Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Slavery in the ancient world, from the earliest known recorded evidence in Sumer to the pre-medieval Antiquity Mediterranean cultures, comprised a mixture of debt-slavery, slavery as a punishment for crime, and the enslavement of prisoners of war.
Slavery was widespread in the ancient world in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. [7] [8] [4] Slavery became less common throughout Europe during the Early Middle Ages but continued to be practiced in some areas. Both Christians and Muslims captured and enslaved each other during centuries of warfare in the Mediterranean and Europe. [9]
Slavery was a widely accepted practice in ancient Greece, as it was in contemporaneous societies. [2] The principal use of slaves was in agriculture, but they were also used in stone quarries or mines, as domestic servants, or even as a public utility, as with the demosioi of Athens.
Nonetheless, pro-slavery Europeans defined the "non-Israelites" of Leviticus 25:44-46 as non-Christians and later as non-white people. Watts suggested that they used the Bible's two-tier model to justify enslaving Africans and Native Americans while limiting white forced laborers to indentured servants and prisoners. [113]
An ancient Roman restaurant (thermopolium) near the forum in Ostia Antica: all aspects of food preparation and service employed both free and slave labor. In the city of Rome, working people and their slaves lived in insulae, multistory buildings with shops on the ground floor and apartments above. [417]
During classical antiquity, several prominent societies in Europe and the ancient Near East regulated enslavement for debt and the related but distinct practice of debt bondage (in which a creditor could extract compulsory labor from a debtor in repayment of their debt, but the debtor was not formally enslaved and was not subject to all the ...
Although many scholars therefore view Ham as an eponym which is used to represent Egypt in the Table of Nations, [2] a number of Christians throughout history, including Origen [3] and the Cave of Treasures, [4] have argued for the alternate proposition that Ham represents all black people, his name symbolising their dark skin colour; [5] pro ...
Arguments in favor of slavery include deference to the Bible and thus to God, some people being natural slaves in need of supervision, slaves often being better off than the poorest non-slaves, practical social benefit for the society as a whole, and slavery being a time-proven practice by multiple great civilizations.