silent and neighbors offer condoleaces.[1] "It is believed by an average Hindu that a male child is the fruit of the propitiation of ancestors."[2] The Aryans thought daughters a sorrow, sons the father's pride and glory.[3]
The status of women is therefore a symptom of the mores because all the interests and feelings of man converge in it. It furnishes one of the most prominent illustrations of the traditional persistence of the mores through ages, even in spite of changes in interests, and of the ultimate triumph of interests in the mores. The phenomena are intricate and perplexing, but it is certain that we can never understand them unless we follow those indications in them which show us the mores as their ultimate explanation.
The remotest stage of civilized society which is known to us is that represented in the laws of Hammurabi as existing in the Euphrates valley 2500 years before Christ. In those laws men and women appear to be on an equality of personal rights. Three classes, wives, concubines, and slaves, are recognized.[4] The laws of Hammurabi and the laws of Moses point back to a common law of the Semitic peoples of Western Asia (Müller traces this out), and the society is evidently an old one, with well-established folkways, which are codified in these laws. Winckler[5] is able to show, from the position of the vernal equinox in the signs of the zodiac, that Chaldean culture must date back to the fifth millennium B.C., and Barton fixes dates as far back as 6000 B.C. The code of Hammurabi is elaborate and systematic,
