section_path: History/Middle East
section_name: Middle East
paragraph_text: Middle East
  
  In the earliest known records, slavery is treated as an established institution. The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1760 BC), for example, prescribed death for anyone who helped a slave escape or who sheltered a fugitive. The Bible mentions slavery as an established institution. Slavery existed in Pharaonic Egypt, but studying it is complicated by terminology used by the Egyptians to refer to different classes of servitude over the course of history. Interpretation of the textual evidence of classes of slaves in ancient Egypt has been difficult to differentiate by word usage alone. The three apparent types of enslavement in Ancient Egypt: chattel slavery, bonded labour, and forced labour.
  
  Historically, slaves in the Arab World came from many different regions, including Sub-Saharan Africa (mainly Zanj), the Caucasus (mainly Circassians), Central Asia (mainly Tartars), and Central and Eastern Europe (mainly Slavs Saqaliba). These slaves were trafficked to the Arab world from Africa via the Trans-Saharan slave trade, the Baqt treaty, the Red Sea slave trade and the Indian Ocean slave trade; from Asia via the Bukhara slave trade; and from Europe via the Prague slave trade, the Venetian slave trade and the Barbary slave trade, respectively.
  
  Between 1517 and 1917, most of the Middle East consisted of the Ottoman Empire. In the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, about one-fifth of the population consisted of slaves. The city was a major centre of the slave trade in the 15th and later centuries.
  
  Eastern European slaves were provided to the Ottoman Empire via the Crimean slave trade by Tatar raids on Slavic villages but also by conquest and the suppression of rebellions, in the aftermath of which entire populations were sometimes enslaved and sold across the Empire, reducing the risk of future rebellion. The Ottomans also purchased slaves from traders who brought slaves into the Empire from Europe and Africa. It has been estimated that some 200,000 slaves – mainly Circassians – were imported into the Ottoman Empire between 1800 and 1909. In 1908, women slaves were still sold in the Ottoman Empire. German orientalist, Gustaf Dalman, reported seeing slaves in Muslim houses in Aleppo, belonging to Ottoman Syria, in 1899, and that boys could be bought as slaves in Damascus and Cairo in as late as 1909.
  
  A major center of slave trade to the Middle east was central Asia, where the Bukhara slave trade had supplied slaves to the Middle East for thousands of years from antiquity until the 1870s. A slave market for captured Russian and Persian slaves was the Khivan slave trade centred in the Central Asian khanate of Khiva. In the early 1840s, the population of the Uzbek states of Bukhara and Khiva included about 900,000 slaves.
  
  By 1870, chattel slavery had been at least formally banned in most areas of the world, with the exception of Muslim lands in Caucasus, Africa, and the Gulf. While slavery was by the 1870s viewed as morally unacceptable in the West, slavery was not considered to be imoral in the Muslim world since it was an institution recognized in the Quran and morally justified under the guise of warfare against non-Muslims, and non-Muslims were kidnapped and enslaved by Muslims around the Muslim world: in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Baluchistan, India, South West Asia and the Philippines. Slaves where marsched in schackles to the coasts of Sudan, Ethiopia and Somali, placed upon dhows and trafficked across the Indian Ocean to the Gulf or Aden, or across the Red Sea to Arabia and Aden, while weak slaves being thrown in the sea; or across the Sahara desert via the Trans-Saharan slave trade to the Nile, while dying from exposure and swollen feet.
  
  Ottoman anti slavery laws where not enforced in the late 19th-century, particularly not in Hejaz; the first attempt to ban the Red Sea slave trade in 1857 resulted in a rebellion in the Hejaz Province, which resulted in Hejza exempted from the ban. The Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1880 formally banned the Red Sea slave trade, but it was not enforced in the Ottoman Provinces in the Arabian Peninsula. In the late 19th-century, the Sultan of Morocco stated to Western diplomats that it was impossible for him to ban slavery because such a ban would not be enforcable, but the British asked him to ensure that the slave trade in Morocco would at least be handled discreet and away from the eyes of foreign wittnesses.
  
  Chattel slavery lasted in most of the Middle East until the 20th-century. The Red Sea slave trade still provided enslaved people from Africa to the Arabian Peninsula after World War II. As recently as the 1960s, Saudi Arabia's slave population was estimated at 300,000. Along with Yemen, the Saudis abolished slavery in 1962.