Free and Unfree: the Sayhadic CaseAuthor(s): A.F.L. BeestonSource: Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, , A.F.L. Beeston at the ArabianSeminar and other papers (2005), pp. 81-85Published by: ArchaeopressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41223851 .

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Edited version of a paper first published in Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 16 (1986): 1-6

Free and Unfree: the Sayhadic1 Case

In a recent article,2 F. de Blois argues that the Semitic term hr(r) "free" is capable of having the secondary sense "noble" only in those languages - Hebrew and Aramaic - closest to Iranian influence, and that there is no trace of such an extension in the geographically remoter areas of Sayhadic and Ethiopie. I would not venture to enter on the question of Ethiopie, but I think that for Sayhadic the case demands a more detailed examination.

What he does stress is a set of texts where hrřhrr stands in complementary antithesis to terms which he translates as "slaves", and hence concludes that °hrr must be free men. But the antithesis is too simplistic, in view of the extreme linguistic and social complexities of both Semitic and European cultures. There are many degrees of freedom, and to equate "not-free" with "slave" does violence to the social facts: a person may be free in some respects and not in others.

The ordinary man would probably be inclined to define slave status as consisting in the fact of being bought and sold. Yet there are traps even in so apparently clear a definition. Someone unfamiliar with our own culture, on hearing that a professional footballer had been "transferred" from club A to club В on payment of a transfer fee by club В to club A, might well conclude that the man had been sold. Again, down to the mid-nineteenth century, the Russian peasants were glebae ascripti; owing services to the owner of the estate, and if that owner sold his estate to another, the services owed passed to the new mas- ter; the incautious observer might think that the peasants themselves had been sold, yet historians do not call them "slaves", but have adopted the technical term "serfs" to cover such a case.

In RES 4818, where the author prays for his children to be "male, notable, and °hrr'' the term is evi- dently a general expression of praise and, as de Blois rightly says, does not connote any specific social rank. In RES 4912, a king of Hadramawt describes his father as having belonged to "the °hrr of (the tribe) YHBDR", and while an interpretation as "nobles" might seem preferable, de Blois is again justified in say- ing that the phrase is ambiguous and affords no certain proof of such a sense. At the same time, it should be noted that Hadramawt, the most easterly of the Sayhadic [21 peoples, can hardly be said to be "remoter from Iranian influence" than Israel. On a wider scale, the whole European feudal system was based on the principle that everybody owed services of some kind to a superior, right up to the king who had no supe- rior - and even a king, if he owned land in a neighbouring kingdom, was obliged to do homage for that land to his brother monarch. In this way, everyone except the sovereign was in a condition of servitium "servile status", to a greater or lesser extent, and was thus not totally "free"; some mediaeval theorists did not shrink from following the logic of this to its conclusion, that the only truly free person was the sover- eign. Clearly, the term "slavery" would be quite inappropriate to the status of all the "not totally free" per- sons, and even those theorists who pushed the concept of servitium to its widest extent, distinguished it from the status of those who were "slaves" in the modern acceptance of the word.

In order to avoid confusion arising both from this and from the "transfer of services" situation, I feel obliged to add an extra qualification to the definition of "slave" in the stricter sense: that a "slave" is ju- ridically a non-person on a level with domestic animals; that is to say, the attributes of full "humanity" do not inhere in him - though they can be conferred on him by emancipation. It is noteworthy in this con- nection that in many societies the purchased slave has tended to be of a different race from that of his owner, so that he was felt to be "barely human". In ancient Greece, barbarians were frequently slaves, but there was some sentiment of antagonism to the enslavement of a "Hellene" (Greek speaker); prisoners of war were indeed often enslaved, but could be thought of as having put themselves "beyond the pale of

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82 A.F.L. Beeston

humanity" by the fact of having borne arms against their captors. In mediaeval Europe, the church always set its face against the enslavement of Christians, and the domestic slaves (specially numerous in Italy) were for the most part purchased from beyond the bounds of Christendom, being pagan Slavs (whence the word slave!), Tatars, Turks etc.

