Marriage And Women In Ancient Babylon
Buying a wife after she had prostituted herself
In his Histories, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus described a lot of unique traditions of many populations. Among all of them, the Ancient Babylonian Marriage Market, where women were sold to both rich and poor men, and the Sacred Prostitution of Mylitta are two of the most interesting.
The Babylonian Marriage Market
Babylon was a really strange city. What if I tell you that there was a marketplace where men could buy a young woman?
In the first book of the Histories Herodotus wrote that:
Once a year, in every village, this is what the Babylonians used to do. They used to collect all the young women who were old enough to be married and take the whole lot of them all at once to a certain place. A crowd of men would form a circle around them there. An auctioneer would get each of the women to stand up one by one, and he would put her up for sale. He used to start with the most attractive girl there, and then, once she had fetched a good price and been bought, he would go on to auction the next most attractive one. They were being sold to be wives, not slaves. All the well-off Babylonian men who wanted wives would outbid one another to buy the good-looking young women, while…
