Voluntary Slavery


Think of slavery and the image you get is of people taken in chains kicking and screaming to some far off land to toil like animals for the rest of their days, right? So did I…until I heard of this case of people voluntarily becoming slaves. But wait, it gets even more weird: these guys even paid monthly fees to remain slaves!

So what was going on, you ask? The guys we are talking about lived in ancient Egypt between 190 BC and 130 BC. They chose to become temple slaves, a “privilege” for which they paid a monthly fee. So was this a tale of religious insanity? Not at all: this was a very level headed choice these guys were making!

The slave contracts that Egyptologist Kim Ryholt unearthed and deciphered showed that 90% of the people entering these contracts could not name their father. Which would suggest they were children of prostitutes. And that in turn meant they belonged to the lower classes. Therefore, the Pharaoh could use them for forced labour, you know for digging canals and worse. But temple slaves, ah, they were exempt from forced labour.

So now it makes sense: these guys were just choosing the lesser of two evils. And the temples were happy with the arrangement because they got free labour and money!

It also explained why this option existed only for a brief period of 60 years. After all, rulers could not afford to lose that many resources (and the associated money) to anybody, even temples.

As if the history of Egypt wasn’t interesting enough with its pyramids, pharaohs, hidden treasures and the sphinx; now add voluntary slavery to the list!

Comments

  1. KumarJanuary 3, 2013 at 2:31 PM

    If the finding is to be believed, ancient Egypt seems to have played fairer than many societies of much later times, which wanted free labor with zero sympathy for the enslaved human being.

    Actually current day slaves have to suffer a lot more inhuman demands than just merciless extraction of work. And also, often suffer the real pain of the cruel sadism of the master/mistress. (For those who wonder who are these current day slaves: Some men/women who go from India to the Arab countries are known to have become slaves since their ID papers usually get confiscated by the "employers" safe-keeping i.e. assurance of slavery. Also, from different parts of the world, reports have come about slavery of women for sexual exploitation. Worse, there is slavery innocent children for extracting labor free of cost, with the children suffering under the most dangerous and terrible work conditions. They get bare minimum food for sustenance. There is some of this going on in India, which happens to be a highly corrupt country. The police and the politicians give covert support to some of the child labor factories. Camel racing in the Arab countries is another horror story of child exploitation and now they are trying to put an end to it by replacing child camel jockeys with robots. These children were cruelly trained to ride the camel and after every race, the betting (in)humans would attack the losing child jockies with such brutality that the child would either die immediately or would get so badly bruised or maimed that painfully slow death would follow in the days to come.)

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