A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Several women, including empresses Hamiko and Jingu, are mentioned among the early rulers of Japan, gaining power through both their family connections and their role as shamans capable of hearing and transmitting the advice of the gods; accounts of their lives mix myth and history, but they became important parts of Japanese national traditions. In Mesoamerica, Lady Ahpo-Katun, Lady Ahpo-Hel, Lady Zac Kuk, and other women ruled Maya city-states on their own. Reliefs sometimes show them dressed as male gods, just as Hatshepsut was in some of her portraits, or wearing costumes that blended male and female clothing in ways that suggest a range of gender and transgender possibilities. The wives of Maya rulers participated along with their husbands in the blood-letting rituals that were a key symbol of royal power. Ceremonies involving actual royal blood could be found in other places as well, and in even more places royal blood was understood to be a real substance whose power trumped other distinctions.

  Marriages and families in cities and states

  Rulers’ families were different from other families in some ways, but in other ways they were not, because urbanization, writing, and the growth of the state shaped family life at all social levels. Conversely, the aims and actions of families and kin groups influenced larger-scale socio-economic structures, government policies, and cultural patterns. Families in the ancient world (and beyond) were both sites and agents of historical transformation.

  Certain trends can be seen wherever cities and states developed, which written records can allow us to trace in greater detail, particularly for urban dwellers of middling status and above. These patterns were remarkably long-lived, with many of them continuing for millennia and some still evident today. For urban families, as for hereditary rulers, procreation and property were the family’s intertwined core threads. Because marriage linked two families as well as two persons, the choice of a spouse was much too important a matter to be left to young people to decide. Marriages were most often arranged by one’s parents, other family members, or marriage brokers. They assessed the possible marriage partners and chose someone appropriate, whom they hoped would produce children and enhance or at least maintain the family’s socio-economic status. Families consulted astrologers or diviners or other types of people who predicted the future for advice about a suggested spouse and the most propitious time for the wedding. In the Roman Empire, June was a favored month, as it was named after Juno, the goddess of marriage and childbirth, and as children conceived in June would be born in the spring, increasing their chances of survival.

  Marriage had aspects of a business agreement: the groom or his father offered the prospective bride’s father a gift, and if this was acceptable the bride’s father or other family members provided his daughter with a dowry, which generally technically remained hers, though her husband administered it during the course of the marriage. Dowries might consist of land, movable goods, jewelry, slaves, and later also coinage or promissary notes for future payments. Like other business arrangements, a marriage might be formalized by a written contract, signed by the fathers of the spouses or by the groom and the bride’s father. No religious or public official played any role in this; marriage was a legally and culturally recognized tie, but it was a private familial agreement. Weddings were central occasions in a family’s life, with much of a family’s resources often going to pay for the ceremony and setting up the new household. In most urbanized societies, living arrangements for spouses were patrilocal: the bride came to live in or near the ancestral home of the groom, or in a place determined by his family rather than hers.

  Sexual relations finalized the marriage; if they did not occur for some reason, negotiations generally began to return the gifts and dissolve the contract. In South Asia, religious ideas about the importance of family life and many children led to a pattern in which all men and women were expected to marry. Women in particular married very young, and widows and women who had not had sons were excluded from wedding festivities. Anything that interfered with procreation, including exclusively same-sex attachments or religious vows taken early in life, was frowned upon. The domestic fire had great symbolic importance, with husband and wife making regular offerings in front of it. Children, particularly boys, were shown great affection and developed close attachments to their parents, especially their mothers. These mothers often continued to live in the house of their eldest son upon widowhood, creating stresses between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. Cruel and angry mothers-in-law were standard figures in the stories of classical India, reflecting what was often harsh treatment of young women in real life. (In the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe, widowed mothers generally did not live with their married sons, so the spiteful old woman in stories is generally a stepmother rather than a mother-in-law.)

  Arranged marriage did not always preclude the possibility of spousal affection and romantic love. Among the tax lists and legal codes that are the most common records left from ancient societies, there is also some erotic love poetry, although we have no way of knowing whether this poetry was written as a prelude to marriage, during a marriage, to someone not the author’s spouse, or perhaps even as a metaphor for love of a god. Material evidence is a bit firmer: Men’s tomb inscriptions from New Kingdom Egypt and the Roman Republic occasionally refer affectionately to their wives, and couples were sometimes portrayed standing close to one another or arm in arm.

  Marriage itself was a private agreement, but as soon as states were established they attempted to regulate aspects of family life. Early written law codes often included provisions regarding dowries, inheritance, and other types of property transfer within families, and also provisions about sexual behavior. About a third of the several hundred provisions in the law code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi from 1790 BCE, for example, concerned families and sex, including laws regarding adultery, desertion, separation and divorce, the husband’s sex with servants or slaves and his treatment of the children that resulted from this, rape within the family, premarital sex, incest, breach of marital contract, second marriages after divorce or death, adoption, and the complexities of inheritance and ownership of property that could result from all of these.

