7 - Divining Slavery in Late Ancient Egypt: Doulology in the Monastic Works of Paul of Tamma and Shenoute

Summary

The title of this chapter plays with the problem of understanding the role of slavery in late ancient Egypt. Scholars tend to agree that Egyptians, with a large tenant farmer population, relied far less heavily on enslaved labour than their counterparts elsewhere in the Empire. These smaller numbers mean that enslavement is harder to trace as a phenomenon. Thus, to discern how slavery functioned and who the enslaved were requires a certain amount of ‘divining’ or well-informed guesswork. Luckily, a wealth of extant documentary evidence and literary, largely monastic, texts are available for such an endeavour. To do such imaginative work responsibly requires careful attention to brief references to the enslaved, to the larger world in which they moved, and to how scriptural appropriation of slave imagery among monks masks the presence of actual enslaved individuals within the community.