68. Witold Tyborowski: Finding a job during Hammurabi’s reign: Transcript

0:13  JT

Hello, and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. The podcast where experts from around the world share new and interesting stories about life in the ancient Middle East. My name is Jon. Each episode I talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand.

0:32  JT

Finding work is about as normal an activity as there is. Cuneiform tablets reveal details of what it was like to do this 4000 years ago. What kinds of work were available? Who might get these jobs? And would you really want them?

0:50  JT

Our guest is a specialist in Babylonia during the time of Hammurabi. He has been researching labour in Babylonia for many years now, making him the ideal person to help us understand the ancient job market. So get yourself a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and let’s meet today’s guest.

1:19  JT

Hello, and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.

1:23  WT

Morning. Thank you.

1:24  JT

Could you tell us please: who are you, and what do you do?

1:28  WT

My name is Witold Tyborowski. I live in Poznan, Poland, and I’m a professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. I’m a historian. My speciality is ancient Mesopotamia. And more precisely, the first half of the second millennium BC Hammurabi: and his times.

1:45  JT

Okay, and we’re talking about Hammurabi this morning. In particular, we’re talking about a topic of timeless interest: how to get a job. So could you set the scene maybe, please, and explain how do we know anything about how you get a job during the time of Hammurabi?

2:01  WT

So economy is always very important for society and for single people. And so, fortunately, we have a huge number of documents, cuneiform documents, from third, second, and first millennia BCE. Years ago, I started to study them. And what I found: some economic issues were more important for people than the others. And namely, it was very surprising for me, getting job; hiring of labour, getting employed, the time conditions, the purpose of hiring. This is really fascinating, as I didn’t suppose that we might get so many details from before 4000 years ago, about the conditions and time and leisure, and so on, and so on about very ordinary things of everyday life of people of that time.

2:54  JT

Yeah, yeah. This is brilliant. So I guess the first question has to be, you know, who are the people looking for a job?

3:00  WT

These were usually quite poor people who did not own their own possessions. And so they didn’t have their farms, or their workshops. But they had time, of course, and they wanted to survive simply so they needed means for life. And so they were looking for job. And they were looking in places and palace and rich people households, to get job and so to live … simply to live. Usually, they were a man. However, we have quite a number of women who are also employed or who are given to work to such places, which is also very interesting, because I did not expect women looking for job or being hired or employed in these very times.

3:48  JT

Do we have any sense of the numbers of people? Is this a relatively small group? Or is this a very common thing?

3:55  WT

Surprisingly, it was quite a common thing, because especially in large farms, they needed labour, human labour, during harvests and sowing time. So in the spring, and in the autumn, and then they really needed a large number of workers. There were two ways of employing people; namely in groups for hire for harvest. And this was done by commission. And so by some people brought groups of people. And there were many hires of single people. And the single people were hired, or were employed to do peculiar jobs, which are quite often named in the contracts. And they’re rarely hired for or employed to do harvest labour, harvest work, because harvest work was done by groups. And so if anyone hired single people for harvest, it meant that this was a very tough period when any hands do work were important.

4:58  JT

So you mentioned there about the importance of harvest time for employment. Is that the kind of job that the palace can offer, then, or are there other jobs available?

5:07  WT

Most often it was harvest. Also cattle breeding was, this was the second after harvest job that the palace or other institutional household could offer. And so harvesters … also it was a very popular job, because no peculiar skills were needed during harvest. Just basic works with hands. And if anyone was hired or employed in a workshop, some skills were needed. And so that’s rather rarer. And sometimes we find very peculiar jobs had to be performed. In one contract, a priestly office is offered to an employee. It was a pashihu priest who was employed for one month, to perform a job in the temple. It was very surprising, because you might think we might expect that any priestly work should have been done by a specialist who was somehow introduced in this and was skilled and so on. And here you have an ordinary man to perform a priestly job. So there is a variety of things that the employees could do.

