332 DAVID M. LEWIS
ancient world. Any notion that this technology is merely an artistic device and
was not adopted by slave traders cannot be seriously credited.
Proceeding top to bottom: in image (a) an African is shown bound by
the neck (Egypt, eighteenth dynasty, St. Louis Art Museum USA); (b) shows
a coffle of Nubian captives depicted on Ramses II’s temple at Abu Simbel
(thirteenth century BCE). An almost identical operation is depicted on the
reliefs from the door-fittings of the ninth-century Assyrian king Shalmaneser
III (c). The closest example to our period is the image of captive rulers being
led before the Persian king Darius I on the Behistun Inscription (d, late sixth
century BCE). Similar images can be found across the Near Eastern world
on Achaemenid seals.^79 But this was not just an eastern practice: physical
remains of neck-chains have been excavated in Wales dating to shortly before
the Roman invasion.^80 Perhaps the most well-known image comes from the
gravestone of a slave trader named Aulus Kapreillios Timotheus, who operated
in the Strymon area in the first century CE. In this depiction, the slave trader
leads a coffle of eight slaves (e). The same basic method of overland transport
was used in the U.S. South. Its widespread use and long popularity owe to
several advantages: first, it is cheap. Slaves moved this way not only require no
vehicular transport, but can also be used as porters for other goods. Secondly,
it requires few individuals to guard the slaves relative to the number of slaves
in the coffle. Thirdly, it is highly mobile, and unlike other forms of overland
transport does not need to move over purpose-built roads. It is impossible to
determine how many slaves would normally make up a coffle: Bodel^81 suggests
that numbers in antiquity might have been comparable to the thirty to forty
average in the United States; interestingly, this does fit with the group of thirty
slaves being led away after the sack of Olynthus in Dem. 19.305–306, but it
would be a mistake to generalise confidently from this lone figure.NOTES
1 For the term see Scheidel 2008 : 105, note 1.
2 Sekunda 1985 ; 1988 ; 1991 ; Dusinberre 2013, 32–113.
3 Shaw 1990 : 207–17, Dusinberre 2013, 46–7.
4 Xen. Hell. 3.1.13; An. 1.2.1; 2.5.13; 3.2.23; Mem. 3.5.26; Hell.Oxy. 21. 1 ; A r r. Anab. 1.25, Strattis
fr. 36 K-A.
5 I discuss this more fully in Lewis 2011. Briefly: a great deal of evidence for the ethnic origins
of slaves comes in the form of names from Attica. These are problematic, but not in the ways
most scholars have thought. These names appear in literary generalizations and a number
of epigraphic texts; the latter, like archaeological test pits, provide us with several random
samples which free us from the dangers of generalizing from a single sample; the ethnic
groups attested therein show some degree of consistency, with Thracian and Phrygian eth-
nics as the most significant. This evidence affords us a crude index of the more important
non-Greek suppliers of slaves to Attica, but does not permit us to calculate statistics nor to
observe fluctuations in supply diachronically.
6 In a recent study of Athenian slave names, Vlassopoulos 2010 shows that the Phrygian ethnic
name Manes is statistically the most common appellation; his findings support the argument