The person of the slave

 Slavery is already an institution in Sumer, although the phenomenon is possibly more than a hundred centuries old, coming from the first Neolithic. If we observe the Ur-Nammu Code we see the legal subsumption of all the social persons of the city under only two categories, freemen and slaves, although then a second categorization is applied for the freemen according to their economic person. The Code is presented as an advance in justice compared to previous moments: at this time, the orphan is no longer handed over to the rich as a slave, nor the widow to the powerful, nor the one who owns a cent (shekel) who owns a thousand (mina). The text implies that these actions that were carried out before are unfair, but not because the Code expresses opinions contrary to the institution of slavery, on which the entire order of the city rested, but because being an orphan, a widow, or a poor person, all of them, social persons defined with respect to a third party (father, husband, rich man), is not considered in this Code as a sufficient condition for slavery, although it was considered so at other previous times. The social persons of the orphan and the widow are not treated as a gender person, but as economic potentialities, and like the poor, as labor, and for that reason they are cited in the same paragraph, as belonging to the slave context. As these people are not self-sufficient, the discussion is the way in which they will become dependent on others, their degree of servitude. 

Sumerian laws allowed parents to sell their children as slaves, and later, in Babylon, the poor could sell themselves as slaves to ensure a livelihood for themselves and their family which meant that, after the captives of war, economic debts were the most important source of these dependency relationships. Slavery has an obvious economic foundation, but its dual source, war and debt, seems to require a different metaphysical foundation to justify it. In the texts of the military campaigns of Tuthmosis III (1490-1436 BC), the loot and looting lists include slaves as one more property, a custom also from Mesopotamia that will be observed in the war incursions of all world cultures up to a much more recent time than our ideas on human rights would like to admit. In this case, the enemy slaves are guaranteed by a divine right that is legitimized by force: it is the triumphant god, and his representative on earth, the King-God, who by winning shows that he complies with what is prescribed in the Tables of Fate, like when Marduk defeats Kingu.

The debt is here from the lowest to the highest, in a very crude sense of the food chain, as when among the Tongan the souls of the poor are enslaved to those of the nobles for eternity, or as when among the Samoans poor people are directly the food of the noble in the other world. The right to life is not considered as something equal for everyone: the people who create order and prosperity, the nobles and kings, are creditors of the rest of the group, and their survival against other clans of kings and nobles of other cities proclaims them leaders in accordance with divine laws. Kings and noblemen are seen as rulers of the universe, although subsumed to the will of the King-God creator of such order. In this sense, the foundation of external slavery (prisoners of war) is not, as it seemed, different from that of the internal one: the debt of the social body with respect to the thinking and organizing head of the city. Slavery expresses in this mythico-ritual plane the way things are, kings are the gods or their heirs, and in the same way that men are slaves of the gods, the kings are the lords of their representatives, those who establish the norms of social functioning as an image of the functioning of the heavens. The debt to the King-God is paid with a life of submission to work, as stipulated by divine laws. Any deviation from these myths produces the moral object of guilt and deserves the retribution of punishment, psychophysical in this world, and metaphysical in relation to larger cycles of existence. The social person is due to the King-God, lord of the city, whom he cares for like a shepherd who cares for inferior beings.