6:17  JT

I wonder if we could probe in a little bit more depth about who the people are? So I was wondering, are these citizens; maybe they’ve fallen on hard times or they belong to a strata of society where they just regularly do this kind of work? Or is it semi-nomadic or nomadic people who are coming in, and you utilise the extra labour when it’s available? I mean, what’s the role of slaves or prisoners of war?

6:41  WT

As I have said that at the beginning, these were definitely some poor people. So you might have expected that they were some nomads, and so people coming from the steppe or from abroad, from areas where the employment could not have been provided. But the names, you cannot judge it by their names, and the names are given regularly. Because it appears to be that Mesopotamia was really deeply Akkadianised. So Akkadian names were also quite often among nomads. So when you look at their names, practically, they’re never characterised by any tribal or national identity. So they’re just people of certain names, and the names are almost always typical Akkadian names.

7:31  WT

But what is quite significant, patronymics quite often are not rarely are given. So they were not characterised, but any roots in families or tribes. If they didn’t want to characterise them, it seems that they were not important members in this. Very rarely seal impressions of the employees can be found in the documents. So in these cases, you suppose that these were not poor people, not insignificant people, but they were someone if they possess their own or near family seals. So this happened, but basically, they were people who just were ordinary people who lived in this society, and they just were looking means for living.

8:19  JT

Alright. So, can you tell us a little bit then about what it was like to perform these jobs? What are the conditions?

8:27  WT

So, the documents, the contracts, which we have, they paid little attention to this. However, they are quite numerous. So we can infer some details, information from them anyway. And so, in a third of all the documents, the purpose of hire or employment is given. But such conditions as are determined as for example, that the worker, the employee, has the right of one day free every 10 days. So in a month, each worker is entitled to be free for three days. And so it was relatively heavy work.

9:07  WT

When the work is named, it is usually a heavy one, because, for example, grinding grain or work in a palace household, named as tupshikkum, for example; it can be translated as “bringing a basket with earth”. It is clear that when anyone needed a labourer, and was ready to pay for him some money, some salary, so it was definitely an important work and so rather heavy work. And if we look at the salaries, they surely reflect that worker, the employee was to work heavily. Also those who employed the workers, they were not very rich people and so they took them in need. It is clear that next to the hired labour, employed labour, also the members of the family were active in households in farms. So the workers were taken in when they were really necessary. And so no one could take a worker, just for some indistinct works.

10:18  WT

What else can we say? Some other conditions were also determined. For example, that the employer was to provide food and drink. And it is sometimes determined how large should be the drink, and food. And the quota which the employee was to receive, we can see that he was to eat good food and drink a lot of usually beer. So to be able to perform a heavy work. This was an economic process, this was a necessity, which was held by the employer. So the employer was rather expecting that the workers would do a good job, heavy work. Finally, the women who were employed, they constitute only about 15% of all the staff which was employed. So if they were so few, we can also say that they were simply not able to work harder. And so that’s why the employers preferred men, because they could provide better work.

11:22  JT

Are they doing the same job? So is it a case of, well, I need somebody to help with the harvest, I’d rather have a man? Or with a woman be doing weaving? Is there a difference in the type of work offered?

11:33  WT

Yes, we can say that there was a difference. What is interesting, when you have women being employed, they are usually employed by women. And they are employed for a shorter time, usually one month. And so there is a suggestion, it’s my guess, that these women who were employed, they performed some work at their mistresses’s households. And when they are priestesses, and we have ten such examples, there, the men couldn’t simply enter some places or do some works. And so they were rather personal service, the women, than the regular work typical also for men. And so when the employer wanted anyone who could provide good labour, then he preferred men, because he was to be used for such work, which women couldn’t provide. In one case only, we have a woman employed who was to grind grain during one year. So this is a very special situation. The woman must have been a very strong person. And so the employer decided to take her, in spite of the fact that she was a woman. And so physically, seemingly not very fit for such work. But anyway, he took her because this was a situation when she could.

13:03  JT

When people are performing these tasks, are they working alongside the employer? Is it extra help? Or are they working instead of that person doing the job?

