A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium by Chris Harman Read Free Book Online

about 3000 BC. The sign for ‘male slave’ occurs slightly later. This is followed by the first appearance of different terms distinguishing ‘full, free citizen’ and ‘commoner or subordinate status’. 55 By this time ‘evidence for class differentiation is all too clear’. In ‘ancient Eshnunna the larger houses along the main roads…often occupied 200 square metres or more of floor area. The greater number of houses, on the other hand, were considerably smaller…having access to the arterial roads only by twisting, narrow alleys…Many do not exceed 50 square metres in total’. 56 Adams continues:
    At the bottom of the social hierarchy were slaves, individuals who could be bought and sold…One tablet alone lists 205 slave girls and children who were probably employed in a centralised weaving establishment…Other women were known to be engaged in milling, brewing, cooking…Male slaves generally are referred to as the ‘blind ones’ and apparently were employed in gardening operations. 57
    The emergence of civilisation is usually thought of as one of the great steps forward in human history—indeed, as the step that separates history from prehistory. But it was accompanied wherever it happened by other, negative changes: by the development for the first time of class divisions, with a privileged minority living off the labour of everyone else, and by the setting up of bodies of armed men, of soldiers and secret police—in other words, a state machine—so as to enforce this minority’s rule on the rest of society. The existence of slavery, the physical ownership of some people by others, is palpable proof of this development, not only in Mesopotamia but in many other early civilisations. It shows how far social differentiation had gone since the days of kin-based societies and village communities. But slavery was of relatively minor significance in providing for the early Mesopotamian ruling class. Much more important was the exploitation of peasants and other labourers forced to provide labour to the temples and the upper classes. There were groups such as the ‘ shub-lugals ’—‘a group with a reduced status and degree of freedom, reported as labouring in gangs on demesne lands of the Bau temple or estate, pulling ships, digging irrigation canals, and serving as a nucleus of the city militia.’ They received subsistence rations during four months of the year in return for labour service and were ‘allotted small plots of…land from holdings of the temple or estate’. 58 Such groups had once been independent peasant households, but had been forced into dependency on more powerful groupings, especially the temple.
    Gordon Childe summarises an edict from the city of Lagash of around 2500 BC which describes how ‘favoured priests practised various forms of extortion (overcharging for burials, for instance) and treated the god’s (ie the community’s) land, cattle and servants as their own private property and personal slaves. “The high priest came into the garden of the poor and took wood therefrom…If a great man’s house adjoined that of an ordinary citizen”, the former might annex the humble dwelling without paying any proper compensation to its owner.’ He concludes, ‘This archaic text gives us unmistakable glimpses of a real conflict of class…The surplus produced by the new economy was, in fact, concentrated in the hands of a relatively small class’. 59
    The scale of exploitation grew until it was massive. T B Jones tells how in the city state of Lagash in about 2100 BC ‘a dozen or more temple establishments were responsible for cultivating most of the arable land…About half [the crop] was consumed by the cost of production [wages for workers, feed for draught animals and the like] and a quarter went to the king as royal tax. The remaining 25 percent accrued to the priests’. 60
    C J Gadd notes that in the famous Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, ‘The hero is