Origins of Eunuchs and Human Castration

[JesusA]

Castration began long before the first intentional eunuchs, whom I define as humans castrated for the advantages that they then provide. Castrated with the intention that they live following their surgery.

Among our closest relatives, the chimpanzee, a defeated male sometimes has his testicles bitten or ripped off after defeat in battle for dominance. Among humans, we know that the defeated were sometimes castrated after defeat with no concern about whether they survived. One early record of this is the Palette of King Narmer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmer_Palette) of Egypt, dated c. 3000 to 2920 BCE. On it are depicted ten of the defeated. They have been decapitated, and their severed genitals are placed on top of their heads. Some of the victory monuments to Pharaohs in later years depict baskets of severed genitals of defeated opponents brought before the pharaoh for counting. One stele at Karnak celebrating a victory by the army of King Merneptah of the 19th Dynasty (r. 1213-1203 BCE) shows piles of severed genitals and writing stating that 6,111 severed penises of the defeated were presented to the king.

Robert Englund (1995, 2009) has written about both pigs and slaves in Sumer during the late Uruk period (3350-3000 BCE). Among other points, he notes that accounting records list slaves together with pigs, but separately from sheep and goats. He notes that slaves are listed in the format that is used for “herded animals” as opposed to other accounting categories. Slaves are separated into male and female categories. They are further separated into age categories: child in first year, child in second year, child in third year, four years of age until working age, and of working age.

Englund then writes that full working age was probably somewhere between four and six, pointing out that bonded labor (modern-day slaves) in India are put to manual labor making bricks by five or six. It would be expected that slaves in Sumer would be put to physical labor by the same age. In the Sumerian cities built of mud brick, they may well have been put to the same brick-making task when they were young as are the contemporary Indian children.

The first documented instance of castration where the person was expected to live and be productive (as a slave) is from the Sumerian city of Lagash in about 2100 BCE. Kazuya Maekawa (1980, 1982) has written about that period. Weaving was a major industry in Lagash with thousands of slave weaving women, overseen by free males. The slave women had many children, all slaves. The girls grew up to become weaving women like their mothers, but the question was what to do about the boys. On the model of domestic animals, they were castrated and set to work. The boys were treated as domestic animals, not needed for breeding purposes and with the knowledge that castration would reduce their aggressive behavior. The earliest Sumerian word for “eunuch” (amar-KUD) was the same as that for a castrated donkey. The word was applied to slave boys above the age of four or five who would have been castrated just like the donkeys.

New tasks were soon found for the castrated boys. As they grew older, they graduated to digging canals and hauling barges. Soon some of their other qualities were observed. There are records of choruses of a hundred eunuchs as praise singers to the Sumerian gods. That they were sterile made them useful in both temple and palace. In the palace, they quickly moved beyond guardians and servants of women to roles in the palace administration.

Maekawa's reading of Sumerian texts finds some with large numbers of castrated boys in a single location, such as one that lists 267 castrated boys. Another tablet lists 85 castrated boys under the supervision of a single individual. (Maekawa 1982) Some tablets list numbers of castrated boys given as gifts from Lagash to other city states.

By the time of the Assyrian Empire, eunuchs held some of the highest positions, including treasurer and head of the palace guards. They were frequently sent to administer distant regions, sometimes as civil administrators, sometimes as the military commanders. Julian Reade (2009) has described some of the eunuch administrators as superfluous royal sons, who were castrated to prevent them from warring for the crown. The kings are known to have had 100 or more children, half of whom would have been boys. When a king died, surviving (uncastrated) sons would fight for the throne. Better to have two or three, rather than 50 or 60. It is known that the castrated sons sometimes allied themselves with a fovorite to become the next king. It is known, too, that important families sometimes also castrated sons to provide them with future employment in the palace bureaucracy.

The numbers of eunuchs quickly grew in all the kingdoms of the Middle East. The kingdom of Urartu emerged in the mid-9th century BC and dominated the Armenian Highlands in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Urartu frequently warred with Assyria and became, for a time, the most powerful state in the Near East. Weakened by constant conflict, it was eventually conquered by Cyrus the Great in the middle of the 6th century BC. Archaeologically, it is noted for its large fortresses and sophisticated metalwork.

A cuneiform tablet found at one of the palace sites enumerates the members of the palace personnel of the Urartian city named Rusahinili Qilbani. Listed are 5,507 persons in the palace, 3,892 (71%) of whom are specifically listed as eunuchs. (Grekyan 2016)

In later ages, castrated boys were often required as part of regular taxation/tribute. The Assyrian state required 1000 talents of silver and 500 castrated boys as annual taxation from the conquered state of Babylon. Other conquered states paid fewer castrated boys. As late as the 18th century, some districts in modern India and Bangladesh paid taxes in castrated boys. The British eventually put a stop to the practice. (Hinchy 2015)

The idea of eunuchs, wherever they are found in the world, appears to have spread from that single invention in Sumer. All castration to produce eunuchs (rather than as an act of vengeance) everywhere in the world that it has been practiced seems to have spread from Sumer.
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Englund, Robert K. (1995). Late Uruk Pigs and other Herded Animals. U. Kinkbeiner, R. Dittmann & H. Hauptmann, eds., Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte Vorderasiens. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, pp. 121-133.

Englund, Robert K. (2009). The Smell of the Cage. Cuneiform Digital Library Journal, 2009:4; 1-27.

Grekyan, Yervand. 2016. A Note on the Toprakkale Tablet. N.A.B.U. 2016/1, pp. 54-56.

Hinchy, Jessica (2015). Enslaved childhoods in eighteen-century Awadh. South Asian History and Culture 6(3):380-400.

Maekawa, Kazuya. (1980). Animal and human castration in Sumer, Part II: Human castration in the Ur III period. Zinbun (The Research Institute for Humanistic Studies, Kyoto University) 16: 1-56.

Maekawa, Kazuya. (1982). Animal and human castration in Sumer, part III: More texts of Ur III Lagash on the term amar-KUD. Zinbun (The Research Institute for Humanistic Studies, Kyoto University) 18: 95-121.

Reade, Julian. (2009). Fez, diadem, turban, chaplet: Power-dressing at the Assyrian court. Studia Orientalia (The Finnish Oriental Society) 106: 239-264.

[NaturalEunuch]

Great post! Didn't China have eunuchs before the Sumerians?

[JesusA]

The earliest discovered mention of human castration in China is on an oracle bone that is hundreds of years later than the eunuchs in Sumer. The earliest clear mention of intentional eunuchs comes after trade contact with the Middle East. I will post some historical information about Chinese eunuchs later.