From the other end of the spectrum, I choose one more European example. In the beginnings of Polish history, the Polish "nation" consisted exclusively of the members of the military landowning caste, the szlachta', these were a free and equal society, among whom the king was primus inter pares, but not a feu- dal sovereign; the actual tillers of the soil were not lower-class Poles, but a different "nation". In the course of time this distinction became blurred by the economic rise of some non-members of the szlachta, and the economic decline of some members of it to a position where their mode of life was indistinguish- able from that of the peasants around them; nevertheless, down to the end of the 18th century, membership of the Sejm, the national plenary assembly corresponding to the Scandinavian "allthing", was confined to the szlachta. Query, therefore: were the szlachta freemen as opposed to serfs, or nobles as opposed to commoners? No definitive answer is possible, but it can be remarked that in the eyes of the rest of Europe the szlachta was "the [31 Polish nobility", however reduced one of them might be in his circumstances.3

In Sayhadic terminology there are a great many references to a set of terms all having the same social connotation and differing only in gender and number: cbdlcbdy for the masculine singular (and dual), °dm as a collective thereto, °mt fern, sing., °mh fern. pl. In the majority of instances this set does not refer abso- lutely to any specific social class; it is a relative term, signifying the status of a person or persons bound by a social nexus to a superior "seigneur", a mr°.4 For the sovereign, who had no superior, all his subjects of whatever degree were his °dm; the great baronial families, who ranked immediately below him in the social scale (being to him in a position comparable with that of a king's "tenants-in-chief ' in the European feudal system) were themselves simultaneously "vassals", °dm, of the king and "seigneurs", DwrD, of infe- rior families who nevertheless were in no sense "slaves". The relational nature of the social nexus is indi- cated by the fact that in an overwhelming majority of cases the cbdřdm term is followed by a personal or family name: they were not just cbd/°dm in an absolute way, but the cbdřdm of such-and-such a seigneur or seigneurs.

The nexus just described was probably a group relationship rather than an individual one. Many texts speak of the 3dm of such-and-such a family, and though there are also many references to an individual as seigneur, one may reasonably conclude that this individual was the head of the seigneural family, by whom the family's rights were exercised.

The operation of the nexus principle at various social levels involves difficulties in translating the cbd term. One could of course opt for the non-committal "servant", and this is the conventional rendering in a religious context, where a deity is the mr° of all his worshippers (as the king was of his subjects). But if one wants to be more specific in the social context, one is confronted with a choice between "vassal", "cli- ent" (in the Roman sense, or that of the Arabic mawãlJ) and "serf, as well as, right at the bottom of the social pyramid, "slave".

One significant text reveals the presence in Sayhadic society of slaves in the stricter sense as I have de- fined it above. RES 3910 has "with regard to mercantile transactions involving a man or camel or ox or head of cattle or other commodity: if anyone buys an cbd or an °mt or head of cattle or other commodity ...", thus placing the male cbd and the female °mt juridically on the same footing as the domestic animals. But between the major royal "vassals" at the top, and the "slaves" at the bottom, there is considerable un- certainty whether we are dealing with vassals, clients or serfs.

It has been generally accepted that the central Arabian bedouin tribe differed from the Sayhadic s2cb (also by convention rendered "tribe"), inasmuch as the former was economically based on pastoralism and genealogically structured, the latter was to a considerable extent based on agriculture and not genealogi- cally structured (the [4] "tribal" subdivisions, the clans, however, were). Still, there is one point of paral-

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Free and Unfree: the Sayhadic Case 83

lelism between the two systems. The bedouin tribe was not socially homogeneous: it comprised the full member, the °asfl, who participated in tribal decision making, and two types of inferior members, the jãr al-qurbã, of the same genealogical kin, but economically depressed, a sort of "poor relation"; and the jär al-junub (whom the Jewish Fourth Commandment calls "the stranger who is within thy gates"), not kin of the tribe but taken under its protection. It is in this last type that I would see the parallelism with South Arabia. In the Sayhadic s2cb there was normally one leading "seigneural" clan, and several clans of °dm, owing obligations to the seigneural clan, most characteristically, it seems, a rent for the land they culti- vated, expressed in a crop-sharing arrangement. Right up to the middle of the present century, the "tribes" of Yemen (qabã°il in Yemeni usage) were landowners who might either cultivate their own land or rent it to tenant-farmers on a métayage basis, or both. This means that in Sayhadic society we should envisage both "serfs" who were glebae ascripti, and non-landowning tenant-farmers of a somewhat higher status.

