In both Babylonia and Assyria married women enjoyed many liberties. They might carry on business enterprises, borrow or loan, manage their own property and dispose of it at their will. They could seek justice in the courts, and if they belonged to the middle classes, could come and go at pleasure. The women of noble families were more carefully guarded, and seldom appeared unattended in public.
Girls who were not provided with dowries might be purchased and so become superior slaves of their husbands. Children might be sold by their parents and brothers might sell their sisters, but in these countries, slaves were not despised as inferiors and inhumanly treated. They were often adopted into families, and since those of noble birth were not infrequently taken captives in war, the slave might be superior to the owner. However, this last was not so common in Mesopotamia as it was later in Rome. The fact which alone assured slaves of good treatment was that there was generally no race difference to engender feeling between slave and master. Indeed one case is cited in those days of quickly reversed fortunes, where the slave in a few years became the master and his former owner became his property!
Marriage was both a civil and a religious ceremony, and the contract was signed in the presence of a priest. In a code of Babylonian laws compiled about 2250 B.C., a law provided that "If a man has taken a wife and has not executed a marriage-contract, that woman is not a wife." Another provided for one who is helpless: "If a man has married a wife and a disease has seized her, if he is determined to marry a second wife, he shall marry her. He shall not divorce the wife whom the disease has seized. In the home they made together she shall dwell and he shall maintain her as long as she lives."[2]
Both sons and daughters could inherit property, and according to Babylonian law, whosoever possessed property, could will it, or dispose of it, with certain well established restrictions. In case there were no children to inherit an estate, it was a common practice to adopt them. Thus families were prevented from dying out.
Children were cared for, sent to school, taught trades or professions, and probably a certain amount of family life was enjoyed while they were growing up. The rights of each member of the family were definitely recognized by law. Home life as we today understand the phrase, was unknown in antiquity.
We can contrast the condition in Babylonia, where the individual, instead of the family, was recognized by the law to that in Rome of a later time, when the family was the unit of the state, and the pater familias managed all family affairs without state interference or restriction.
[1] Sayce: Social Life Among the Assyrians and Babylonians, 18.
[2] Johns: Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters, 56, 58.