determined by the perceived value of their labour. If someone was old and sick and would be good for some basic manual tasks, they would command a much lower price than a young and healthy slave, who might be put to work in the fields if he was a man, or sent into the household if she was a woman.
[00:13:54] And on this note, the role of female slaves was often a dual one, being forced to act as sexual slaves for their masters.
[00:14:04] Or perhaps even worse, given that slaves were the legal property of their masters, a particularly cruel master could force a female slave into prostitution, and would collect the money that she made as a prostitute. As prostitution was legal in Ancient Rome, there is evidence of this being the fate for some poor female slaves.
[00:14:27] Now, what is abundantly clear is how ingrained slaves were in many ancient societies.
[00:14:34] These economies were based heavily on slavery - the relatively luxurious lives that one might imagine of the Ancient Greeks or Romans or Egyptians, or we could even expand this to Ancient China, these were made possible by the unpaid and enforced labour of the slave underclass.
[00:14:53] It was how the world worked, nobody had known anything different, and even the most well-known philosophers and kings of the ancient world found ways to rationalise it and profess that it was the “natural” order of the world.
[00:15:09] In fact, not owning slaves would put you at a large disadvantage. Having many slaves was often a sign of your high social status, and it also meant that you had a fleet of people who would do your bidding for free.
[00:15:25] It is, of course, hard to find a perfect modern comparison, but if we think of something that is as instrumental to the smooth running of the modern world as slavery was to the ancient world, perhaps we could take the extreme example of electricity.
[00:15:43] If, in 2024, you state that you have a moral objection to electricity, and you decide to not use anything electric because you are concerned about global warming, let’s say, or some other moral problem with using electricity.
[00:15:58] Clearly, this puts you at a large disadvantage to the rest of society, as electricity makes everything easier: it powers our telephones, it heats our water, it cooks our food.
[00:16:11] People used electricity before you were born, people have been using it all your life, of course you’re going to use it too.
[00:16:19] Now, this is obviously an imperfect comparison - electricity has approximately 0% of the same moral problems as slavery - but perhaps it gets us one step closer to understanding why there is so little evidence of people in the ancient world taking issue with slavery, and also helps remind us how pivotal this cruel behaviour was for the successful-functioning of economies from Rome to Alexandria, Babylon to Athens.
[00:16:50] So, to wrap things up, slavery powered the ancient world, and it would only really be with the fall of Rome in the 5th century that this cruel practice started to evolve, at least.
[00:17:03] Die out it would not, but for a thousand years or so, at least in Europe, its nature changed, and the worst of the barbarity was over.
[00:17:14] Then, like a phoenix from the ashes, in the 16th century slavery would return in an industrialised and factory-like manner, go on for hundreds of years, and leave a mark that still defines much of the world today.
[00:17:29] That is the translatlantic Slave Trade, and that is what we’ll cover in part two of this mini-series.
[00:17:38] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Slavery in the Ancient World.
[00:17:43] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and that it has laid some groundwork for what is to come in parts two and parts three of this mini-series.
[00:17:52] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:55] Why do you think so many people were able to justify this for so long?
[00:17:59] Are there any similar behaviours in the modern world that you think historians will look back on in a similar way?
[00:18:06] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:10] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:17] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:22] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the start of another three-part mini series, on the sensitive but important topic of slavery.
[00:00:29] In part one, in this episode, we are going to talk about slavery in antiquity, in the ancient world.
[00:00:36] Then in part two, we will look at the transatlantic slave trade, the period in history where over ten million Africans were rounded up, sold into slavery, and packed off on boats to the Americas to labour under the most unimaginable of conditions.
[00:00:51] And in our final part, part three, we are going to talk about the unfortunate reality of modern slavery, of the slavery that still exists today.
[00:01:01] Ok then, we have got a lot to be getting on with, so let’s get right into it.
[00:01:07] If you are a software developer, or you have a technical background, you probably have experience working with masters and slaves.
