Foreigners, Deportees and Slaves as Agents of Change and Cultural Transfer. Some Reflections on the Neo-Assyrian Period

Slavery has often been connected with foreign provenance, as a result of wars or through trade. Slaves were often forcefully displaced people who, like deportees, had various relations with the communities they lived in and differing possibilities of expressing and transmitting their own culture. The focus of this paper is to look for traces of these dynamics in everyday life, i.e. to identify patterns of social relations and administrative organization which determined how deportees and slaves acted and were managed in the scenario of the Neo-Assyrian empire.