13:12  WT

I think that the regular situation was that the employed workers, they worked with the family members of the employer. This is very clear, because when we have the employers, fortunately, we have a huge number of other documents. In many cases, we can find the employers as owners of some households. So if a large householder employs only one man, so we can expect that he worked next to some other people. We also have situation with when one employer employs men in the first month of the year, second, and fifth. And so he needed more and more, and he took men whenever it was necessary to avoid leisure time, a period when the worker wouldn’t do anything. And we have a number of documents, when for example, it is stipulated that if a worker will be lazy, and will not perform the job he was hired for, then he would not get any salary, even he would forfeit, he would lose any rights to get any money. And so it was a situation, a system in which the employer was very careful to use properly the employed person.

14:30  WT

And we also know sometimes the names of sons of the employer. And we can guess at that time they were relatively young, the sons, so they had to work next to the employed person. I think that only when we have the case of the harvesters, who are employed in groups, sometimes in large groups. We have one  situation when a commissioner gets huge money to bring workers for a princess, Iltani. And the money he gets would be enough to get about 120 workers. And so in such cases, the members of the family of the employer were not significant, because they were only few. And so these employers could allow employing large numbers, large enough to make free and members of his own family.

15:22  JT

We’ve touched a couple of times on salary, basically, what do you get in exchange for work. And you started talking about the provision of food and drink. I wonder, could you say a little bit more about that, please? Because if you’re working out in, you know, collecting the harvest, or something like that, hard manual work, you’re going to be burning a lot of calories. Do we know quite what they’re getting to fuel that?

15:44  WT

Yes, when the food and drink is detailed, when it’s spoken of, in the document, it’s a good amount of both to let the worker do a good job. And sometimes, however, it says that the worker would feed himself or that he would dress himself, because dress ,clothing, is also mentioned, sometimes. You may wonder, and it is not clear, whether in these cases, the worker when he wants to feed himself was to go outside of the household of the employer and go somewhere to eat or it was just alluding the salary. So, it would be extracted from the salary of the worker, when he was to feed himself? But anyway, was rather provided the food by the employer, because it would be not economic, if the worker was to leave the household of the employer and go somewhere for food. These details, basically, I think, are connected with salary. So whether it was to be larger, when the worker was to feed himself or it would be smaller, fewer when the worker was to be fed by the employer.

17:01  WT

I think that as far as the salary is concerned, however, it varies very much, definitely depending from the work which was to be performed. A regular payment for a month, for one month, when a worker is taken for one month, is one shekel silver, which was equal to one gur barley, so 300 liters. However, when the worker was taken for longer, for the whole year, the salary varied from two shekels or two gur silver, till six gur, six silver. It may be surprising that we must recognise this amount from two to six shekels or more silver as regular, as average, because the average you would expect three or four, four or five, but we have two to six. Sometimes, however, the payments are quite high, even more than 10 shekels of silver, more than 10 gur of barley. Definitely the worker was to perform a more important work or a harder work.

18:12  WT

And for example, we have situation when such work is stated. So it’s work at a brewer’s workshops, or grinding grain when the work was hardest, and the salary was highest. But in other cases, for example, when we have a very small salary. In five cases, we have a salary so small that only in these cases we can suppose children being employed. Children, it was not reasonable from economic point of view, to take for work, because they couldn’t do any serious, effective work. But anyway, sometimes they were taken, and they were paid very little money.

19:00  WT

What is also quite significant, we cannot see that the workers worked for debt. You certainly know that working for debt is mentioned in the laws of Hammurabi. And it was supposed quite often by the scholars that debts were worked in the household of the man who gave them money, but we cannot observe it in the contracts. Quite possibly, because in such cases, the contracts were not drafted. Contracts, documents were written in peculiar situations, basically, to commemorate the transfer of a man from one man to another. Coming back to the salary, some things remain unclear. So the salary varies very much. Basically, there were two means of payment: silver and grain, and so barley. With this variety of the salary, we can just wonder what was the reason, but there are many things still to be answered.