[00:01:18] This refers to a model of communication and control between two parts of a computer system.
[00:01:25] The master controls, it issues commands, and the slave awaits commands and does whatever the master asks it to.
[00:01:34] This master-slave terminology has been in use for over 100 years, with few people batting an eyelid, thinking that it was in any way problematic.
[00:01:46] It made sense; masters and slaves, those with power and those without, putting aside the ethics for a minute, these are familiar concepts to all of us.
[00:01:58] In fact, this master-slave terminology has only recently come under greater scrutiny, with some prominent software companies pushing to change the language.
[00:02:10] Of course, language matters, and using the terms “master” and “slave” reminds us of one of the oldest, cruellest, and most inhumane practices in human history: the practice of reducing another human being to property, removing their freedoms and forcing that person to work for free for the personal gain of someone else.
[00:02:35] Now, perhaps you might think it surprising that it took so long for these terms to be considered inappropriate, but it reminds us of the sad reality that the practice of slavery has been in existence for practically all of humanity, there have been masters and slaves for much longer than there have not been.
[00:02:56] And evidence of slavery goes back as far as the first civilisations.
[00:03:01] Mesopotamia, back in 3500 BC, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India and Ancient China, there is evidence of slavery in all of these civilisations, strongly suggesting that so long as mankind has lived together in “civilisation”, we have engaged in this most uncivilised of behaviour.
[00:03:22] And this is the kind of slavery that we are going to focus on in this episode, slavery in the ancient world.
[00:03:30] Now, the most dedicated listeners among you may remember an episode about slavery from our mini-series on Ancient Rome, where we talked about slaves in Ancient Rome specifically. That was episode 318, and we even made another member-only episode on Spartacus, which was episode number 193, so if you haven’t listened to those and there isn’t enough slavery in this mini-series for your liking, then you can go back and listen to those ones too.
[00:04:00] Anyway, the reason I’m mentioning this is to explain why this mini-series will be slightly lighter on Ancient Roman slaves, and we’ll be focusing elsewhere.
[00:04:12] Now, you may know the phrase, the old adage, “history is written by the victors”.
[00:04:19] It means that historical records are normally told through the eyes and from the perspective of the powerful, those who win wars and conflicts.
[00:04:30] This most certainly holds true when talking about slaves and slavery, especially in the ancient world, as there are virtually no accounts of what slavery was like from the perspective of the slave, no matter what civilisation we are talking about.
[00:04:46] So, we must look elsewhere.
[00:04:49] From accounts in stories and texts we can hypothesise about what life as a slave might have been like, but one of the best early sources that gives us some idea about the lives of slaves, and how slaves fitted into a particular society, come from legal codes, from how slaves were treated in the eyes of the law.
[00:05:13] Going right back to the first legal code in known history, something called the Code of Ur-Nammu, there is evidence of how slaves fitted into society.
[00:05:23] This code comes from Ancient Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq, and archaeologists believe it dates from around 2100 BC, so over 4,000 years ago.
[00:05:38] This code has various references for the punishments for different sorts of crimes, both against normal members of society and against slaves.
[00:05:50] There are specific laws for what happens when slaves marry other slaves, when slaves marry non-slaves, and even what happens to a man who is found guilty of raping a virgin slave.
[00:06:04] Moving forward a few years, a Babylonian legal text from the 18th century BC goes into even greater detail about the treatment of slaves, including what happened to slaves that tried to escape, what happened if a man harmed the slave of another man, and so on.
[00:06:22] The fascinating but disturbing thing about these ancient legal codes is that, despite the fact that slaves were afforded some legal protections, it is abundantly clear that slaves were considered property with a monetary value rather than as human beings, they were legally treated as possessions to protect rather than humans with rights to uphold.
[00:06:48] And this is the case for practically every civilisation for which there are surviving legal codes that reference slavery: slaves were the property of another man, and they should be treated as such, more similar to a house or cow than another human being.
