The chapter investigates predecessors of current concepts of human rights in history. It discusses seeds and traces of ideas of rights about freedom and equality in indigenous societies. It argues that it is a mayor shortcoming of human rights history to neglect the rich normative world of indigenous societies. It addresses in particular the evidence drawn from the documented experience of the victims of (European) human rights violations, including the experience of slavery. It reconstructs manifestations of rights ideas in ancient sources, medieval ideas voiced during popular rebellions, the role of natural rights in the criticism of the subjugation of the Americas and the dawn of an explicit concept of human rights in the Enlightenment. Human rights history has to include normative phenomena that are not human rights but paved the way to their development. It is shown that the roots of rights ideas are concrete moral judgments – for instance, about the injustice of a certain treatment – that are conceptualized in abstract terms, objectified, generalized over cases, universalized over persons and, ultimately, after long struggles, turned into explicit concepts of ethics and law.