20:04  JT

You also mentioned that people will be supplied with beer. And there is quite a big discussion, isn’t there, about what the beer is.

20:11  WT

I think it was just a kind of alcoholic drink, not to be rotten in the heat of the Mesopotamian climate. We cannot be sure, of course. Unfortunately, documents use only Sumerian ideogram in this situation, and always the same. The documents which are quite numerous, because the contracts alone amount to about 300 documents, plus the huge number of harvest labour contracts. But anyway, they’re very regular in the phraseology they use. And so it’s just a matter of speculation. Surely, it wasn’t anything delicious, anything special. It was just a basic drink with alcohol to provide a healthy refrigerator to workers?

21:03  WT

Hmm, well, the alcohol is another interesting aspect, isn’t it. The beer would be a good source of calories, which you’d need. But then if you’re out doing hard work, especially in the heat, then alcohol isn’t a great thing to have for hydration purposes. And that’s the kind of thing that might make you underperform and therefore not get paid. And if you’re, you know, using sharp tools, and you don’t want to be too drunk, the text won’t explicitly say how strong the beer was. But as you reconstruct the text, do you have a picture in your mind of how alcoholic that beer is?

21:36  WT

I think that regular drink named beer with alcohol, will have very small amount of alcohol in it. Basically, not to let the people get drunk. Only in one document, when a man is taken to work at the brewers workshop, and so the document states, that worker would not drink too much. So it would mean that in this case, he had contact with the regular beer with good amount of alcohol. And so he could have got addicted, and he could have wanted to drink more. But it was a peculiar situation when he had access to regular beer with larger amounts of alcohol. But in other cases, I think that first the employer who provided the drink, he surely tried to make it cheap, and so of low quality. Just to let the workers drink, not to make them drunk, because then they wouldn’t work effectively. And so I think it wasn’t anything to be jealous about.

22:45  JT

I can imagine. Do you have a sense of the balance of power in these relationships? Is it that people are desperate for work, so they’ll take anything whenever it comes up? Or is it really that the employers are desperate for the manpower, and so they’ll pay what it takes to get the people when they need them?

23:05  WT

Surprisingly, in the light of the contract documents, you can see that the employers were more determined to get labour than the workers themselves. And so for example, we have documents when the contract is broken by the workers, by the employees. In two pairs of documents, we have a situation when the worker broke the documents, and so gave up and went away from the household of the employer. And so he lost the right to get any salary. And in one case, after a few months, the same employer takes the same man and pays him even more than before. So after three months, exactly. So here clearly, the employer was determined to get this man. And he paid more to encourage him to harder work.

23:56  WT

And in another situation, a father gave his son to an employer, he was a tradesman, a merchant. Five days later, the same father gives out the same son to another employer, where the son would not have to go abroad to perform any dangerous job. You surely know the opinion that the Mesopotamian economy lacked manpower, lacked labour. And so I would say that Old Babylonian documents reflect this fact, this phenomenon, that the people who were able and wanted to work, they could find it quite easily. Whereas those who needed labour and manpower, they sometimes had to look for them. And they were sometimes ready to agree not very convenient conditions to get some people. For example, we have some situation of three contracts where workers are taken for a few weeks, for 10 days is the shortest time when the employee or is taken. So here surely the employer was very determined to get anyone to perform a job. So he paid for writing a document to get a man for 10 days.

25:13  JT

Do you have any examples in the other direction? Because I remember you said earlier that if your employer judged that you weren’t working hard enough that they could withhold some of your pay. Do you have legal cases where somebody has had their pay withheld, and they feel it’s unjust, and they’re trying to challenge this rogue employer?

25:32  WT

No, unfortunately, not. Court decisions in documents are relatively rare in comparison to documents concerning hiring of labour or employing people. For example, we have a few hundred, surely more than 500, of these documents employing people. And we have less than 120 documents concerning court trials. And these concern more serious cases, and so injuries, stealing and so on. I think that maybe sometimes these cases were not recorded in documents, because they were not so important. In the case, for example, when the man surely broke the contract and left the household of the employer, we could expect a trial here. And maybe there was; we don’t know. Anyway, someone took the decision. And there is no such document. We don’t have such cases recorded, unfortunately.