Alongside the use of the cbd set of terms as relational ones which, with the correlative mf0 "seigneur", signify the personal nexus at all levels of the social scale, the set can be used in complementary antithesis with hrřhrr. In RES 3945/6 we find "the children of DLMQH and GW [a phrase implying the members of the Sabaean confederation as a whole], both free and ?serf? (hrhw/wcbdhw)"; ibid./S "the men (DsJd) of the town cAbadan, both free and ?serf?"; ibid/12 "all the qs't of (the tribe) KHD both free and ?serf?". In the last passage the merismus figure whereby hr + cbd classes together constitute the qs't makes it impossible to accept Rhodokanakis1 rendering of this word as "plantations of costus-plant": the most likely interpreta- tion is that they are "occupiers of land" (cf. Arabic qisf "portion/share/allotment"), comprising both owner-occupiers (the hr) and rent-paying peasants or even serfs (the cbdřdm ). In ibid./lO we have kl/qs't^dm/dtbrm, where the genitive link between qs]{ and °dm is perhaps best seen as explanatory (idãfat al-bayän ), thus "all occupiers of land who are tenants/vassals/serfs of dTBRm".5

A merismus parallel to the above comes in the Minaean text RES 2771/7 "all the Minaeans and people of Yathill, both their freeman (hr) and their hw". In citing this text, de Blois has been misled by the Reper- toire's translation of the last term as "leurs esclaves"; this simply reproduces in French the German transla- tion of Glaser, who had supposed hw to be cognate with Arabic ahwã (plural huww) "dark coloured" (and hence slaves of a different race from their owners; see above). This, however, is wholly unacceptable in the context, which indicates that the persons in question were participants in legislative activity concerned with taxation: it is unthinkable that slaves could have done so, and even doubtful whether serfs or non- landowning peasants should have. The most plausible contrast would be between "nobles" and "common- ers". This is in one way concordant with de Blois1 general hypothesis, because the Minaeans with their trading activities were in much closer touch with the Mediterranean-Meso- [5] potamian area than the Sa- baeans and Qatabanians.

A "sale" of '*dm is mentioned in RES 3946, set up by the same famous Sabaean as RES 3945. In line 3 he records that he "purchased (s2om) HDNN the Ddm of HDRHMW of MFcLm, and GBRm the °dm of YCTQ of Hawlan-dü-YRRT". The fact that the two °dm groups have the distinctive names HDNN and GBRm militates strongly against their being slaves in the narrow sense, and Rhodokanakis is surely right in translating °dm here as "Hörigen"; they appear to have been client-clans or serf-clans owing service to their respective seigneurs, the lords of MFcLm and Hawlan-dü-YRRT; what is compendiously called a "purchase" would thus have been a "transfer of services".

More intriguing is 1 ine 8 of the same text: the Sabaean mkrb "acquired (csJy) all the property of HDRHMW son of HLDMR, "firstborn" (bkr, i.e. senior, leader, chieftain) of the MFcLites, namely all that he (HDRHMW) owned in the Wanab district and all the districts of FTRm and QNT and all the townships thereof, namely MFcLm [and FTRm and GW and its burghs and] its agricultural valleys and the pasture- lands pertaining to its townships, with full ownership rights (gwlm), thus enlarging (w-ys3f) his (the Sa- baean mkrb's) hw FYS^ with the °dm that HDRHMW had sold to him in his townships MFcLm and FTRm and QNT and GW". Rhodokanakis in his commentary on this passage7 visualises that the lands

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84 A.F.L. Beeston

were annexed to the royal domain but the ̂dm were constituted an adjunct to Fayshan (zu seinem Stamm F. geschlagen werden). Now Fayshan was a "tribe" (sFb), and one of the most influential within the Sa- baean tribal confederation, rivalling Saba proper; J.Ryckmans8 observes that CIH 126 shows us Fayshan and Bakil as "chargés de l'exécution des décrets royaux, et ... soutiens de l'activité centralisatrice du sou- verain." This is sufficient to show that hw, like the cbd/bdm words, can express a relational nexus operative at various levels on the social scale; in our text, "his Mv" refers to the top-ranking vassals of the mkrb.

But the phraseology of Rhodokanakis' commentary would lead the reader to suppose that the "acquisi- tion" of the lands and their retention as royal domain, and the "sale" of the persons who were transferred to Fayshan, were two separate transactions; which seems to me not the case. The imperfect verb ys3f follow- ing the perfect csJy, in the stylistic of this period, connotes an intimate "circumstantial" linkage between the two actions, and this is brought out better in Rhodokanakis' translation of the actual text, "und er so [sic] seinem Stamm F. die Hörigen hinzufügte". Note also that these W/w are not described here as "the °dm of HDRHMW", but as "the ""dm in his townships". This affords a presumption that these °dm were glebae ascripti and hence "went with" the sale of the lands; but since a s2cb is essentially a collectivity of persons it is the human element in the transaction which is alone referred to in the mention of the assign- ment to Fayshan. It is not easy, indeed, to see how the royal domain could have benefited from the lands if these had been deprived of the peasantry who worked them, by assignment to a different overlordship.

