| Sumario: | The emergence of slavery in Mesopotamia is of crucial importance for historians who study ancient cultures as well as for comparativists interested in its influence on later societies. But the social, economic, and legal contexts in which "slaves" appear in cuneiform texts differ so widely not only between ancient and modern forms but also within intracultural contexts, such that the nature of the underlying concepts and practices are hardly clear. Given these indistinctions, the Mesopotamian terms for "slave(ry)" warrant closer scrutiny. Remarkably, the relevant words in both Sumerian and Akkadian are etymologically opaque and semantically uncertain, obscuring the precise status denoted by the words arad / ardu. This paper delves into philological problems in order to argue that the ambiguity of these terms was deliberately perpetuated by structured linguistic choices. Definitional vagueness generated and permitted nonspecific meanings for personal status, legal object, and economic institution, which enabled slavery to change and thrive across the ages. This deliberate ambiguity allowed slavery and mastery to persist in legal and commercial practice untroubled by social logic or critical definitions—as concepts whose protean meanings were transmitted to successive historical cultures as both profoundly ambivalent and natural.
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