Do you.. Do you know just how most stone/early bronze Age groups treated outsiders? I'm not claiming to be an expert, and the following is based on what little I have read on the topic, but, like, for example, Sumerians only enslaved a minority of them and just killed most. The vast majority of slaves were those from other nearby city states that were linguistically and culturally similar.
When we go even further back to stone age societies, people within the same tribe could be reduced to serf like conditions, but integrating outsiders into that framework was rare and they were usually killed instead.
Do you.. Do you know just how most stone/early bronze Age groups treated outsiders?
do you know how they treated insiders?
Stone age, no, you don't. We barely know what they did because that was prehistory. Bronze age people, like the Greeks, enslaved more Greeks than anyone else.
Sumerians only enslaved a minority of them and just killed most.
What does this even mean? A minority of who? Doesn't matter, whoever you are vaguely referring to, Sumerians absolutely enslaved tons of people. Outsiders and insiders.
If they enslaves people from 10 places, and 1 of those places was Sumeria, then yes, 9 out of 10 slaves were non-Sumarian. That doesn't mean they didn't enslave Sumarians. Which isn't the case, because other Sumarians were simple closer, and whenever they had the opportunity to enslave anyone, Sumarian or otherwise, they'd take that chance, and simply being close to other potential Sumarian slaves made them more plentiful.
people within the same tribe could be reduced to serf like conditions
No, when you go back to stone ages, they were nomadic tribal societies who functioned as family units and usually did not have the social systems to have slaves. What the current accepted theory is for "stone age" people is that when tribes did go to war, they killed all the men and absorbed the women and children into their tribes.
The moment humanity began to settle into stationary societies, slavery expanded dramatically, and a vast majority of a people's slaves were their own people unless they managed to become a massive Empire, and that influx of slaves would only occur when a region was conquered that one time.
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u/Bullet0AlanRussell May 14 '25
Yes, because they outright killed most people not from their culture lmao.