Children in Ancient Sumer: How Much Do We Know?

By: Vitali Bartash

Children constitute a large portion of any society. But the meaning of childhood varies from one society to another. This results in specific habits of child caring and raising, their legal status and overall life conditions. Childhood is more than just a biological stage in human development, it is also a social and political concept. Ancient Sumer was no exception.

Children and childhood remain largely understudied within cuneiform studies. The reason for this is not scarcity of data. On the contrary, according to my preliminary estimations, about 1500 cuneiform texts within the corpus of approximately 100,000 written records from Southern Mesopotamia dating to ca. 3300 – 2000 BCE offer insights into lives of children. But information about them is unevenly distributed across different text genres and epochs of Mesopotamian history, and made more difficult by the complexities of Sumerian and early Akkadian. Moreover, despite the abundance of written and archaeological data, we still do not understand many details of how the urban societies of Southern Mesopotamia were organized.

The majority of cuneiform tablets from Ancient Sumer are economic and legal accounts, unfairly regarded by some as “dull.” They originate from archives of institutions known as “temples” and “palaces,” but these were not just places of worship or kings’ abodes. They were complex land estates, production and redistribution centers run by bureaucrats excellently schooled in writing and accounting.

The fact that the bulk of our data comes from the “public sector” shapes the information on children we can extract. Archival texts tell us how temple and palace officials managed human resources, land, animals and other goods. Due to this, we see children and everything else officials were concerned with through their eyes. In contrast, Old Babylonian school texts of the first half of the second millennium BCE draw a colorful picture of “college life” for upper class children. We do not have comparable narrative sources in earlier periods. Our challenge is to thus reconstruct social phenomena by relying on scraps of biased information, spread thinly across a large quantity of grocery-list like texts.

My ongoing research investigates a remarkable social phenomenon alluded to in archival records from early Mesopotamia. It appears that Sumerian temples and palaces supported and subsequently employed children from underprivileged social strata. My aim is to tell where this practice originates, its forms and consequences for the larger society. I suggest that the support of children had a clear socioeconomic purpose. On the one hand, socially unprotected children were not left to the mercy of fate, to roam the streets begging. On the other hand, both as children and eventual adults they were supported as an important source of cheap labor for the temple and palace economies.

Who were these children in legal, social and ethnic terms? Texts show they were children of slaves, semi-free workers, prisoners of war, and deportees from far-off lands, children of debtors, children dedicated to temples, as well as orphans and foundlings. Public institutions fed them, dressed them and provided with shelter. Although mostly legally free, these individuals fully depended economically on their master-households. As the result, their social mobility was severely restricted. Moreover, it appears that they started working at the age of five to seven. This is probably the earliest evidence for child labor. Their living conditions resulted sometimes in flight. Documents also record high numbers of deceased children, implying high mortality rates.

I concentrate on studying three aspects: terms for children attested in texts and their demography, influx of children into households, and their support vs. labor employment.

Texts provide a rich set of terms for children. Coupling these data with numbers of children mentioned in texts allows to reconstruct the demographic structure of child population, how many boys vs. girls and of what age groups, and of what ethnicities, lived under the control of temples and palaces. Since these data come from successive periods, it is possible also to draw a diachronic view of how child population developed.

The earliest cuneiform texts attest the presence of children in communal institutions. This account of personnel originates from the city of Uruk and dates to about 3000 BC. It categorizes individuals according to their age classes and lists “adult”, “developed child”, “babies of 1” and “elderly”. It is comical that one of the babies bears the name “Big Man”. It is remarkable also that we know names and age of people who lived more than 5000 years ago.

There are Late Uruk documents that employ the same terms to count people, who were likely simple workers or even slaves, and their children. If we put the number of people of each age class in a chart, we can get a rough image of their age structure.

