Children in the Ancient (and Present-day) Near East
January 2026 | Vol. 14.1
By Daniel Justel
For some time now, the discipline of Assyriology has moved away from the exclusive study of great events, battles, and important people who were once thought to be the only ones who changed the course of history. For decades, Assyriologists have also focused on delving into the daily life of ancient Near Eastern societies: how they lived, how they thought, what they ate, how important religion was in their lives, how they managed their goods, what their education was like, how they honored their dead, did they go to the doctor, what rights there were (actually, were there any rights?), and so on.
The answers to these questions are not universal, since, like any society in any era, the Mesopotamian world was not egalitarian. Society was heterogeneous, and each social class faced everyday problems differently: men, women, rich, poor, skilled workers, farmers, artisans, elders, adults, etc.
Fired clay toy of an animal on wheels, from Ur © The Trustees of the British Museum. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Within this amalgam of variants, we find that some social groups are consistently presented to us in the sources as secondary and even suffering. Among them are the children of the ancient Near East. Yet cuneiform texts positioned minors as subjects of study in their respective societies.
We could say “today more than ever” (but in reality, we should say “today, as always”) we should contemplate the children of ancient Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Israel as passive people on many levels. They were (and are) the ones who suffer the most, the ones who do not realize what is happening around them, the ones who see (sometimes in despair) how their parents give them away in marriage (especially to girls) or directly sell them. Even so, children are never resigned. They want to play, contribute and build. They always did it, are doing and always will do it.
Votive statue of a seated boy from the sanctuary of Eshmun at Bostan ech-Sheikh (Sidon). Marble, ca. 450-300 BCE. Photo by J. Nitschke.
It is in this perspective that we must read the cuneiform texts and archaeological record that inform us about children, their manual production, their goals and desires. The mission of ANE Today is in this sense relevant, as it builds bridges between the present and the past regarding the realities of the ancient Near East. We need to do the same for the world of childhood.
Many are the recent analyses that deal with the study of childhood in ancient Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Israel. However, there has so far been no desire or possibility to capture in a large compendium of studies the History of Children — and the testimonies about them — in the ancient Near East. Progress continues to be made thanks to new research initiatives (excavations, text editions, etc.), bringing together projects, research groups, articles, scientific notes and published volumes.
The latest of these is the special issue of the journal Childhood in the Past. An International Journal, entitled Children in the Ancient Near East . This is a good example of the interest in childhood in the Ancient Near East from different perspectives.
Both the archaeological record and the cuneiform literature provide us with compelling information to assess how children lived in ancient Mesopotamia and Syria. We start from the obvious premise that children had no legal capacity of their own to arrange their present or future. Their lives depended not only on the context in which they were born, but also on the decisions adults made about them. However, the general dynamics of cuneiform legal and administrative texts show us a special attention to children, who were considered an asset to society.
Thus, some legal codes regulate the adoption of children or even education. The Code of Hammurabi (18th century B.C.) reads as follows:
CH 188: If a craftsman takes a young child to rear and then teaches him his craft, he will not be reclaimed.
CH 189: If he should not teach his craft, that rearling shall return to his father’s house.
Translation from M. T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Scholars Press, 1997, p. 119.
In the Middle Assyrian Laws, the importance of the life of a child is contemplated even before the child is born:
Translation from M.T Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Scholars Press, 1997, p. 174.
Legal Text from Assur, from the reign of Tigleth-Pileser I (1114-1076 BC), containing a collection of laws and regulations regarding women. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Vorderasiatisches Museum / Olaf M. Teßmer, CC By-NC-SA 4.0
The thousands of documents attesting to adoptions of children, with various casuistry and possible motivations, reflect a special and positive attention on the adoptee. Generally, these texts express the difficulty of the biological parents to take care of their children, who from the adoption act will become part of another family, inheriting in the future part or the totality of the adoptive parents’ properties. In other occasions it is appreciated that the adopted children are orphans, or even have been abandoned.
Other documents that inform us about the transfer of a child record the sales of minors. It is these texts that most vividly reflect the economic difficulties of historical contexts, since it is generally the parents who sell their children. An example that illustrates the critical socio-economic situation is Syria in the 13th century B.C. Texts from the Emar archive are very eloquent in this regard. One of them reads:
Zadamma, son of Karbu, man of the city of Šatappa, and Ku’e, his wife, have sold their two sons and their two daughters: Ba’ala-bia, Ba’al-bēlu, Išma-Dagān and Ba’ala-ummī, the latter a breast-feeding girl, for 60 shekels of silver, their full price, in the status of slavery, to Ba’al-malik, son of Ba’al-qarrād, the diviner.
