Enslaved Persons in the Making of Societies and Cultures in Western Eurasia and Africa, 1000 BCE - 300 CE

Project Information

SLaVEgents

Grant agreement ID: 101095823

DOI

10.3030/101095823

EC signature date 26 June 2023

Start date 1 July 2023

End date 30 June 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 495 575,00

EU contribution

€ 2 495 575,00

Coordinated by

IDRYMA TECHNOLOGIAS KAI EREVNAS
Greece

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SLaVEgents (Enslaved Persons in the Making of Societies and Cultures in Western Eurasia and Africa, 1000 BCE - 300 CE)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2025-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

SLaVEgents aspires to be a pioneering contribution to the study of antiquity, shifting the focus of research from the elites to the lower classes. The project aims to re-examine the social, economic, political and cultural history of antiquity on the basis of slave agency.

The project aims to analyze the role of slaves in the processes of transformation of ancient societies and cultures. In this context, it will study the multiple identities, communities and networks created by slaves based on family, kinship, work, ethnicity and cult and how these shaped their aspirations, expectations and strategies; the changes that slave agency brought about in the economic, legal, political and religious systems of antiquity; and the individual and collective participation of slaves in historical events and contexts such as wars, crises and revolutions. The project also departs from the usual focus on Greek and Roman slavery and will examine all ancient slaveholding societies across Western Eurasia and North Africa for which sufficient information survives: in addition to the Greek and Roman societies of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the slaveholding societies of Assyria, Babylonia, Judea, Syria and Egypt.

The main objective of the project is to create a prosopography of all enslaved persons in antiquity. This will take the form of a digital database open to researchers and the general public, and will include the relevant testimonies both in the original ancient language and in modern English translation. At the same time, the database will include digital maps showing the places where slaves are recorded and their place of origin, and the material will be used to enhance existing digital databases on antiquity. In this way it will be possible to study both the individual biographies of ancient slaves and the collective trends in their lives.

For the creation of the digital prosopography, the project team will study the literary, epigraphic, and papyrological data preserved in a large number of ancient languages (Greek, Latin, Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Aramaic), as well as the relevant archaeological data. The project will be carried out by an international research team of 21 people under the supervision of prof. Vlassopoulos, hosted by the IMS in Rethymnon. The team will create an open access digital portal including databases, abstracts, multimedia material, and bibliographies; it will also organise and participate in a series of academic meetings and international conferences, and produce several open-access publications - including three books, and four PhD theses.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

SLaVEgents is the first project to focus systematically not only on what happened to ancient slaves (domination and exploitation), but also on what slaves did: the historical consequences of slave agency for ancient societies. To achieve this aim and study the impact of countless actions of innumerable subaltern individuals, it is essential to collect systematically the relevant evidence and find ways to process and interpret it.

Our digital prosopography includes individual files for enslaved persons, masters and associated free third parties, recording various aspects of their biographies and identities; it reconstructs the various networks that linked together enslaved persons, masters and third parties, and classifies the types of networks involved and the types of actions involved. Finally, the network links together individuals and actions with all relevant sources for each individual, thus enabling users to have direct access to the evidentiary foundation and employ it for their own distinct purposes.

A major innovation of the project concerns the range of sources employed. In contrast to most prior scholarly work, which has largely focused on Greek and Latin sources, the project team has been exploring sources in all the major ancient languages (Aramaic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Phoenician), while each source is accompanied by a translation in modern English, thus making all sources accessible to scholars who do not possess the relevant linguistic skills. This decision will have a revolutionary impact on the study of ancient slavery, making for the first time possible the systematic comparison of ancient slaveries and the sources for ancient slaveries.

Another major innovation of the project concerns its spatial and temporal extent. Most prior work has overwhelmingly focused on classical Athens and early imperial Rome, while most other areas of the Greco-Roman world, as well as societies in the Ancient Near East, have either been examined very partially, or have never been the object of any study. By covering the whole of Western Eurasia and Northern Africa from Iran to the Atlantic between 1000 BCE and 300 CE, and collecting all the relevant primary evidence in our database, the project makes possible for the first time the systematic study of all ancient slave systems for which there exists evidence.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

SLaVEgents is the first major project to combine ancient history from below, big data and digital humanities. Our database currently includes 25,000 enslaved persons, an equivalent number of masters and free third parties, which are recorded in 16,000 sources. The decision to include the actual sources in the database will have a transformative effect on the discipline, as it will make possible innumerable future projects which are currently impossible to implement. For the first time it becomes possible to access a huge amount of evidence that until now was never employed or was only know to a few specialists.

This is associated with the creation of Linked Open Data. Rather than merely collect the evidence required for our own aims, our database is interlinked with all other existing digital collections of ancient data (persons, settlements, sources). This is crucial for linking the study of ancient slavery with the study of all other aspects of ancient history. At the same time, the collection of big data will radically transform how we approach ancient history. The big data collected in our prosopography make possible for the first time a processual and historicist approach that starts from the constitutive role of interaction in human affairs and its diverse consequences in terms of spatial diversity and temporal change. The social network tools and the digital tagging of the database makes possible the discovery of huge amounts of evidence for particular phenomena. By plotting the evidence along space and time it becomes possible to move beyond prescriptive and structuralist models and construct new narratives of ancient history.

Furthermore, our prosopography makes possible microhistorical and biographical approaches to the study of ancient slavery and slaves. The quantitative and qualitative study of patterns and individual trajectories offers a new way of approaching slavery; instead of studying an ahistorical institution, our emphasis can now shift to how slavery affected the life trajectories of enslaved persons alongside the persons with which enslaved persons interacted. Finally, the fact that all sources are available in modern English translation makes the sources accessible to scholars who do not know all the ancient languages included in the database, thus making possible comparative studies and perspectives.

fig-18.jpg