society, there were laws governing their treatment and their
rights. There are no such laws today because officially slavery no
longer exists!
Hittite male slaves were designated by the logogram ÌR in the
Laws and other texts. This term basically means‘servant’,and
could be applied to anyone who was subordinate to someone
else. Thus the king is the ÌR of the gods, and each of the king’s
subjects, from the highest to the lowest, is an ÌR of the king. Most
commonly, however, the term designates a male slave, and GEME
a female one. Persons reduced to this status could be bought from
slave traders, who may have acquired them on foreign markets or
kidnapped them from foreign lands. But slaves were sometimes of
local origin, and originally free. A person who had committed a
particularly serious crime could be punished by his enslavement
to the victim’s family, though he might have the option of
producing another member of his family to take his place (if one
could be persuaded or coerced). Other persons suffered reduction
to slavery because of their failure to pay a debt. If the debt was
substantial, other members of his family could have been forced to
surrender their freedom as well. But debt-slaves were released
after a few years–though we can’tbesurepreciselyhowlong
they remained slaves, or what if anything they had to do to regain
their freedom.
By far the largest number of unfree persons were the‘booty-
people’ brought back to the homeland as part of the spoils of
conquest by Hittite armies abroad. Officially designated by the
logographic term NAM.RA.MEŠ, some were kept by the king and
recruited into his armies or workforces, or served as temple
personnel, some were allocated to the king’s military officers to
work their estates and some were used to repopulate sparsely
inhabited or depopulated frontier areas of the homeland. In all
cases, they were virtually owned by those to whom they were given,
had no freedom of movement, and were forced to undertake all
duties assigned to them. To all intents and purposes, they too were
slaves, and they too could earn their freedom, sometimes for
services rendered to their masters, and sometimes by accumulating
sufficient property and goods to buy their way out of servitude.
WOMEN,MARRIAGE AND SLAVERY 149