Whoever claims the four sons of Zadamma, son of Karbu, must give Ba’al-malik ten other persons, as compensation for them, and may take the children. And now Zadamma, their father, and Ku’e, their mother, have pressed their (children’s) feet in clay.
Text E6 217, from D. Arnaud, Recherches au Pays d’Aštata. Emar VI.3, Textes sumériens et accadiens. Synthèse, 1986, p. 231-233.
Footprints of two of the children of Ku’e pressed into clay and sealed and inscribed by witnesses, from Emar, early 12th century BCE (National Museum Aleppo M10561, M8649). Drawing by Amanda Podany, from Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East (Oxford 2022), fig. 16.2.
Both in periods of crisis and in times of prosperity, children contributed actively to the economic development of the societies of the Ancient Near East. Minors are found working in households, but also performing labor activities among the servile staff managed by the Temple and Palace. A good example is Kassite-era Nippur (especially from 14th-13th centuries B.C., as shown in a recent study by Jonathan Tenney), where children — even while still suckling — worked as builders, gardeners, potters, shepherds, artisans, or scribes.
All these texts (adoptions, sales, child labor, etc), especially those showing children in critical situations, should sound like a bygone era and far away in time. Unfortunately — and with reference to the same geographical areas — we see every day that children continue to live these and other similar realities. In Syria today (where in addition there is now great political uncertainty) there are more than 7 million children in need of humanitarian assistance, and some 3 million of them, aged between 5 and 17, do not have access to basic education (see: https://www.unicef.org/syria/situation-children-syria). Also, in today’s Iraq almost 4 million children are affected by extreme poverty or have been used as soldiers in the continuing war context (1/6 of Iraqi citizens are orphans). The under-5 mortality rate is 27%, a truly overwhelming datum (https://www.humanium.org/en/iraq/). The reality is similar in many Middle Eastern countries (for more information see https://www.humanium.org/en/middle-east-north-africa/).
The knowledge of the lives and situations of children in the past should make us reflect in order to open our eyes to current realities, which are not so different from those of more than 3000 years ago. This opening of the eyes should not be passive, and from different positions should involve an urgent request to international organizations to watch over the lives of minors in contexts of crisis, wars and absence of basic rights. May the scholars of 3000 years from now not speak of our society as they will contemplate their own.
Daniel Justel is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the University of Alcalá (Alcalá de Henares, Madrid). From the disciplines of Assyriology and Biblical Studies, his main lines of research are family law from cuneiform sources and the deported communities in the ancient Near East during the First Millennium BC, especially in the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods. He recently edited a special edition volume for the journal Childhood in the Past, entitled Children in the Ancient Near East.
Further reading:
Justel, Daniel. 2018. Infancia y legalidad en el Próximo Oriente antiguo durante el Bronce Reciente (ca. 1500-1100 a. C.). Ancient Near East Monographs 20. Atlanta: SBL Press.
Justel, Daniel. 2020. “La infancia en la antigua Mesopotamia: 25 años de investigación.” Panta Rei. Revista Digital de Historia y didáctica de la Historia 25, 43-54. doi: 10.6018/pantarei.44551
Flynn, Shawn W. 2018. Children in Ancient Israel. The Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia in Comparative Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Garroway, Kristine H. 2014. Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.
Stol, Marten. 2000. Birth in Babylonia and the Bible. Its Mediterranean Setting. Groningen: STYX Publications.
Tenney, Jonathan S. 2011. Life at the Bottom of Babylonian Society. Servile Laborers at Nippur in the 14th and 13th Centuries B.C. Leiden-Boston: Brill.
Théodoridès, Aristide-Naster, Paul-Ries, Julien (eds.). 1980. L’enfant dans les civilisations orientales / Het Kind in de Oosterse Beschavingen. Leuven: Peeters.
How to cite this article:
Justel, D. 2026. “Children in the Ancient (and Present-day) Near East”, The Ancient Near East Today 14.1. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/children-near-east/.
Want to learn more?
The Sound and the Fury: The Passion for Chariot Racing in Imperial Rome
Post a comment