Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

HONOR AND DEGRADAT I ON 17 9
scale and social importance of war, and the increasing centralization
of the state that accompanied it.34 This is more convincing. Certainly,
the more militaristic the state, the harsher its laws tended to be toward
women. But I would add another, complementary argument. As I have
emphasized, historically, war, states, and markets all tend to feed off
one another. Conquest leads to taxes. Taxes tend to be ways to create
markets, which are convenient for soldiers and administrators. In the
specific case of Mesopotamia, all of this took on a complicated relation
to an explosion of debt that threatened to turn all human relationsand
by extension, women's bodies-into potential commodities. At the
same time, it created a horrified reaction on the part of the (male) winners
of the economic game, who over time felt forced to go to greater
and greater lengths to make clear that their women could in no sense
be bought or sold.
A glance at the existing material . on Mesopotamian marriage gives
us a clue as to how this might have happened.
It is common anthropological wisdom that bridewealth tends to
be typical of situations where population is relatively thin, land not a
particularly scarce resource, and therefore, politics are all about controlling
labor. Where population is dense and land at a premium, one
tends to instead find dowry: adding a woman to the household is adding
another mouth to feed, and rather than being paid off, a bride's
father is expected to contribute something (land, wealth, money . . .)
to help support his daughter in her new home.35 In Sumerian times, for
instance, the main payment at marriage was a huge gift of food paid by
the groom's father to the bride's, destined to provide a sumptuous feast
for the wedding.36 Before long, however, this seems to have split into
two payments, one for the wedding, another to the woman's father,
calculated-and often paid-in silver.37 Wealthy women sometimes appear
to have ended up with the money: at least, many appear to have
to worn silver arm and leg rings of identical denominations.
However as time went on, this payment, called the terhatum, often
began to take on the qualities of a simple purchase. It was referred
to as "the price of a virgin"-not a mere metaphor, since the illegal
deflowering of a virgin was considered a property crime against her
father.38 Marriage was referred to as "taking possession" of a woman,
the same word one would use for the seizure of goods.39 In principle,
a wife, once possessed, owed her husbands strict obedience, and often
could not seek a divorce even in cases of physical abuse.
For women with wealthy or powerful parents, all this remained
largely a matter of principle, modified considerably in practice. Merchants'
daughters, for example, typically received substantial cash