Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs. Archibald Henry Sayce
or otherwise deal with her property as she chose. The dowry, in fact, must have been her original charter of freedom.
But it was so because it was given by her father, and not by the bridegroom. Where it was the gift of the bridegroom it was but a civilized form of purchasing the bride. In such a case the husband had a right to the person and possessions of the wife, inasmuch as he had bought her; as much right, in fact, as he had to the person and possessions of a slave. The wife was merely a superior slave.
Where, however, the dowry was the gift of the bride's father the conditions were reversed. The husband received not only a wife, he received also an estate along with her. He it was upon whom the benefit was conferred, and he had to accept the conditions offered him, not to make them. In a commercial state like Babylonia, property represented personalty, and the personalty of the wife accordingly remained with the family from which her property was derived, rather than with the husband, to whom the use of it was lent. Hence the independence of the married woman in Babylonia and her complete freedom of action as regards her husband. The property she possessed, the personalty it represented, belonged to herself alone.
Traces, however, may be detected of an older order of things, which once existed, at all events, in the Semitic element of the Babylonian population. The dowry had to be paid to the husband, to be deposited, as it were, in his “hand.” It was with him that the marriage contract was made. This must surely go back to an age when the marriage portion was really given to the bridegroom, and he had the same right over it as was enjoyed until recently by the husband in England. Moreover, the right of divorce retained by the husband, like the fact that the bride was given away by a male relation, points in the same direction. According to an early Sumerian law, while the repudiation of the wife on the part of the husband was punishable only with a small fine, for the repudiation of the husband by the wife the penalty was death. A deed drawn up in the time of Khammurabi shows that this law was still in force in the age of Abraham. It lays down that if the wife is unfaithful to her husband she may be drowned, while the husband can rid himself of his wife by the payment only of a maneh of silver. Indeed, as late as the time of Nebuchadnezzar, the old law remained unrepealed, and we find a certain Nebo-akhi-iddin, who married a singing-woman, stipulating in the marriage contract that if he should divorce her and marry another he was to pay her six manehs, but if, on the contrary, she committed adultery, she should be put to death with “an iron sword.”
In this instance, however, the husband married beneath him, and in view of the antecedents of the wife the penalty with which she was threatened in case of unfaithfulness was perhaps necessary. She came to him, moreover, without either a dowry or family relations who could give her away. She was thus little better than the concubines whom the Babylonian was allowed to keep by the side of his lawful wife. But even so, the marriage contract had to be made out in full legal form, and the penalty to be paid for her divorce was as much as £54. With this she could have lived comfortably and probably have had no difficulty in finding another husband.
The concubine was usually a slave who had been bought by the bridegroom. Occasionally, by agreement with the parents, the wife herself was in much the same position. Thus Dagil-ili, who married the daughter of a lady named Khammâ, gave the mother one and a half manehs of silver and a slave worth half a maneh, and agreed that if he married another wife he would give her daughter a maneh and send her back to her old home. Here the husband practically buys his wife, though even so the law obliged him to divorce her if he married again, and also fined him for doing so. Khammâ was apparently in financial difficulties, and consequently, instead of furnishing her daughter with a dowry, received money from the bridegroom. It was a private arrangement, and utterly opposed to the usual custom. The parents had, however, the power of selling their children before they came of age, and where the parents were dead, the same power was possessed—at any rate in Assyria—by a brother in the case of a sister. Doubtless the power was restricted by law, but the instances in which we hear of its being exercised are so rare that we do not know what these restrictions were.
Nor do we know the reasons which were considered sufficient to justify divorce. The language of the early laws would seem to imply that originally it was quite enough to pronounce the words: “Thou art not my wife,” “Thou art not my husband.” But the loss of the wife's dowry and the penalties attached to divorce must have tended to check it on the part of the husband, except in exceptional circumstances. Perhaps want of children was held to be a sufficient pretext for it; certainly adultery must have been so. Another cause of divorce was a legal one: a second marriage invalidated the first, if the first wife was still alive.
This is a very astonishing fact in a country where polygamy was allowed. It proves that polygamy was greatly restricted in practice, and that the tendency of the law was to forbid it altogether. Among the multitudinous contracts of the second Babylonian empire it is difficult to find any which show that a man had two legitimate wives living at one and the same time. The high position of the mother of the family, her independence and commercial equality with her husband, were all against it. It is only where the wife is a bought slave that polygamy can flourish.
In early times, it is true, the rich Babylonian indulged in the possession of more than one wife. Some contracts of the age of Khammurabi, translated by Mr. Pinches, are particularly instructive in this respect. We hear in them of a certain Arad-Samas, who first married a lady called Taram-Sagila and then her adopted sister Iltani. Iltani, it is ordained, shall be under the orders of her sister, shall prepare her food, carry her chair to the Temple of Merodach, and obey her in all things. Not a word is said about the divorce of the first wife; it is taken for granted that she is to remain at the head of the household, the younger and second wife acting as her servant. The position of Iltani, in fact, is not very different from that of a slave, and it is significant that neither wife brought a dowry with her.
As we have seen in the case of Dagil-ili, the law and custom of later Babylonia display a complete change of feeling and practice. Marriage with a second wife came to involve, as a matter of course, divorce from the first, even where there had been a mésalliance and the first wife had been without a dowry. The woman had thus gained a second victory; the rule that bound her in regard to marriage was now applied to the man. The privilege of marrying two husbands at once had been denied her; usage was now denying a similar privilege to him. It was only when the first wife was dead or divorced that a second could be taken; the wife might have a successor, but not a rival.
The divorced wife was regarded by the law as a widow, and could therefore marry again. A deed of divorce, dated in the reign of the father of Khammurabi, expressly grants her this right. To the remarriage of the widow there was naturally no bar; but the children by the two marriages belonged to different families, and were kept carefully distinct. This is illustrated by a curious deed drawn up at Babylon, in the ninth year of Nabonidos. A certain Bel-Katsir, who had been adopted by his uncle, married a widow who already had a son. She bore him no children, however, and he accordingly asked the permission of his uncle to adopt his step-son, thereby making him the heir of his uncle's property. To this the uncle objected, and it was finally agreed that if Bel-Katsir had no child he was to adopt his own brother, and so secure the succession of the estate to a member of his own family. The property of the mother probably went to her son; but she had the power to leave it as she liked. This may be gathered from a will, dated in the seventh year of Cyrus, in which a son leaves property to his father in case of death, which had come to him from his maternal grandfather and grandmother. The property had been specially bequeathed to him, doubtless after his mother's death, the grandmother passing over the rest of her descendants in his favor.
The marriage ceremony was partly religious, partly civil; no marriage was legally valid without a contract duly attested and signed. The Babylonians carried their business habits into all departments of life, and in the eyes of the law matrimony was a legal contract, the forms of which had to be duly observed. In the later days of Babylonian history the legal and civil aspect of the rite seems to have been exclusively considered, but at an earlier period it required also the sanction of religion; and Mr. Pinches has published a fragmentary Sumerian text in which the religious ceremony is described. Those who officiated at it, first placed their hands and feet against the hands and feet of the bridegroom, then the bride laid her neck by the side of his, and he was made to say to her: “Silver and gold shall fill thy lap; thou art my wife; I am thy husband. Like the fruit of an