---
title: "The History of Slavery"
subtitle: "A Technology of Power - From Shuruppak to the Present"
author: "Tim Maker"
trim_size: "6x9"
style_preset: "nonfiction-modern"
---

# Part I: Ancient Inventions of Unfreedom

## Chapter 1: Alienability Enters the Record

The tablet is small enough to hold in two hands.

It is clay, roughly square, marked by signs that belong to an early world of writing. Its surface does not announce itself as the beginning of anything. It does not say: here begins slavery. It does not explain how the man named or classified in the text came to be transferable. It does not describe his face, age, language, fear, skill, family, or destination. The document does what administrative documents so often do. It reduces a human rupture to an orderly form.

Around 2600 BCE, at Shuruppak in southern Mesopotamia, a contract recorded the transfer traditionally described as the sale of a male slave and a house.