The Evaluation of Children’s Labor During Proto Elamite Period in Late 4th Millennium B.C. Iran1

Authors

1 PhD Candidate of Prehistoric Archaeology, Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Humanities, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.

2 Assistant Professor, Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Humanities, Varamin-Pishva Branch, Islamic Azad University, Varamin, Iran (Corresponding Author).

Abstract

Children are a big part of any society. But the meaning of childhood is different from one society to another. This leads to specific child-rearing habits, legal status, and general living conditions. Childhood is more than a biological stage in human development, but a social and political concept, and Iran in the late 4th millennium was no exception to this rule. Children’s status has been largely understudied in Proto-literate texts, both in ancient Iran and Mesopotamia. This is not due to a lack of data, while, on the contrary, according to our preliminary estimates, about 50 proto-Elamite texts in a collection of about 1650 written records from all across Iran dating back to about 3300–2800 BC provide insights into the lives of children. But information about them is unevenly distributed across different textual genres and is made more difficult by the lexicon and semantic complexities of the Proto-Elamite writing system. Furthermore, despite the abundance of archaeological data and somehow written texts, we still do not understand many details of how proto-Elamite societies in Iran were organized. Many of the Proto-Elamite tablets from ancient Iran are economic and legal records that are unfairly considered “dull” by some. They originate in the administration archives of pastoral nomads’ households of Khans or elites ruling over the community, where they were complex estates, centers of production and redistribution run by bureaucrats trained in writing and accounting. The article aims to discuss a corpus of clay tablets related to child labor in Proto-Elamite. These clay tablets confirm the presence of children, both male and female, among the workers of Proto-Elamite households and administration institutions. Proto-Elamite texts offer complex patterns of classifying workers according to their gender and age. These tablets describe workers as male or female and then distinguish between adults and children according to their rations. 

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References

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pazhoheshha-ye Bastan shenasi Iran
Volume 14, Issue 41
English Articles
September 2024
Pages 115-131

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