but when she remonstrates they make up the quarrel and "whatsoever she wished to have done was done from that time forth forever more."
The laws of Hammurabi show that the problems of matrimony were the same 2500 years before Christ that they are now, and have been ever since. It is asserted that the excavations of Telloh show that the mother-family existed in Chaldea in the third millennium B.C.; that the wife was "goddess of the home," and that she could expel her husband from it.[1] Later, perhaps through Semitic influence, the man got control and the institutions of the father-family were fully developed; e.g., patria potestas, sacrifices by the father to ancestors. A son could take only a concubine, not a wife, without the father's consent. A slave woman would resent it if her master took no notice of her; the popular poetry represented her case, and there was reason to fear her arts and magic.[2]
In the old Babylonian kingdom the husband could dismiss his wife at will by giving her a bill of divorcement, and frequent injunctions not to do it show that it often occurred; consequently the woman was powerless and rightless against her husband, although her dignity and authority in the house and over her children were great. If repudiated she could marry again.[3] Repudiated wives, however, were the "strange women" of antiquity; wandering adventuresses, without husbands or status where they were met with, and living by vice.[4] As wealth and social activity increased in the Euphrates valley, polygamy became commoner, women were se-
