Babylonian wisdom literature disparages sexual relationships between free men and
both female and male slaves, even though the legal texts often anticipate these
relationships, which must have been quite common in practice. In the Kassite or Late
Babylonian Counsels of Wisdom, for example, a father advises his son not to “honor a
slave woman [amtu] in your house,... The house which a slave woman rules, she
disrupts” (translation in Lambert 1960 : 103 ).^21 A more sympathetic portrayal of
slave–master relationships is given in a Standard Babylonian extispicy text: “If the
sibtu [of the liver] is as big as the lobe, a slave will be as important as his master, or
a slave girl [amtu], (since) her master loves her, will be as important as her mistress”
(CT 20 , 39 : 10 ).^22 Slave women thus were considered to be capable of supplanting
free wives within the household. The development of overly close relationships between
owners and slaves therefore jeopardized the cosmological ideal – namely the nuclear
patriarchal family – that is often reflected in literary texts (cf. Bottéro 1992 : 196 – 197 ).
In common practice, of course, most house-born slaves appear to have been treated
very much as members of the household, if low-status ones.
Several Babylonian laws (e.g., LH § 119 , § 146 , NB § 6 ) imply that it was in the
master’s interest to retain slave women who bore him children, whether or not he
acknowledged them legally. LH § 170 – 171 stipulate that a master may legitimate
his slave woman’s children, so that they might divide his estate with his free-born
children, but the woman and her children are to be released even if the children
remain illegitimate. The ideal manumission of slave mothers and their children was,
however, probably an unusual occurrence in reality.^23 Old Babylonian wives were
specifically prohibited from selling slave women who had borne children to their
masters (LH § 146 ); but the sale contract of Shamash-nuri cited above (CT 8 , 22 b)
demonstrates that a wife might negotiate this right in individual cases. Alternatively,
this text and two laws of Hammurabi (CT 8 , 22 b; LH § 146 ; LH § 144 ) jointly indicate
that some non-childbearing wives viewed concubinage as a more favorable alternative
to polygamy or divorce. In fact, wives such as the one described in the Old Babylonian
sale contract (CT 8 , 22 b) sometimes fulfilled their marital obligations by providing
slave women who could bear surrogate children, and these children were therefore
not subject to the usual rules of legitimation (Westgate 1998 ; cf. Postgate 1992 :
105 ).
As in most ancient slaveholding societies, specific sources rarely describe the relation-
ship between a male owner and a slave woman in clear terms or from the woman’s
perspective. The most notable exception is an extraordinary NB court decision (YOS
7 , 66 ) in which the slave woman Nubtâ testifies in the first person: she reports that
she had been dedicated to a temple by her first master, but upon his death, his brother
Shamash-zer-ushabshi took Nubtâ to his own house, where she bore three sons.
Though she does not say so explicitly, the clear implication is that the children were
fathered by her new master. The court confirms, based upon a mark on her hand,
that Nubtâ has been dedicated to the temple; but it places Nubtâ and her sons in
the care of Shamash-zer-ushabshi until he passes away, at which time Nubtâ will
belong exclusively to the temple.^24 The most interesting clause of the document is
one outlining the mutual responsibilities of Nubtâ and of Shamash-zer-ushabshi
during the time that she remains in his household: “While Shamash-zer-ushabshi is
alive, she is to serve him, and he is not to desire (her), and Shamash-zer-ushabshi
is not to sell (her) for silver or marry (her) to a slave” (trans. Dandamaev 1982 : 478 – 9 ).
— Laura D. Steele —