  The code of Hammurabi clearly envisions the husband/father as the dominant person economically and socially in the household. His decisions were expected to determine the economic (and thus marital) fate of his children by his wife or servants. If he could prove that his wife “wishes to leave it [the household], plunges into debt, tries to ruin her house, neglects her husband, and is judicially convicted,” he could divorce her without returning her dowry. That clause, and others in the code, provide evidence that women were perhaps not as dependent as the male, educated, well-to-do Babylonian lawmakers hoped they would be, however. If a wife “plunges into debt,” someone had to loan her the money, and other provisions of the code discuss women contracting debts before and during marriage, husbands giving their wives “fields, gardens, and houses,” and mothers choosing which of their sons to favor in handing on property. (The ability to decide who gets your property after you die, called “testamentary freedom,” was often restricted by gender, birth position in a family, and other factors; the Babylonian code is unusual in the amount of testamentary freedom it gives to married women.) Although women are always a tiny minority of those who appear in the sparse records of actual legal and financial transactions, sources from many parts of the ancient world suggest that women may have made more family decisions and controlled more of what went on in the household than laws alone would indicate.

  Women were particularly active in the Greek city-state of Sparta, which developed family structures very different from those anywhere else in the ancient world. In Sparta between the eighth and the fifth centuries BCE, all activity was directed toward military ends. Citizen boys left their homes at seven years old and lived in military camps until they were thirty, eating and training with boys and men their own age. They married at about eighteen to women of roughly the same age, but saw the
ir wives only when they sneaked out of camp. Military discipline was harsh—this is the origin of the word “spartan”—but severity was viewed as necessary to prepare men both to fight external enemies such as Sparta’s rival city Athens and to control the slaves who lived in the city and the dependent farmers who lived in the rural area around it, groups that vastly outnumbered the citizens.

  In this militaristic atmosphere, citizen women were remarkably free. As in all ancient societies, there was an emphasis on childbearing, but the Spartan leadership viewed maternal health as important for the bearing of healthy, strong children, and so encouraged women to participate in athletics and to eat well. With men in military service most of their lives, citizen women owned property and ran the household, and were not physically restricted or secluded. Despite the emphasis on procreation, same-sex attachments were widely accepted, with male same-sex relationships in particular viewed as militarily expedient, leading men to fight more fiercely in defense of their male lovers and comrades, as well as their wives and children.

  The unusual family and gender structures of Sparta did not leave much of a legacy, however, for the dominant city-state in classical Greece culturally, politically, and intellectually was Athens. As noted above, Athenian democracy made a sharp distinction between citizen and non-citizen, with citizenship handed down from father to son, symbolized by a ceremony held on the tenth day after a child was born in which the father laid his son on the floor of the house and gave him a name; this ceremony marked a boy’s legal birth. It was thus very important to Athenian citizen men that their sons be their own, so that their wives were increasingly secluded in special parts of the house. Female citizens participated in religious festivals and funerals, and may have attended some theatre performances and other public events, although the extent to which they did so is debated. In contrast to most classical societies, Athenians regarded the individual man, rather than the family, as the basis of the social order; an adolescent was to learn how to be a citizen in a hierarchical tutorial relationship with an older man. That relationship might involve sex, with the older man taking the active (penetrator) role viewed as appropriate for adult male citizens, but it was supposed to become intellectualized and “platonic” once the adolescent became an adult. (How often actual sexual relationships between men or between men and women approached the ideal in Athens is difficult to say, as most of the surviving sources are prescriptive, idealized, or fictional.)

  Athenian norms and ideas were carried widely around the Mediterranean and beyond by the armies of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE and by the Hellenistic states set up as hereditary monarchies ruled by Greeks after his death. In some places these clashed with existing practices. In Egypt, for example, women had long done business and worked in public without head coverings, managed their own property, served as guarantors for the loans of others, and acted on their own behalf in legal matters, including appearing in court. This was startling to Greek conquerors, and some Egyptian men attempted to take advantage of the more restrictive Greek laws and deprive female family members of their property. Egyptian legal records from the third century BCE include cases in which women fought such moves, and demanded to remain under the more gender-egalitarian Egyptian legal codes.

