The Employment of Non-free Persons in the Old Babylonian Period, as Exemplified by Women

Abstract

The identification of various groups of hirelings in the Old Babylonian Period as far as their social status is concerned is not easy due to a very short formular of the contract of hire and the very simple way these persons are mentioned in them. As a result the only group with which it is possible are women, who appear in 45 contracts and who were slaves in 43 of them. This results from the lack of any mentions of their family relationships with anyone else. Women who were hired in these documents in spite of their small number can be studied both in long term, as well as short-term hires, in cases when the purpose is determined and when it is not. The essential thing is that thanks to the fact that they create a single compact group in legal sense the result of the analysis can be considered conclusive for the important question “What was the role of the unfree hired-women in the economy of the Old Babylonian Period?”

In short one can assume that irrespectively of their gender the women paid a valued labor service, for which the hirer granted their owners an average pay taking into consideration also men. However, the conditions of the hire of women were adapted to their physical abilities. Thus they were hired much more rarely, and it was basically hire for about one month, and the purpose of hire was most often harvest. As a result one can assume that although the work performed by women in hire was a full value labor it was only supplementary to that of men which appear ca. 6 times more often in hire documents in this period.