26:35  JT

Yeah, that’s a shame.

26:37  WT

Yes, it’s shame.

26:39  JT

Do we know anything about discipline on the job is your employer allowed to walk around and beat you with a stick to make your work faster?

26:47  WT

Surely, it might vary from who the worker was, because sometimes they were slaves. And in other cases, they were free people. We have a group of texts of almost 50 documents, where people will hire out themselves. So they are those who hire out the manpower, and they are the manpower who are hired. And so surely, they expected from the employer to be respected, because they were free people and they decided about the situations. And we have also, as I told you, people who were to perform some important jobs, like the pashishu priest, who surely was to be treated properly in the place he was to work. In less than five documents, we have statements, then the worker would come back to the owner or to the person in charge of him in good condition. So shalmu in Akkadian, so healthy and in good condition. And so surely, the person who gave the labour to the hirer, to the employer, expected that the worker would come back to him, ready for further work.

28:00  WT

And we have also situations that sometimes the worker, in these cases, they were slaves, were given every year for many years, in one case, nine years, every year to those who needed the labour. And so in these cases, surely, for the owner of such slave, this slave was mean of getting more profits. So the owner of the slave paid attention to how the slave was treated and whether he was fit for further work or not. The discussion in the science is whether the employers were entitled sometimes to sexual service of women taken into hire, but it is not possible. I think, in some documents, and also in local actions of Mesopotamia, it is stated that also slave women must remain secure in this sense. So I think that the possibility does not exist. Although the documents do not state this, the fact that the majority of labor were free man. And also in cases when the slaves were hired. They were hired in some cases for many years to various employers. So surely those who are in charge, they paid attention that the conditions should be good, and that the worker was to be ready to work further after the time when he was freed from the employer.

29:31  JT

We touched earlier on gendered aspects of employment. But what we haven’t really talked about yet is age. And I imagine if you’re working for the temple, it’s not unusual to find children of some age working alongside the adults. Is this normal also in the contracts, the private employment? Is there an age at which you’ll be expected to go and help support your family, say.

29:53  WT

As you can expect, the age is never quoted, is never given. In more than 50 documents, we have a situation when people are given out to an employer by their parents; by fathers, or mothers, and brothers as well. It is supposed that in these cases, those workers were relatively young. And so in many cases, we can say, the workers were relatively young. However, they were surely not children, because in cases when a worker was given by his mother, the document says that he would get the money for the work. And so he was surely an adult person.

30:33  WT

And the document in this case was written to secure safe return of the worker from the employer. Because surely there existed a phenomenon, a practice, of enslaving illegally people, as it was recorded in later antiquity. Because a man was a precious property. At that time, slave costed an amount of silver, which a worker would have to work for five years. And so there was surely sometimes phenomenon of enslaving labour, of enslaving those who were hired, especially for example, if a merchant took a labourer as a help, as an aid for business journey, he might have sold him somewhere. And he could tell the family well, the man was lost. And so documents were frequently to secure safe return from employment.

31:28  WT

And that’s why they were given also by fathers and mothers being adult people. And they were placed in such documents, the parents, not because the workers were young, but because to provide them safety for the employment. And as far as the elder age is concerned, in cases, when a worker is employed for some years, we can see the decreasing amount of silver he earns, he gets for his job. In two cases, when the employment lasts for about 10 years, we can see that he gets less barley, or less silver. We can infer from this that he grew older, and that’s why he got less payment. This is quite obvious. But anyway, it is only about 10 years; it’s not much. So if the worker started to work being 20 or less, so being 30, it’s not aged person.

