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+Karl Jacoby writes that it seems "more than coincidental that the region that yields the first evidence of agriculture, the Middle East, is the same one that yields the first evidence of slavery." Indeed, in the ancient Near East, he writes, slavery was "little more than the extension of domestication to humans.''" Most studies of human slavery have railed to emphasize how the enslavement of animals served as the model and inspiration for the enslavement of humans, but there have been notable exceptions.40 Elizabeth Fisher believes that the sexual subjugation of women, as practiced in all the known civilizations of the world, was modeled after the domestication of animals. "The domestication of women followed the initiation of animal keeping," she writes, "and it was then that men began to control women's reproductive capacity, enforcing chastity and sexual repression."41 Fisher maintains that it was the vertical, hierarchical positioning of human master over animal slave that intensified human cruelty and laid the foundation for human slavery. The violation of animals expedited the violation of human beings. In taking them in and feeding them, humans first made friends with animals and then killed them. To do so, they had to kill some sensitivity in themselves. When they began manipulating the reproduction of animals, they were even more personally involved in practices which led to cruelty, guilt, and subsequent numbness. The keeping of animals would seem to have set a model for the enslavement of humans, in particular the large-scale exploitation of women captives for breeding and labor. 42 |