Slavery in Iran took different forms across the region's long imperial history. In the Achaemenid period, surviving administrative records show a mixed labor system that included tribute, corvée, dependent work groups, prisoners, household servants, and enslaved people. The Persepolis ration tablets therefore cannot be treated as a simple register of slaves: they document coercive imperial labor allocation, but also workers with differing legal and social positions.

In later Persian states, enslaved people were used in households, courts, armies, and agricultural work, and Iran was connected to slave-trading routes across the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. Status, origin, gender, and function shaped enslaved people's experiences, so court and military advancement by a minority did not remove the coercion involved in capture, sale, and household control.

Legal slavery ended under the Pahlavi state. Iran's 1929 law against the purchase and sale of slaves declared that no person in Iran could be regarded as a slave, freed enslaved people entering Iranian territory or territorial waters, and criminalized slave trading and acts of ownership over another person. The law distinguished abolition of legal ownership from later questions of forced labor and human trafficking, which are addressed through other legislation. The Antislavery in Domestic Legislation database reproduces the abolition provision and summarizes subsequent Iranian law.

Sources

Antislavery in Domestic Legislation: Iran

Richard T. Hallock, Persepolis Fortification Tablets (University of Chicago Press, 1969).