Slavery and Dependency in the Sassanid Empire

From 224 to 651 CE, the Sasanian Empire ruled Iran and Mesopotamia, chiefly in present-day Iraq, and at different times held territories farther west and east. Enslavement within this empire could follow capture in war, birth to an enslaved parent, or a debt that a family could not repay. Sasanian law treated enslaved people as property, but it also recognized particular capacities in court and provided several routes to full or partial freedom.

The late Sasanian Hazār dādestān, usually called the Book of a Thousand Judgements, is a collection of legal cases assembled by Farroxmard ī Wahrāmān in the first half of the seventh century. Its examples explain how people could be held, transferred, made to work, and released. In Middle Persian, the language of the legal text, bandag could mean an enslaved person, but it also described any subject bound to the king. The circumstances of a person’s service determine which meaning applies.

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Routes into enslavement

War brought captives into Sasanian territory and could lead to enslavement. In the third century, King Shapur I’s inscription at Naqsh-e Rustam in Fars, southwestern Iran, says that he deported Roman men and settled them in Persis and Khuzistan in Iran, Parthia in the northeast, Babylonia in Mesopotamia and other territories. Shapur’s account links conquest to the movement of people across the empire. Later accounts describe some deportees as the king’s prisoners, while other evidence records captives enslaved by private owners.

These transfers could put captives to work in new settings. Later scholarship places deportees on crown lands and in royal cities they helped build. Under Shapur II (r. 309–379), accounts describe deported silk weavers and embroiderers settled in Khuzistan, a fertile region already known for textile production. Under Khosrow I (r. 531–579), deported workers augmented the industry as Sasanian workshops manufactured silk textiles for export.

Debt created a different path. A debtor could offer a child or guarantor as security for a loan. The lawbook calls the person’s status tan, literally “body,” while that person remained in the creditor’s custody for the agreed period. Security did not itself make the person a slave. If the debt was not paid on time and ownership passed to the creditor, the legal position changed. This distinction made the terms of repayment consequential for the person whose body secured the loan.

The lawbook also discusses fathers selling children they could not support. Its jurists limit that sale to an emergency in which a guardian could not provide food and other necessities. This was a sale into ownership, distinct from temporarily pledging someone to secure a debt.

Status could also pass from parent to child, though jurists recorded a change in the rule. One passage says that until the reign of a king named Wahrām, only children of enslaved fathers inherited enslaved status. It then records the later juristic view that a child followed the mother’s status. Several Sasanian kings bore the name Wahrām, so the passage does not identify the precise reign. It does show that the legal rule was debated and altered over time.

Work and control of earnings

Legal terms describe different relationships to work. The bandag commonly served in a household or at a religious foundation. The anšahrīg, literally an “outlander,” was often attached to a farm and transferred with the land. A wardag, or captive, might work on land, in construction or at other manual work. Free peasants could cultivate under sharecropping contracts, farming land in return for a share of its crop, while wage-earners lived from their own labor and might own a small plot. These arrangements differed from the ownership and transfer of enslaved people.

The lawbook treated the enslaved person as transferable property. An owner could sell or lease a person, give them away, bequeath them, or pledge them as security for a loan. In an estate sale, an enslaved worker attached to the soil could pass with the land and its animals. Female household servants appear under the term bandag paristār.

An owner’s rights could be divided in ways that separated a person from the proceeds of their work. Two or more owners might hold shares in the same person, each controlling a proportion. The lawbook gives an arrangement in which one man received the person for one year every other year. It also distinguishes ownership from income: an owner could transfer a slave’s earnings to someone else without transferring the person. When an owner permitted an enslaved person to control earnings or accept a gift, the permission extended only as far as that owner’s share. If a second owner had not authorized it, that owner retained a claim to the corresponding portion.

Standing in law and limits on owners

Although the lawbook treated enslaved people as property, it also allowed them to speak in court. In one ownership dispute, a plaintiff sued a person as his slave. The defendant answered that he belonged to someone else. The enslaved person thus became both the object of the claim and a participant who identified another owner. Other cases allowed enslaved people to appear as witnesses, plaintiffs or defendants.

Rules also set limits on an owner’s actions. The law prescribed a penalty for cruel treatment or mutilation. It prohibited selling an enslaved Zoroastrian, a follower of Iran’s ancient religion, to a buyer outside the religion and treated both seller and buyer as thieves. The restriction connected a person’s religious affiliation to the transfer of ownership, and made the purchaser’s status part of the transaction.

Partial release and freedom

Manumission, the legal act of freeing an enslaved person, could release all or only part of the ownership claim. If one of several co-owners freed that person, the released share could be one-half, one-third or one-tenth. The person then held a corresponding degree of freedom, and their children shared that same proportion. A legal certificate recorded complete release and changed the person’s status to a subject of the king of kings.

Conversion could also create a route to freedom. An enslaved person with a non-Zoroastrian owner who became Zoroastrian could purchase release. The Zoroastrian community was expected to help raise the price, including through a loan. If the owner had already converted before the enslaved person did, the lawbook says that the later conversion no longer created this right. Timing therefore determined whether religious change opened a path out of ownership.

Religious service could use the same word as slavery without creating the same status. An ātaxš-bandag, or servant of a sacred fire, was a free person dedicated to Zoroastrian temple service. By contrast, an anšahrīg ī ātaxš, or enslaved person of a fire temple, was held as an unfree worker, probably on the foundation’s land. Zoroastrian fire temples could own farmland, orchards and vineyards as well as maintain their sacred fires. The word for a free religious servant and the term for an enslaved temple worker described different legal relationships.