[00:07:07] Now, as to the question of how one became a slave in Babylon or Mesopotamia, or even Ancient Greece, Rome or Egypt, there were broadly five different categories of how someone had the misfortune to wind up as the slave of someone else, and these categories perhaps help us understand how it was possible for human beings to treat their fellow humans with such inhumanity.
[00:07:35] The first, and almost certainly the largest, was by being captured in war. A victorious army might round up men, women and children, and bring them back as slaves.
[00:07:49] The second category is the poor children who were born into slavery. The destiny for the children of two slave parents was, in most cases, to become a slave, so this category of slave may never have known freedom, having been born into slavery and dying a slave.
[00:08:09] The third category is of people who were forced into slavery because of debt. They would either have to sell themselves into slavery to pay off their debts, or they would be sold by their creditors, so this category of slave was a curious one, having previously been a free, normal member of society, and being pushed into slavery because of debt.
[00:08:34] The fourth and penultimate category is semi-related, and that’s people who were forced into slavery as a criminal punishment. This happened in Ancient Rome and Greece, and is referenced in the legal codes of Ancient Mesopotamia, and there are multiple references to it in the Bible as well.
[00:08:55] And the final category is of people who were kidnapped or sold by slave traders, people who would raid towns or villages and capture anyone who could be sold into slavery.
[00:09:06] Now, I’m sure it is difficult for anyone today to imagine how human beings, and entire societies, could have tolerated and embraced slavery for so long, but perhaps the fact that most of the slaves were seen as either being from an enemy state or unknown country, or having committed some crime and needing to pay for it, perhaps this helped people rationalise this behaviour to a certain degree.
[00:09:35] And to state the obvious, we’ve been generalising here; while slavery was mostly tolerated and enshrined in legal codes, there were clearly some people who opposed it and thought it was wrong.
[00:09:48] Cyrus The Great, the 6th century Persian king, is often remembered as having great sympathy for slaves, and is credited with freeing Jewish slaves in Babylon.
[00:10:00] But slavery still existed under Cyrus, he may have shown some compassion towards a particular group of people who were enslaved, but there is no evidence that he thought slavery to be morally wrong.
[00:10:14] Even the great Greek philosophers managed to make slavery fit into their worldview.
[00:10:20] Plato and Aristotle, two of the most well-known and respected philosophers in human history, they both managed to reconcile slavery with a healthy and functioning civilisation.
[00:10:33] In Plato’s case, he saw slavery as part of the natural order of the world. Slavery should exist, Plato wrote, and for it not to exist would be contrary to the natural order of the world.
[00:10:49] The only concession he did make was that some people shouldn’t be enslaved, but those people were, surprise surprise, The Greeks, who he saw as “naturally free”, as they were superior to non-Greeks.
[00:11:03] Plato’s student, Aristotle, was even more vocal in his support of slavery. In his work "Politics," he introduces the concept of the "natural slave" - someone who is naturally suited to be ruled over and lacks the rational capacity to govern themselves.
[00:11:22] He believed that some people were slaves by nature and it was beneficial for them to be ruled by a master.
[00:11:32] Of course, we will see this idea of some people being inferior, and thus destined for slavery, in the transatlantic slave trade, but then it's based more on the colour of one’s skin rather than where they come from.
[00:11:46] Now, Plato and Aristotle, these are two of the most well-known and best-regarded philosophers in history, and there you have them finding a way to rationalise a practice that we today find despicable and inhumane.
[00:12:03] Perhaps you could argue that the fact that they felt that they needed to address the issue of slavery showed some kind of subconscious understanding of the fact that it was morally problematic, but both of these world-famous philosophers were able to look at the reality that their society was split between the free and the enslaved and say, “yes, that makes perfect sense to us”.
[00:12:27] Now, as to “day to day” lives of slaves, and what tasks they were given, clearly it was highly variable.
