Children in the Ancient Near East

By Kristine Garroway

“Why have children been such a neglected issue in ancient Near Eastern studies, both from the archaeological and textual point of view?”

JFK called them “the world’s most valuable resource,” and Whitney Houston claimed they “are our future.” Just as children are recognized as important members of contemporary households, so too were they in the ancient world. Yet, historically children have not been important factors in investigations of ancient societies. Why?

The reason for this has to do with how ancient documents and archaeological sites were traditionally approached. Scholars focusing on texts concentrated on documents recording trade between cities, laws governing the cities, and the transfer of property between peoples. Children were often an explicit part of these documents: sons and daughters received inheritances, girls and boys were adopted, and children were sold as slaves and hired as day laborers. Nevertheless, the lives of these children were not a scholarly focus. The focus was on the big picture, on recreating ancient societies through their public aspects, such as laws, economic institutions, and social structures.

From an archaeological perspective, children had two things working against them. Until the 1970s large-scale excavations focused on discovering town plans and piecing together the history of the site. References to children in excavation reports were thus usually records of burials under a floor or in a wall. One may think cemeteries would be a more likely place for children to be found, but here too children often went unseen. Left to the elements over thousands of years, smaller and more fragile bones often crumbled or were so fragmented that they were unnoticed by excavators. Occasionally excavators made mention of special child burials, such as a female buried holding an infant or the presence of beads on a child’s skeleton. However, until recently such references were the exception to the rule. Taking into consideration that many children in antiquity appear to not even have been buried in cemeteries, we can begin to see how children had disappeared from conversations in the archaeological record. Children were hard to find and were simply not on the scholarly radar as a subject.

What new ideas or approaches are changing our perceptions of children in ancient societies?

On the one hand, one could argue that Near Eastern archaeology’s initial forays into archaeological sites and documents have run their course. Town plans have been established, the ways public institutions operated are now largely understood, and scholars need a new avenue to investigate.

But there is more to it than simply running out of other topics. Changes within academia have resonated outward and caused scholars to approach archaeology and textual data differently. With the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s, the androcentric focus on the public arena came in for sharp criticism. It was as if someone called scholars out on their tunnel vision. As a result, studies began to shift from the public to the domestic sphere as interest in women and minorities came to the fore. As one of the minorities or “silent voices” in society, the study of children owes a lot to those pioneers in feminist scholarship. In more recent years, archaeological theory and textual criticism have begun to incorporate other theoretical methods, found in literary, sociological, and anthropological theories. A new theoretical approach to documents and realia has shifted the focus away from institutions and onto the different kinds of people that make up the institutions.

Children are not simply creatures that were acted upon, but are actors and participants. This recognition frames the way in which the current group of childhood scholars offers new insights into children and childhood in the ancient Near East. Since this is a nascent field, there has been much debate as to what to call it. Within archaeology, this focus is generally referred to as childhood archaeology. Outside archaeology, terms suggested include: child-centered, childish, childism, and childist interpretations. I use the latter term, coined by Julie F. Parker, which seems to be catching on. A childist interpretation reassigns agency and a voice to the silent child. It is multidisciplinary, utilizing the social sciences, cultural anthropology, archaeology, and gender theory to examine issues such as the legal and social status, and economic contributions of children. This theory also examines how children function in ancient literature, including both secular and biblical texts.

Using a childist interpretation, my book, Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household, combines an examination of biblical and ancient Near Eastern texts with archaeology, specifically child burials. The study focuses on a child’s social and legal status within his or her household and how the child’s gender affects membership within that household. Examining the issue of membership allows one to see a cross section of children, from slaves to free born children and everything in between (e.g., debt slaves, adoptees, hired hands, pledged daughters, orphans, sacrificed children, children thrown to the dogs, etc.).

The study demonstrates how previous textual references that offer binary constructions of children, like “free or slave” or “adopted or biologically born,” are incorrect. It also establishes how a child’s social and legal statuses exist along a sliding scale; statuses are not static, but fluid. For example, a child may be a freeborn child living in the natal household one day, and a debt slave in a master’s house the next. Likewise, a child’s membership in the household is also fluid. A son may have been adopted with the “firstborn” status, but per his adoption contract he becomes “second born” as soon as a biological son is born.

For their part, child burials add to our understanding of a child’s membership in society. Throughout the ancient Near East there is a trend wherein children under the age of two were buried differently from the adults in the community. Around age three, adults began to bury their children like other adults in the community. The textual and archaeological data combined suggest that a child’s membership in society is tied to both their gender and their age.

Do these new insights have potential to speak to contemporary concerns regarding children and childhood?

I think the primary insight that a childist interpretation can offer for contemporary societies has to do with agency, the idea that children are beings with free will, capable of making decisions and taking action. Admittedly, the study above looks at children from an “outside-in” approach; this is unavoidable since the data we have on children in the ancient Near East are produced by adults. Agency theory encourages us to think about the child’s perspective. As scholars, we try to reassign agency to children in ancient societies by focusing on them and bringing to light their silent voices. Within contemporary society, we have the opportunity to do something we cannot do for ancient societies—we can talk to children and engage them, let them be an active part of the family and household. Instead of adults writing a child’s history, have the child write it—write her own stories, edit photos taken of her, record her version of the family history or her school day—this way, 2000 years from now her story will be heard.

Kristine Garroway is Visiting Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles.

Links

Robert Paulissian, Adoption in Ancient Assyria and Babylonia [PDF]

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