32:32  WT

As we have, however, numerous documents from some cities in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, we can try to trace some people, their activity through decades. And I think it would be possible sometimes to determine the age of a parent or of a man, because he might have been active as worker earlier and later. You know that there are some officials also in Old Babylonian period, who were active for 30 years, for example. The same happens with ordinary people, because like in Ur III time at the late third millennium BC, also in Old Babylonian period, we have a situation that sometimes also the ordinary people are recorded in various documents for 30 or 40 years. But it’s really a great job to be performed, which can be also very profitable, because this information would be very interesting. But no one has done it until today.

33:37  JT

Yeah, yeah. Another one for the future.

33:39  WT

Yes, is promising for the future, to work on these documents and research.

33:45  JT

Yeah. So am I right in thinking you will have a book coming out on this topic?

33:49  WT

Yes, actually, there are quite a few books on this topic. I’m preparing the edition of documents from the British Museum, unpublished documents. And, of course, with a study of documents published until today, because the latest book on laboir in Old Babylonian period is dated to before the Second World War. So by Lautner, Altbabylonische Personenmiete [und Erntearbeitervertraege], and so I think it’s going to be a large study. And it is going to reveal many aspects in the published and unpublished documents, which will be surely of interest to both for those who make research on a society and economy. And in many cases, it is going to add the important new details, observations, because this stuff was not studied simply.

34:38  JT

When can we expect your book to come out?

34:40  WT

It should be at the end of this year, or the beginning of next year, with copies of course of documents, but the written part of the book is ready now. I’m looking for people, for the activity of those involved in the documents through letters and the other documents. It’s endless work, but it’s also very exciting when you will find a man from the documents in other documents. Sometimes, you’ll find two or three people from one document in one contract, in a letter or elsewhere. So it’s a temptation to do more and more to excavate more and more the content of documents. You know this, but sometimes you also have to stop yourself to say, no, it’s enough. Let us leave something for future generation, for future scholars, and this will be done so.

35:33  JT

I’m very much looking forward to that. Thank you very much for sharing your insights.

35:36  WT

You’re very nice. I’m really very grateful.

35:40  JT

I’d also like to thank our patrons: Enrique Jiménez, Jana Matuszak, Nancy Highcock, Jay C, Rune Rattenborg, Woodthrush, Elisa Rossberger, Mark Weeden, Jordi Mon Companys, Thomas Bolin, Joan Porter MacIver, John MacGinnis, Andrew George, Yelena Rakic, Zach Rubin, Sabina Franke, Shai Gordin, Aaron Macks, Maarja Seire, Jaafar Jotheri, Morgan Hite, Chikako Watanabe, Mark McElwaine, Jonathan Blanchard Smith, Kliment Ohr, Christina Tsouparopoulou, TT, Melanie Gross, Claire Weir, Marc Veldman, Bruno Biermann, Faimon Roberts, Jason Moser, Pavla Rosenstein, Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, Tate Paulette, Willis Monroe, Toby Wickenden, Emmert Clevenstine, Barbara Porter, Cheryl Morgan, Kevin Roy Jackson, Susannah Paulus, Eric Whitacre, Jakob Flygare, Jon Ganuza, as well as those who prefer to remain anonymous.

35:40  JT

I really appreciate your support. It makes a big difference. Every penny received has contributed towards translations. Thanks of course to the lovely people who have worked on the translations on a voluntary basis or for well below the market rate. For Arabic, thanks in particular to Zainab Mizyidawi, as well as Lina Meerchyad and May Al-Aseel. For Turkish, thank you to Pinar Durgun and Nesrin Akan. TEW is still young, but I want to reach a sustainable level, where translators are given proper compensation for their hard work.

35:40  JT

And thank you for listening to Thin End of the Wedge. If you enjoy what we do, and you would like to help make these podcasts available in Middle Eastern languages, please consider joining our Patreon family. You can find us at patreon.com/wedgepod. You can also support us in other ways: simply subscribe to the podcast; leave us a five star review on Apple Music or your favourite podcatcher; recommend us to your friends; follow us on Twitter: @wedge_pod. If you want the latest podcast news, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can find all the links in the show notes and on our website at wedgepod.org. Thanks, and I hope you’ll join us next time.