Slavery was quite common in classical Greece too, especially in Sparta.
Re:How Ancient People Saw Themselves
by username332211 on Thursday October 30, 2025 @11:51AM
(#45761404)
That was chattel slavery which doesn't generate the same feelings of devotion compared to divine monarchy. We've all seen the great sadness of the North Korean people at the passing of their Dear Leaders.
This in spite of the tendency of said Dear Leaders to keep their charges in famine conditions, something absent even from most modern systems that are close to chattel slavery, for example in the Gulf states and in human trafficking operations.
Many people in USA are very fond of their Dear Leader, despite cuts on basic survival needs such as food stamps.
Re:How Ancient People Saw Themselves
by KineticLensman on Thursday October 30, 2025 @10:53AM
(#45760707)
Athens too - the vast majority of the population were slaves or 'metics' - non-Athenian foreigners. Some slaves worked as partners with their citizen master and it wasn't unusual for such a slave to be adopted into a family and thus become a citizen. Such slaves had greater rights than women, who could never become citizens.
Re:How Ancient People Saw Themselves
by ahazred8ta on Saturday November 01, 2025 @03:02PM
(#45784346)
Doonesbury: "Aha! The Hittites!" "You know their work?" "Complete degenerates. But tough to beat after they invented iron." https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1978/12/26
Ea-Nasir's buddies were experimenting with adding hematite flux to remove slag from copper. They wanted to improve their copper, and wound up giving us IRON. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-year-copper-smelting-site-key....
On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the sea.)