Law and Legal Practice in Egypt from Alexander to the Arab Conquest: Slavery in Greco-Roman Egypt

Introduction Anyone who has seen a spectacular movie set in Egypt, say, for example, The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston, will be forgiven for coming away with the impression that the land was full of slaves who spent all their time suffering while building pyramids and other massive structures. Herodotus (2.124), of course, reports a similar image of slave labor and pyramid building. So it is perhaps surprising to see in the preceding chapter ( 8.1 introduction) that slavery in Ptolemaic Egypt was a negligible phenomenon and that such slaves as there were were mostly engaged in domestic service in Greek and hellenized Egyptian households. That would conform to what we know about pre-Ptolemaic practice, according to which slaves are found performing work in the non-agricultural sector, in households (see also of course Joseph’s service to Potiphar in Genesis), in quarries, and in royal building projects. In agriculture, before the Ptolemies, many persons were bound to specific estates – to temple estates, or to the large estates of state officials – as “serfs” (Lloyd 1983: 315). Often the Egyptian terminology does not help us define exactly what the status of these workers was, but we may be safe in assuming that their status, like that of many workers in antiquity, was somewhere between fully free and fully enslaved. It was in the first millennium bc that the state began to recognize a particular institution that we may call slavery. It is documented in contracts of sale (Donker van Heel 1995: 177–82). The so-called self-sale to satisfy a debt ( P.Ryl . 5 [569 bc]; see 5.1 above) and the seizure of debtors and/or their children continued to occur in the Ptolemaic period and beyond, not without attempts at regulation (e.g., 9.1.2 , 10.1.2 ; cf. 5.5.3 , 9.3.1 ). But there was no need for large-scale agricultural slavery in a land full of laborers, some of whom brought their own specialized skills to bear on the agrarian economy (Chapter 8, passim ). Under such circumstances the scholarly interest in slavery as an object of historiographical investigation and as a social and legal phenomenon in Egypt is probably out of proportion to its importance as a demographic and economic phenomenon.