[00:12:35] But as a general rule of thumb, slaves in antiquity, whether that be in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Rome or Mesopotamia, they were charged with doing all the manual and often back-breaking labour that their masters did not want to do.
[00:12:51] From farming to household labour, construction to working on ships, slaves powered much of the economies of these ancient civilisations which we now revere, which we look up to.
[00:13:03] But, contrary to what many people believe, slaves in the ancient world were not always limited to manual labour.
[00:13:11] Given that being taken as a prisoner of war was a major way in which people became slaves, teachers, accountants and other skilled professionals could find themselves enslaved, and there is plenty of evidence of their new masters making the best possible use of their new slaves’ skills.
[00:13:30] And as you might expect, when slaves were bought and sold, the price was determined by the perceived value of their labour. If someone was old and sick and would be good for some basic manual tasks, they would command a much lower price than a young and healthy slave, who might be put to work in the fields if he was a man, or sent into the household if she was a woman.
[00:13:54] And on this note, the role of female slaves was often a dual one, being forced to act as sexual slaves for their masters.
[00:14:04] Or perhaps even worse, given that slaves were the legal property of their masters, a particularly cruel master could force a female slave into prostitution, and would collect the money that she made as a prostitute. As prostitution was legal in Ancient Rome, there is evidence of this being the fate for some poor female slaves.
[00:14:27] Now, what is abundantly clear is how ingrained slaves were in many ancient societies.
[00:14:34] These economies were based heavily on slavery - the relatively luxurious lives that one might imagine of the Ancient Greeks or Romans or Egyptians, or we could even expand this to Ancient China, these were made possible by the unpaid and enforced labour of the slave underclass.
[00:14:53] It was how the world worked, nobody had known anything different, and even the most well-known philosophers and kings of the ancient world found ways to rationalise it and profess that it was the “natural” order of the world.
[00:15:09] In fact, not owning slaves would put you at a large disadvantage. Having many slaves was often a sign of your high social status, and it also meant that you had a fleet of people who would do your bidding for free.
[00:15:25] It is, of course, hard to find a perfect modern comparison, but if we think of something that is as instrumental to the smooth running of the modern world as slavery was to the ancient world, perhaps we could take the extreme example of electricity.
[00:15:43] If, in 2024, you state that you have a moral objection to electricity, and you decide to not use anything electric because you are concerned about global warming, let’s say, or some other moral problem with using electricity.
[00:15:58] Clearly, this puts you at a large disadvantage to the rest of society, as electricity makes everything easier: it powers our telephones, it heats our water, it cooks our food.
[00:16:11] People used electricity before you were born, people have been using it all your life, of course you’re going to use it too.
[00:16:19] Now, this is obviously an imperfect comparison - electricity has approximately 0% of the same moral problems as slavery - but perhaps it gets us one step closer to understanding why there is so little evidence of people in the ancient world taking issue with slavery, and also helps remind us how pivotal this cruel behaviour was for the successful-functioning of economies from Rome to Alexandria, Babylon to Athens.
[00:16:50] So, to wrap things up, slavery powered the ancient world, and it would only really be with the fall of Rome in the 5th century that this cruel practice started to evolve, at least.
[00:17:03] Die out it would not, but for a thousand years or so, at least in Europe, its nature changed, and the worst of the barbarity was over.
[00:17:14] Then, like a phoenix from the ashes, in the 16th century slavery would return in an industrialised and factory-like manner, go on for hundreds of years, and leave a mark that still defines much of the world today.
[00:17:29] That is the translatlantic Slave Trade, and that is what we’ll cover in part two of this mini-series.
[00:17:38] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Slavery in the Ancient World.
[00:17:43] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and that it has laid some groundwork for what is to come in parts two and parts three of this mini-series.
[00:17:52] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:55] Why do you think so many people were able to justify this for so long?
[00:17:59] Are there any similar behaviours in the modern world that you think historians will look back on in a similar way?
[00:18:06] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:10] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:17] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:22] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