This might not precisely mirror social reality, owing to the uncertain sample of the tablets or even their state of preservation, but we still can see major trends. The majority of the personnel were “adults” while only few individuals lived long enough to become “elderly.” We do not really know where the boundaries were between childhood and adulthood and adulthood and elderly in terms of biological age. Since we know from later sources of Ur III period (21st century BC), that children began to participate in work at the age of about five to seven, it seems likely that Late Uruk “adults” might have been our “early teens.”

This demonstrates the need for comparative data from other disciplines, in this case social anthropology, to interpret our data. Why, for example, is there a designation in the texts between a “baby of three” but none for “baby of four”? Studies of traditional societies show that women tend to breastfeed babies for two or three years. From this we may infer that children designated “developed” in the Late Uruk accounts were likely weaned infants older than age three.

Archival texts allow us to answer other questions, such as how children came to be dependents of public institutions. As mentioned, there were numerous possibilities. The account of personnel below exemplifies one. This text is about 2300 BC and comes from the city of Adab.

The document is remarkable in many respects. It records Subarean women and children. Subir – Akkadian Subartum – was the ancient name for the Habur triangle in Northern Mesopotamia with its famous cites Tell Mozan, Leilan, and Beydar, and neighboring territories. Hurrians inhabited this area and rulers from Southern Mesopotamia often aimed this land in their military campaigns. It is very probable that women and children listed in this text were deportees from Northern Mesopotamia. The absence of adult men also alludes to this. The usual practice was to kill adult male captives and take their women and offspring as workers in public economy of Southern Mesopotamia.

Even more striking is that according to the text children of both sexes are “branded” or “not branded.” It shows that captors imparted the state of slavery upon unfortunate children by branding their faces or other body parts with branding irons, a practice well attested elsewhere in different periods and cultures. For unknown reasons a small number of infants remained “not branded.”

The text ends with the statement that these persons find themselves in an “Enclosed House” or “stronghold”. We do not know their fate. Relying on similar texts, we can guess that they were eventually employed as weavers, millers or did other manual work for the remainder of their lives.

Finally, we know in detail, what children ate, how much, and what they wore. The amounts of food, mostly barley, depended on age, gender and involvement in labor. The next example is from about 2250 BC:

84 female workers (each receiving) 60 sila (of barley)

3 male workers (each receiving) 80 sila (of barley)

3+x boys (each receiving) 60 sila (of barley)

4 boys (each receiving) 20 sila (of barley)

2 girls (each receiving) 20 sila (of barley)

7 baby boys (each receiving) 10 sila (of barley)

6 baby girls (each receiving) 10 sila (of barley)

They are (people listed in) former (accounts)

42 boys (each receiving) 60 sila (of barley)

5 baby boys (each receiving) 10 sila (of barley)

4 baby girls (each receiving) 10 sila (of barley)

They are new boys and girls (in this account)

2 fullers (each receiving) 80 sila (of barley)

7 branded blinded (workers each receiving) 80 sila (of barley) (and) 1 janitor

2 fullers (and) 10 blinded (workers each receiving) 80 sila (of barley)

(All these people are under the supervision of) the chief fuller)

The text shows that smaller children regardless of gender received 20 sila barley (1 sila is about 1 liter) monthly while older children had 60. Even breastfed infants got their share of 10 sila. Their parents or caregivers probably found use for these rations. It is interesting that the older children received as much barley as adult women. This leads to the conclusion that these boys (of unknown age) were already laborers process with the same work capacity as adult women. At any rate, we see clearly there were child laborers in early Mesopotamia and that even the bureaucrats exploiting them acknowledged they were “children”.

These are only a few examples that show how much new we can learn about children who lived four to five thousand years before us. Though much information is still difficult to interpret, collaborating with colleagues from archaeology, anthropology, sociology and other disciplines, I hope to offer a coherent image of child life in public households of early urban centers in Southern Mesopotamia. This will add to, refine and possibly redefine our understanding of childhood as a universal social phenomenon.

Vitali Bartash is Associated Member of the Research Training Group “Value and Equivalence” at the University of Frankfurt/Main