Individual Slave Release

Abstract First and foremost, freedom is found in the social and economic sphere and the legal solutions to its problems, in the beginning only in the negative. In the first part of this chapter, I deal with the legal and socio-economic aspects of debt and slave release. In the ancient Near East, the social institution of corvée and debt slavery eventually gave way to the concept of liberation in the form of manumission. Legal documents know of negative freedom in the sense of liberation. In these documents, manumission of single persons was granted in special cases. The most common way was that the slave was granted manumission upon the owner’s death if he or she had continuously cared for the master during the master’s lifetime, especially in old age. But there was also autonomous, self-active liberation: to liberate oneself by self-redemption. Legal anointment rituals in front of the sun god Shamash (or Apollo) were carried out before a legal public and written down as a legal document to protect the new status of the former slave as a freedman.