“Slavery 1.0”: the Concept of the Ancient Oriental Slave-Owning Societies in the Works by Vassiliy Struve of 1933—1934 and Its Perspective

Abstract

The article presents a detailed analysis of arguments forwarded by a leading Soviet Orientalist Vassiliy Struwe (1889—1965) for his thesis about the existence of the slave-owning mode of production at the Ancient Orient. This thesis was formulated in his lecture at the State Academy for the History of Material Culture (GAIMK) on 4 June 1933 and in a number of publications of 1934. Backing this thesis with the Ancient Near Eastern evidence and building around it a rather vast scheme positioned as an alternative to the cyclist theory of Eduard Meyer was a realization of tasks put before Struwe at his job at GAIMK, as can be seen from the preserved plan of his work there for the year 1933. According to Struwe’s scheme, the evolution of slavery in the earliest irrigation societies of Egypt and Mesopotamia started with the collective property of rural communities on slaves employed in the build-up of the irrigation systems (canals, dams etc.). There eventually developed the individual property on slaves and the vast slave-owning latifundia, which have already existed in Mesopotamia under Ur-III and in the New Kingdom Egypt. In the 1st Millennium B. C. the development of slavery in Mesopotamia and Egypt was comparable with that in the societies of Classical Antiquity. Struwe pointed out a number of slaves’ uprisings at the Ancient Near East starting from the 2nd Millennium B. C. and explained the downfall of ancient societies at the East with the “slave revolution”, like at the West. Struwe’s scheme revealed an emphasis on a rather high development of slavery at the Ancient Orient and parallels between its social phenomena and those of Ancient Greece and Rome. However, this emphasis vanished from his later texts, probably, due to a demand to show the Ancient Oriental societies as a phase preceding the Classical Antiquity, in compliance with the general trend of the world historiography.