But then, a lot of women didn't suspect their husbands of... or was that only on TV?
As late as the accession of Assur-bani-pal and Samas-sum-yukin we find the Babylonians appealing to their city laws that groups of aliens to the number of twenty at a time were free to enter the city, that foreign women once married to Babylonian husbands could not be enslaved and that not even a dog that entered the city could be put to death untried.
They were also charged with the maintenance of order in the mir and the family, punishing infractions of the religious law, husbands who beat their wives, and parents who ill-treated their children.
Under the present constitution they are "fully emancipated from all disability on account of coverture," and are placed on an equality with their husbands in acquiring and disposing of property and in making contracts relative thereto.
Both sexes dressed with Puritan plainness; husbands and wives quitted their homes for convents; marriage became an awful and scarcely permitted rite; mothers suckled their own babes; and persons of all ranks - nobles, scholars and artists - renounced the world to assume the Dominican robe.
