Serfs

Today mention of the word serf usually conjures visions of downtrodden medieval European peasants working in the fields for their noble lords, who dwell comfortably in their castles. Yet serflike workers existed in many other ancient and medieval places and times. In ancient Mesopotamia and other parts of the ancient Near East, these workers can be generally classified as agricultural laborers who were not slaves, and therefore could not be sold along with land, yet were closely dependent on the well-to-do persons who owned the land. In particular, serfs lived and worked on the large estates run by the palaces and temples.

In the Old Babylonian period (the first few centuries of the second millennium B. C.), Mesopotamian law codes began to recognize this special class of workers. The famous code of King Hammurabi (reigned ca. 1792-1750 b. c.), for example, divided the population into three general social classes: the awilum, the mushkenum, and the wardum. It seems that the awilum were members of Babylonia’s traditional landowning class and that the wardum were slaves. In contrast, the mushkenum, from an Amorite term meaning “one who prostrates himself,” were workers who lived on the land. Their exact situation is unclear, but they apparently kept for themselves a portion of the food they grew and turned the rest over to the landowners or their overseers.

By the end of the second millennium B. C., the legal distinctions between the mushkenum and other social groups had more or less disappeared. However, serflike laborers still existed. Some evidence suggests that they remained a common fixture of the agricultural systems of the Assyrian, Persian, and Parthian realms that followed in Mesopotamia. When the Parthians defeated the Roman notable Marcus Licin-ius Crassus in western Mesopotamia in 53 B. C., for instance, they resettled the ten thousand surviving Romans as agricultural serfs in Iran.