Who invented the idea of marriage?
I’ve asked hundreds of people, and no one seemed to have the answer. I know for a fact that back in the stone age days, there was no concept of marriage. A male could have several females in his group. So, someone down the line must have invented the law to strictly enforce the one to one relationship. Who did it?
kurty writes:
> I know for a fact that back in the stone age days, there was no
> concept of marriage. A male could have several females in his
> group.
And just how do you know that? Were you there?
– CH
Ummm . . . How do you “know for a fact that back in the stone age days, there was no concept of marriage”?
Lots of animals besides man form pair bonds. I think the law was put in place to codify what was already instinct.
I haven’t got any literature handy right now for reference, but it looks again like a question of definition.
If by ‘marriage’ you mean the legally recognized union implying a specific collection of rights, this is something that requires a reasonably advanced society that recognizes this, since it assumes a concept of rights. That this is an artificial construct is quite clear from the fact that same-sex marriage is heavily debated even in societies where same-sex affectionate unions are accepted. Marriage therefore cannot be equated with the consensual union between loving partners.
Furthermore marriage in the past, as I guess is well know, in fact did not always imply such a loving union. In Europe it was primarily a legal construct for regulating inheritance between royal families. As far as I know, marriage in that sense (a legally recognized union) may have been rare, or was at least not required. Poor people may have lived together, but they had neither the money nor the inclination to have a marriage in that way. If you live on a farm in semi-bondage (as was common in the middle ages), what good would such a marriage do, as long as the children were taken care of by the community and you were allowed to live together with your chosen partner? (Warning: here I would prefer to look things up. I may be wrong in the precise facts) You could also check the Bible, mentioning that the brother of the deceased must marry the widow (probably in Leviticus).
If you take a bit broader concept, meaning a societally recognized union between partners, that is very probably a universal phenomenon. But be aware that there is a large variety in the precise rights that persons derive from such a marriage. The nuclear family is a very recent construct.
I’m not sure what the OP wanted; he doesn’t make clear what he exactly means with marriage. If he means a blessed union, anointed by a priest, that obviously depends on the existence of a church and therefore is not universal.
First, to continue the custom, welcome aboard!
I agree with TTT. I have also heard that marriages formalised in church only began for the masses around 200-300 years ago. One should remember people until that time were usually not exactly rich and had far better uses for money than paying for a priest’s services. The marriage was nevertheless formalised before God by the pair swearing oaths to love one another (no idea what they would have precisely sworn). I have heard of Welsh miners where the men floated from mine to mine, hoping to finally make a better living while the women had children and kept the house. When one man left, she simply invited someone else to take his place. Sorry, forget the book I read it in.
In LIthuanian society, parents did not usually raise their children since both had to go to work in the fields (Lithuania was primarily agricultural). The grandparents raised the children.
Another interesting custom comes from Africa where the girl’s mother stayed with her daughter for the first year after the birth of the first child in order to teach her how to raise it and help her adjust.
Another topic not mentioned is that many societies consider and have considered one’s best friend to be the same sex (e.g. Plato’s Greece) and marriage is more of a business relationship, which has the advantage that this Venus-Mars thing is much less important, your friend is better listener than your spouse, and you don’t clutter up the relationship with all the daily frustrations from the job. Therefore, it might help if the question were slightly rephrased to express exactly what marriage relationship the author had in mind, not just legally but also socially.
IMO, this is marginally GQ. As TTT points out, it may be impossible to answer the question objectively.
Even with a clear definition, how could we possibly nail down an “origin”? The best we could hope for, would be to find out what is the oldest record of formal, legal recognition of marriage. And even then, as mentioned, it may be a case in which the procedure was that they just just move in together and set up a household, and the tribe/village simply recognizes that fact, and wrote down what were the agreed rules of behavior expected of the parties and their families in that case. If just customs, taboos, social opprobium and the simple fact that if you want Torg to cover your back during the battle you better be kind to his sister, can make those rules enforceable w/o a complicated legal contract structure, it’s still a form of marriage. Even if it is not monogamous or lifelong.
manasi, the male may be driven to “spread his seed”, but he would be also inclined to try and prevent anyone else from getting a “free ride”. And the best way to do this is to make the mating at least temporarily exclusive at least on her part, and a way to achieve this is to establish an at least temporarily ongoing relationship in which he gives her something more than just semen.
(* Really, is anyone arguing that unrestricted Free Love is our natural state? Most of what we see among humans is at the very least serial monogamy/polygamy and very rare “open” or communal relationships)
This early notion seems to be coming under some fire:
And
As to the OP, marriage as a cultural institution would be a net benefit to society, so certainly makes sense from a societal perspective. If every male just went around generating as many little DNA copies of himself as possible, without some sort of long term commitment, the societal cost is much higher. For the female it obviously provided some long term security of food and shelter as well. What we haven’t addressed so far is exactly when this came around.
If you are asking about the first recorded marriage, it was between two people named Adam and Eve.
In what way was there a marriage between them FBG?
Genesis 2: 21-25
For those who doubt that this is a literal story, the evidence is a little bit thin.
Oops… Let’s try that again
Genesis 2: 21-25
Well, the OP asked who invented marriage, and this is certainly one possible answer, which is shared by a good many people.
hmm, ok, I was wrong, but bear in mind that that’s only a translation BFG, the original words may well have been different.
Fair enough, but I would assume that God would have at least as much authority as a priest to perform a marriage.
Sorry if I hijacked the thread by throwing religion into the mix, but I just wanted to point out that for a good many people in this world, this is the correct answer. We now return you to your normal thread.
Fat Bald Guy, fair point. By that interpretation of the bible, then marriage (as done in Judaism/Christianity/Islam) would then date back about 10,000 years, correct?
My supposition is that marriage would have first happened within a religious/societal context. So if we can also determine roughly when the first marriages were discussed in relation to other early religions, it might be possible to pinpoint where the concept was first issued. For example, I’ve read that some Christian ideology may stem from Zoroastrianism, which is among the first recorded mentions of the concept of good vs. evil.
But you’d have to know 1) the original language of the Old Testement, and 2) when it was written to pinpoint that particular mention.
I think my point still stands that the translation may have just been convenient to convey an idea that the translator wanted to convey…
Hebrew.
The SDSAB speaks. Around 450 BCE at the latest.