The Hadramitic text CIAS I, 47.82/o6 is cited by de Blois as evidence for *dm [61 meaning "slaves", al- though Pirenne's translation has "serfs". But the text gives us another slant on the matter, since the totality expressed by the merismus "their °hrr and their °dm" is a family or household (byt), for protecting which the deity is thanked. In the ancient world, the familia was commonly all the members of the household, of whatever degree9. In this case, in my view, it is more plausible to see the °hrr as the paterfamilias and his immediate kin, and the °dm as all the rest of the familia, including both agricultural tenants or serfs and domestic slaves.

I would suggest that in Sayhadic society the free/unfree antithesis was not capable of being expressed in absolute terms referring to precise social gradings, but had shifting boundaries according to the context of situation and speech.

Appendix

Mediaeval European concepts of free and unfree were extremely fluid. The label of servitium could attach to anyone of whatever social position, who owed service of any kind to a superior. The armed and mounted knight was by no means low in social rank, yet some degree of "unfreedom" could attach to him. See Mundy 1973: [p. 257] Around Macon in the later 1 100s about 159 families of knightly grade were not materially better off, though socially higher, than the 50 or so families of important ministers (provosts, stewards) of princes, castellans and churchmen. [But] the statutes of Fréjus in 1235 state that if a knight spends the greater part of his time ploughing ... or doing other agricultural labour, he shall not have the knight's liberty, [p 259] At one time, the term noble had usually meant free, and relatively few members of the martial order were nobles. In the course of the tenth-eleventh centuries this had changed radically, so that simple knights could be called noble .... Not so in Germany, where quasi-servile knighthood depend- ent on the emperor or his greater ecclesiastical and secular vassals had been more firmly established .... In the mid-twelfth-century German Empire, to be a noble still meant to be free. Although there was already a free knighthood, to be a ministerialis or simple knight implied servility .... In the 1 180s the English justi- ciar could still argue that a peasant, when emancipated and knighted, was free (liber) only in relation to his master and other peasants, but not in relation to other orders. But the great jurist of the next century, Henry of Bracton, maintained the contrary.

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Free and Unfree: the Sayhadic Case 85

Notes 1 i.e. the Minaean, Sabaean, Qatabanian and Hadramite cultures anterior to the 4th century A.D. [See

Beeston 1987: 13-14, republished above, pp. 79-80] ¿ deBloisl985. Davies 1 98 1 : passim. According to Nashwan (1916: 100), mari is the typical Yemeni word for sayyid "lord".

5 TBRm is probably a toponym, but it is uncertain whether dTBRm is "lord of Г.", or (as Rhodokanakis thinks) "the T. district".

6 One may well wonder whether any assumption of "influence" is needed at all; semantic development "free" to "noble" could well be independent and spontaneous in a number of languages. 7 Rhodokanakis 1927: 94.

0 RyckmansJ 1967: 272. In the Jewish Fourth Commandment, the rule ot abstention trom Sabbath labour extends right through the human members of the familia to include domestic animals as well.

Sigla CIH Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum. Pars IV. Inscriptiones himyariticas et sabaeas

continens. Paris: Reipublicae Typographeo, 1889-1932. CIAS I Inscription in Pirenne & Beeston 1977. RES Répertoire ďépigraphie sémitique. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1900-1968.

References Beeston A.F.L.

1987. Apologia for "Sayhadic". Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 17: 13-14. [Re- published here, pp. 79-80].

Davies N. 1981. God's Playground, a history of Poland. Oxford: Clarendon.

de Blois F. 1985. "Freemen" and "nobles" in Iranian and Semitic languages. Journal of the Royal Asiatic

Society: 5-15. Mundy J.H.

1973. Europe in the High Middle Ages 1150-1309. London: Longman. Naswän b. Sacïd al-Himyarl / ed. A. Ahmad.

1916. Die auf Südarabien bezüglichen Angaben Naš wãns im Šams al-culüm. (E.J.W. Gibb Me- morial Series, 24). Leiden: Brill.

Pirenne J. & Beeston A.F.L. 1977. Corpus des Inscriptions et Antiquités Sud-arabes. Tome 1, Section 1. Louvain: Peeters.

Rhodokanakis N. 1927. Altsabäische Texte. I. (Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. Phi-

losophisch-historische Klasse, 206/2). Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky. Ryckmans J.

1967. Etudes ďépigraphie sud-arabe en russe, 1 (année 1965). Bibliotheca Orientalis 24: 271- 273.

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