  Marriages in the ancient world sometimes ended with divorce, but much more often with the death of one spouse. Law codes include stipulations about what would happen when either the man or the woman died first, but because a woman’s economic situation, social position, and legal standing were generally more dependent on her husband’s than his was on hers, a husband’s death was a more dramatic rupture in the family. At his death, a wife became a widow, a word for which there is no male equivalent in many ancient languages and one of the few words in English and other modern languages in which the male, widower, is derived from the female instead of the other way around. Her situation varied considerably from place to place, and it changed over time. In much of South Asia and China, when a husband died his widow came under the legal authority of her eldest son or her husband’s brother or other family members. One of the articles of the Manusmrti (“Laws of Manu”), a long text detailing social and ritual obligations compiled between 200 BCE and 200 CE in India, states: “In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, and when her lord is dead, to her sons; a woman must never be independent.” Among Central Asian nomads, the widow was expected to marry the brother of her dead husband—a practice called levirate marriage—which appears to have been a common practice in other areas as well. This was a way to provide for her and her children, keep them within the clan, and assure that a sexually experienced woman came quickly under a husband’s authority. The Hebrew Bible mandates levirate marriage if the widow was childless, with her firstborn son considered the child and heir of her dead husband, but it also provides a way for the man to opt out of this. Levirate marriages never seem to have been very common among Jews, however, and grew even less so over time.

  2.4 On this krater used to mix wine and water, made in fifth-century BCE Athens and attributed to the anonymous vase painter known as the Kleophrades painter, a discus thrower gets tips from his trainer. Athenian vases and dishes often depict young male athletes, who generally competed in the nude, as festivals celebrated both athletic prowess and the male body.

  In contrast to places where widows quickly came under the control of male family members, in other places a woman’s ability to act independently increased after her husband died. There were no categorical statements prescribing or praising this to parallel Confucian texts or the Manusmrti—perhaps because the authors of such texts were all male—but records from Egypt, cities around the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period (336–100 BCE), Imperial Rome, and even the Bible show widows buying and selling land, making loans, giving charitable donations, or providing support for religious establishments. Widows were somewhat suspect because they were not under direct male control, but such actions were acceptable because widows were often guardians for their children and so in control of family finances. Even in China and India, descriptive sources suggest that some widows were more economically active than prescriptive sources imply, managed the assets of their dowries and gave donations to Buddhist monasteries.

  Family patterns in kin-based societies

  Family life in the ancient period is harder to examine for parts of the world in which there were few cities and where traditions and norms were transmitted orally. Historians and anthropologists use a variety of means to study kinship organizations, marital patterns, living arrangements, and other aspects of family structure: written records from later periods, reports of outsiders, direct interviews and oral histories with living individuals, archaeological remains, and linguistic analysis of words denoting family and kin. All of these provide evidence, but they also have limitations. What is described as “traditional” may often be quite new, for family patterns are not static, and groups living in areas without strong written traditions developed very diverse family forms and arrangements.

  Some patterns of family structure and function appear to have been fairly common among agriculturalists, pastoralists, and foragers who did not live in states. Those considered kin tended to include a fairly wide group of relatives, and this kin group had a voice in domestic and other matters, such as who would marry and when they would do so, who would have access to land, animals, or other economic resources, or whose conduct was unacceptable and worthy of censure or punishment. These decisions were arrived at through a process of negotiation and discussion within the family, with the influence of each member dependent on the situation. The opinions of older family members generally carried more weight than those of younger, the opinions of first born more than later born, and the opinions of men more than women. These two hierarchies—age and gender—interacted in complex ways dependent on the issue at hand, with older women sometimes having control of younger men on certain matters. Death did not end one’s auth
ority, for the ancestors now inhabiting the unseen world could also intervene in family life.

  Marital patterns and the resultant living and ownership arrangements varied. In agricultural areas of Africa, many marriages were polygynous, and families lived in house-compounds in which each wife had her own house, cattle, fields, and property. In eastern and southern Africa, groups such as the Khoisan and Nilotes were pastoralists, with the men typically caring for cattle, the higher-status animals, and the women caring for smaller ones such as goats. Cattle often formed the bridewealth that husbands presented to their wives’ families on marriage, with fathers and male elders retaining control over young men’s marriages through their control of the cattle. Among Germanic and Slavic peoples in Europe and Western Asia, wealthy and powerful men had several wives, but they all lived in the same household; polygamy was not common among ordinary people, nor was female property ownership as widespread as it was in Africa.

  Many cultures in Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific were matrilineal, in which membership in a kin group was traced through the female line and a man’s heirs were his sister’s children. This meant not necessarily that women were economically or legally autonomous, but that they depended more on their brothers than their husbands. Their brothers also depended on them, however, for many of these cultures also had systems of marriage in which a husband brought a bridewealth to his wife’s family. A man often used the money, land, or goods that the family had received as the bridewealth at the marriage of his sister as his own bridewealth, so that his marriage was dependent on his sister marrying well. A prospective groom also frequently performed brideservice for the family of his future wife, working for his future father-in-law either before the wedding or in a period of trial marriage. Matrilineal inheritance systems encouraged close lifelong relations among siblings, with women relying on their birth families for support if they came into conflict with their husbands. This was particularly true in groups that were also matrilocal, such as those in eastern North America, in which husbands came to live with their wives’ clans and related women lived together. Relations with one’s mother’s kin were thus more important than those with one’s father’s kin or even one’s spouse, and children often regarded their mother’s brothers with particular respect.