a generous owner, or earning and saving funds as a tenant farmer
of his owner. He might then have been able to afford to‘buy’afree
wife or son-in-law, offering a sufficiently large brideprice to his
prospective parents-in-law to make the proposition attractive to
them. In such a case, parents would be effectively selling their sons
or daughters into slavery. But they might have done so if they
were in straitened circumstances and needed funds raised by
the brideprice to pay off a debt or meet some otherfinancial
commitment. As we have seen, debt-slavery was not unknown in
the Hittite world, the Near Eastern world in general, or indeed in
the Classical world.
But then we must ask what did a slave, or a slave’s father, have
to gain from such an arrangement if the bride or bridegroom,
originally free, was thus also reduced to slave status?
We could avoid this question if an alternative interpretation
of the last part of the two clauses referred to above were accepted:
Instead of‘no-one shall free her/him from slavery’, the translation
‘no-one shall change her/his social status’has also been proposed;
that is to say, free marriage-partners would retain their free status
after marrying slaves– provided the marriage was formalised
by the payment of a brideprice. In this case, it’s likely that a
slave’s descendants by his free wife or his free son-in-law would
be born and remain free, even if he himself retained his slave
status. Throughout the ages, the two greatest aspirations of slaves
have been to die free, and to have children or descendants who are
born free.
I am reminded that in Roman society there were a number of
cases of a male slave marrying a free woman because in Roman law
the offspring of a free woman were always freeborn, regardless
of the father’s status. But much closer to home, we have several
Hammurabic laws which deal with marriages between slaves and
free women. From the Babylonian clauses, it is clear that the free
woman retained her free status and children of the marriage were
born free.^5
As far as the Hittite Laws are concerned, if Hoffner’stranslationof
the two clauses discussed above is correct, I really cannot come up
with any satisfactory motives for the mixed marriages, apart from
152 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA