“breeding” practiced in other slaveholding societies. As in LH § 175 – 176 , slaves
(usually male) also married non-slaves (usually female; cf. Westbrook 1998 ). There
has been much debate regarding the legal status of their offspring, even though LH
§ 171 and § 175 clearly imply that legal marriages between a free person and a slave,
regardless of the slave’s sex, produce free children (cf. Mendelsohn 1949 : 56 contra
Diakonoff 1974 : 73 ).
Slave owners occasionally gave or sold sexual access to their slave women to men
outside their household as well: some female slaves worked as prostitutes, particularly
in the Neo-Babylonian period, when brothels were sometimes called “the place where
they know slave women” (Dandamaev 1984 : 132 ff.); but some women may also have
engaged in non-commercial relationships with men who did not own them. A unique
Old Babylonian legal document from Ur (UET 5 , 191 , cited in Diakonoff 1974 )
describes an interesting family dynamic stemming from the sexual relationship between
a slave woman and her master’s brother. Their son was legally recognized by his half-
brothers after their father’s (i.e., the slave owner’s brother’s) death, implying that it
was difficult for free men to legitimize their children by slave women who were
owned by someone else (Diakonoff 1974 : 74 ). An even more complex case is revealed
by several engaging Old Babylonian letters (AbB 1 , 27 and 28 ), in which an occasional
slave trader named Awil-Adad describes his difficulties with Shala-ummi, a slave
woman whom he inherited from his mother. Shala-ummi herself, however, insists
that she rightfully belonged to another man named Belshunu. Here is Diakonoff’s
( 1974 : n. 70 ) synopsis of the letters, which contain many classic elements of Graeco-
Roman farce:
Withdrawing into a room of the upper story of the house, Shala-ummi yelled
incessantly and when Awil-Adad went out of the house, she went down, locked
the outer door and for five days did not let anybody into the house. At last, Awil-
Adad penetrated into the house by force, tied Shala-ummi hand and foot and
thrashed her. However, she found protectors. They ran after Awil-Adad, but in
the scuffle they were defeated.Diakonoff ( 1974 : n. 70 ) argues that Shala-ummi was likely the concubine of Belsunu;
hence her insistence that her late mistress had willed her to him and not to Awil-
Adad.^20
Not surprisingly, slave women often were bought expressly for concubinage. A
well-known Old Babylonian contract (CT 8 , 22 b = UAZP 77 ), records the sale of
a slave woman named Shamash-nuri to a free couple: “to Bunene-abi [the husband]
she is a wife, to Belshunu [the wife] she is a slave. On the day to Belshunu her
mistress, ‘you are not my mistress’ [Shamash-nuri shall] say, she shall cut her hair
and sell her for money” (Mendelsohn 1949 : 9 , 51 ). Several such contracts employ
language that suggests that the slave will act as the second wife to the husband, while
she simultaneously fulfills her obligations as the legal slave of the primary wife (see
references in Westbrook 1998 ). Slave owners often paid above-average prices for female
slaves (Mendelsohn 1949 : 142 , n. 93 ), indicating that they had concubinage in mind.
Indeed, several Neo-Babylonian sale documents go out of their way to describe certain
slave women as “beautiful” (babbanitu) (Dandamaev 1984 : 204 – 205 ).
— Women and gender in Babylonia —