Thread on slavery in Persia: Many elements of "compassionate" slavery that we consider unique to Islam were already present in pre-Islamic Persia. Here is a summary beginning from Achaemenid period. The most common term to designate slaves in ancient Iran was the word bandaka, >
> a derivative of banda - “bond, fetter.” (Related to "bandh/bandhna" though interestingly banda is now used in Urdu/Hindi as a generic word for men.) Under the Achaemenids, Persian nobles became large slave owners. Already in 6th century BCE, there are records of slave women >
> from Gandhara & Bactria in Babylon who were taken as prisoners of wars. Judging from Babylonian documents & Aramaic papyri of the Achaemenid period, slaves were sometimes set free at the death of their masters with the stipulation that they continue to serve him as long as he >
>was alive. In the Sassanian period, describing the campaigns of King Šāpūr I, the Zoroastrian high priest Kirdēr reports how the army enslaved, burned, & devastated wherever it went but that he himself then by the order of the king of kings (re)established the Magians & fires. >
> Sasanian law prescribed a penalty (tāwān) for cruel treatment & mutilation of slaves, thus protecting them to a certain extent from arbitrary acts on the part of the owners. It was also forbidden to sell a Zoroastrian slave, whose right to practice his religion was ensured by >
> law, to an infidel. A slave converted to Zoroastrianism could leave his infidel owner & become a “subject of the king of kings,” i.e., a free citizen, after having compensated his previous master. A passage in the Ērbadestān indicates that even a loan (abām) was granted >
> (probably by a religious institution) to the slave for this purpose. The slave’s human faculties were fully allowed in litigation: He could appear in court not only as a witness, but also as a plaintiff or a defendant in civil suits, particularly those involving disputes over >
> ownership of the slave himself. An article in the law book of Īšōboxt confirms the legal right of the slave to dispose of his peculium according to his will. Records suggest that at least at some periods the offspring of slave women & free men had the status of free persons. >
> Moving on to the Islamic period: Early Islamic society was essentially a slave-holding one. Slaves came into the Iranian world as captives of war from Arab campaigns in the Caucasus against the Ḵhazars & from campaigns in central Asia against the local Iranian peoples & the >
> Turks of the steppes beyond, from the end of the lst/7th century onward. Thus Naršaḵī (p. 62, tr. R. N. Frye, pp. 44-45) mentions how in 87/706 the Arab governor Qotayba b. Muslim slew all the males in the town of Baykand in Sogdia & enslaved all the women & children. Eighty >
>hostages of noble birth taken from the ḵhātūn (queen) of Bukhara in 56/676 by the governor of Khorasan Said b. Oṯmān were transported, against Said’s pledge to the contrary, to Medina & set to work there as agricultural slaves, a process which was so demeaning for them that, >
> one day, they all entered Said’s house, killed him, & then committed mass suicide (Naršaḵī, pp. 54, 56-57). Subsequently, Turkish slaves captured in the course of Muslim raids into infidel territory (dār al-ḥarb) were supplemented by a steady flow of Turks brought to slave >
> markets. The endemic ghazwa raids conducted by Muslims in the Caucasus region also brought in a steady flow of Christians as slaves, comprising Greeks, Armenians, & Georgians, the first 2 groups mentioned by Kaykāvūs in his Qābūsnāma. Ibn Ḥawqal mentions that the tax farm >
> (moqāṭa'a) of customs post at Ḵūnaj on the road running from Ardabīl in Azerbaijan to Zanjān in Jebāl was generally rented out annually for 100,000 dinars, in some years going up to a million dirhams; the dues (lawāzem) levied here included those on the transit of slaves. >
> The Samanid emirate in Khorasan & Transoxania dominated the corridor into NE Iran during the 9th-10th centuries, & owed much of its economic prosperity, stressed by contemporary geographers, to the important trade in Turkish slaves. Slaves regularly formed a part of the land >
> tax of Khorasan sent by governors there like the Taherids to Baghdad & of the tribute forwarded to the caliphs by the Samanids from Transoxania & by the Saffarid brothers Yaʿqūb & ʿAmr b. Layṯ from their conquests in eastern Afghanistan & the fringes of India. The geographer >
>Maqdesī states that in his time the annual levy (ḵarāj) of Khorasan included, among other things, 1,020 slaves. The Samanid amirs regulated the transit trade in slaves across their territories, requiring a license (jawāz) for each slave boy & a fee of 70-100 dirhams, the same >
> fee but no license for each slave girl, & a lesser fee, 20-30 dirhams, for each mature woman. Commenting on the superlativeness of Turkish slaves, Ibn Ḥawqal states that he had more than once seen a slave sold in Khorasan for as much as 3,000 dinars; the average rate for a >
> Turkish slave in Taherid times was, however, around 300 dirhams. A single campaign of Maḥmūd of Ḡazna in 1018 to Qanawj in the Ganges valley yielded 53,000 captives, causing the price of slaves in the market at Ḡazna to fall as low as 2-10 dirhams a head (C. E. Bosworth, >
> Ghaznavids, p.102); & by the end of the 11th. century, Indian slaves were sufficiently known in Iran at large for Kaykāvūs to discuss the various aptitudes of different Indian social groups and castes for employment as slaves (Qābūsnāma, p.116). Even earlier, African Zanj & >
> the Indian Zoṭṭ are fairly well documented in the historical sources on account of the periodic rebellions of these despised & exploited groups & their use in large scale sugarcane & rice crops. Eunuchs were kept to guard harems, or if intact males were used, then it was >
> recommended that they should be dark-skinned, physically unprepossessing, & as a result unattractive to women. Marājel, the concubine of Hārūn-al-Rašhīd, & mother of future caliph al-Maʾmūn, was from Bāḏḡīs in NW Afghanistan. Māreda, concubine of Hārūn al-Rašhīd, & mother >
> of future caliph al-Moʿtaṣem, was a Sogdian born in Kūfa. Male slaves were referred to as ḡolām (in Arabic lit. a youth) or zar-ḵharīd (lit. bought by gold), while black slaves were commonly called kākā sīāh. Female slaves were referred to as kanīz(ak). The Turkish slave >
> cupbearer or sāqī isa became a familiar figure in Persian poetry, & such personalities as Sultan Maḥmūd of Ḡazna’s cupbearer & favorite Ayāz b. Aymaq later became elaborated into a significant literary figure. Of course, beardless boys & young men like Ayāz must often have >
> been used by their masters as catamites. In the bāzār of Tabrīz, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa saw a richly dressed beautiful slave boy showing precious stones in front of the jewelers’ shops to attract buyers. Shahs even bestowed handmaidens (jawārī) & slave girls (savārīd) on the ulamāʾ. >
> Looks like I mixed 2 threads. Here is the rest of this thread,
