Pharaoh's slaves

I mused on the invention of slavery last year. h/t Instapundit now we have Hymowitz, summarising the slavery of the ancient world. Hymowitz isn't comprehensive, leaving out - for instance - the Portuguese and Sephardic domination of the Atlantic trade AD 1500ish on. But I'll leave that line of talk to the Nation of Islam. I'm more interested in when slavery started, as opposed to bonded servitude. We're here being told 1580 ... BC.

Hymowitz here cites Orlando Patterson. According to him, slavers were hitting the East African "Punt" for human livestock. By that he means Dynasty XVIII, the Pharaonic age. Tuthmosis III wrote this for his 33rd annal at Karnak #486: Marvels brought to his majesty in/from the land of Punt in this year: dried myrrh, 1685 heket; gold, 155 deben, 2 kidet; 134 slaves, male and female; 114 oxen, and calves; 305 bulls; total, 419 cattle; beside vessels laden with ivory, ebony, skins of the panther; every good thing of this country. The translation is James Henry Breasted, 1962 and not, I think, subsequently revised except maybe the year.

Why did Tuthmosis the Nastiest Pharaoh of the Nasty Dynasty (per Larry Gonick) do this? It helped that he simply could. He had the wealth; he had the navy, and he had the land. I don't think the Minoans or Canaanites were up to a proper slave-trade. The Greeks and Anatolians were then bumpkin villagers, just about able to sack a city like Babylon, unable to chain up masses of prisoners nor to have anything to do with them back home. Babylonia, as mentioned, had recently been sacked. Anyway before the sacking she had a nice little feudal system going on that didn't need foreign slaves - do read Michael Hudson here.

As to what these 134 poor Punters did in Egypt, here I will posit that Hymowitz and Patterson are getting it wrong. The imports do meet my definition of "slave" as against "bondsman" in that they are foreign. But: these slaves feature in a royal text. That means they were royal slaves. They weren't conquered in a border-skirmish, Punt being too far for that. These were exotics. Kings did sell war-captives via intermediaries, especially if they preside over a secular aristocracy, as did Roman emperors. But this doesn't seem like a Pharaonic act.

These 134 slaves, as royal property, thereby stood on a social plane of direct Pharaonic protection perhaps not available even to the fellahin farming along the Nile. Construction in Upper Egypt, sunnier and hotter, is one thought. Maybe they could form the core of a non-Nubian black colony - to shore up the Nile against the Nubian kingdom, or the coast against Libya. This by parallel with Justinian II's raid on the Slavs, for enlistment against the Arabs.

It is of interest that here in Pharaonic Egypt are our first true slaves. I am still not seeing the commodification we see among the Greek and Roman - and Sasanian - worlds.