This statuette of a nursing mother having her hair done captures an ordinary moment of a civilization long gone by. Dating between 1981-1500 BCE, it comes from the world’s oldest urban civilizations in Ancient Mesopotamia. It was in among peoples in this era that slavery was first documented. And among the first types of people to be enslaved were women and children.
There were two main ways the earliest Mesopotamian people became slaves — they were taken as prisoners of war, or they were forced into it because of their family’s debt or crimes. Children as young as age five could be put to work. The famous Babylonian “Code of Hammurabi” from the 18th century BCE states that “if an obligation is outstanding against a man and he sells his wife, his son, or his daughter or gives (them) into debt service, they shall perform service in the house of their buyer or the one who holds them in debt service for three years; their release shall be secured in the fourth year”.
Sources: Image Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The children of slaves in early Mesopotamian laws and edicts,” by John Nicholas Reid, _Revue d’Assyrologie et d’archéologie orientale_, Vol 111 (2017), pp 9-23.
