# Who invented the idea of marriage? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 21, 2003, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056 "2003-03-21T08:16:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![kurty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/a4c791/32.png) [@kurty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kurty)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/1 "2003-03-21T08:16:40Z")
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? ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 8:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/2 "2003-03-21T08:34:34Z")
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? ---
**Author:** ![CzechHistory411](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/94ad74/32.png) [@CzechHistory411](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CzechHistory411)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 8:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/3 "2003-03-21T08:45:32Z")
> [@](#): > > Just the other day, a plane landed at Idlewild Airport containing a man who claims to be 2000 years old . . . 😃 – CH ---
**Author:** ![John\_Kentzel-Griffin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ccd318/32.png) [@John\_Kentzel-Griffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Kentzel-Griffin)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 9:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/4 "2003-03-21T09:07:31Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Tusculan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecd19e/32.png) [@Tusculan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tusculan)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 10:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/6 "2003-03-21T10:29:32Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Arturas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/45deac/32.png) [@Arturas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arturas)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 11:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/7 "2003-03-21T11:08:13Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/8 "2003-03-21T13:36:38Z")
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) ---
**Author:** ![ShibbOleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/848f3c/32.png) [@ShibbOleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ShibbOleth)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/9 "2003-03-21T13:54:38Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by DrMatrix \* > \*\*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. \*\* This early notion seems to be coming under some fire: > [@](#): > > originally from Parenthood by Gareth Hue Davies, from David Attenborough’s _The Life of Birds_ on PBS > > Looked at as a whole, however, birds are not a lot more virtuous or dutiful in their home-making then humans. For example, it has long been thought that birds were the animal kingdom’s best representatives of the romantic virtues. The courtship of birds, and their apparent togetherness, has inspired poets, songsmiths and advertising copywriters. We assumed birds don’t cheat. Well, they do. > > Birds find it pays to deceive their partner as they seek to gain the edge over others of their species, and ensure that their chicks grown to maturity and carry on the lineage. > > Although around 90 per cent of bird species form a parental pair, at least for a given breeding season - a higher figure than among other creatures - there is more deception than was ever suspected. Monogamy is not an instinct, hard-wired into animals’ brains, as was thought. Even birds considered as paragons of fidelity will indulge in a fling if the situation permits. > > The notion of settled married bliss has been blown away by the new technology of DNA fingerprinting, which has revealed that as many as a fifth of the eggs produced by female birds believed to be monogamous had not, after all, been sired by their regular partners. > > Scientists now know that many females two-time; that they even practice divorce. There is jealously; there are “home-wreckers.” And > [@](#): > > originally from [Your Cheatin’ Heart](http://www2.ebham.ac.uk/pkilcoyne/ep/monogamy.html) in the _The Times’_ Higher Education Supplment > UNTIL DEATH us do part. With these words Christianity enshrines the idea that humans are a monogamous species. So why do more than a third of all marriages in Britain and half of those in the US end in divorce? And how come as many as 15 per cent of children are fathered by a male who is not their registered father? Some people see this as a sign of the times: a breakdown in family values, the disintegration of society, or a modern disease that requires everything, including relationships, to be “new and improved”. > > Recently, however, biologists have come up with another explanation. We are finding that monogamy is not a fixed and immutable instinct, hard-wired into some animals’ brains, as we previously thought. Even creatures once considered as para-gons of fidelity will indulge in a fling if the situation is right. > > Take the South American marmoset and tamarin monkeys. Both are usually monogamous in the wild, with males largely responsible for bringing up the young. But in some cases, males engage in roving polygamy, hitching up with a succession of females. “Divorce” rates can be as high as a third of all pairs in the population during any one year. This radical change in behaviour is often prompted by an excess of males, usually because of high female mortality. With females in short supply, males who cannot get a mate become “helpers-at-the-nest”, willing to assist with the rearing of offspring that are not their own. The presence of a helper increases the chances that a breeding male will desert his partner and go searching for another female because he will be able to breed again sooner than if he waited for his current mate to come back into breeding condition. The helper gets his payoff next time the female comes into oestrus, when he mates with her. And the females seem indifferent to their mate’s behaviour: so long as they have a male to help with rearing the offspring, they don’t seem to mind too much who he is. 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. ---
**Author:** ![FatBaldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ecd19e/32.png) [@FatBaldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FatBaldGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/10 "2003-03-21T14:05:48Z")
If you are asking about the first recorded marriage, it was between two people named Adam and Eve. ---
**Author:** ![mallocks](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f4b2a3/32.png) [@mallocks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mallocks)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/11 "2003-03-21T14:10:18Z")
In what way was there a marriage between them FBG? ---
**Author:** ![FatBaldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ecd19e/32.png) [@FatBaldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FatBaldGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/12 "2003-03-21T14:15:48Z")
Genesis 2: 21-25 > [@](#): > > And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a awoman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and aflesh• of my flesh: she shall be called bWoman, because she was taken out of Man. ---
**Author:** ![ShibbOleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/848f3c/32.png) [@ShibbOleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ShibbOleth)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/13 "2003-03-21T14:17:56Z")
For those who doubt that this is a literal story, the evidence is a little bit thin. ---
**Author:** ![FatBaldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ecd19e/32.png) [@FatBaldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FatBaldGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/14 "2003-03-21T14:19:40Z")
Oops… Let’s try that again Genesis 2: 21-25 > [@](#): > > And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his **wife** : and they shall be one flesh. ---
**Author:** ![FatBaldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ecd19e/32.png) [@FatBaldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FatBaldGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/15 "2003-03-21T14:23:02Z")
> [@](#): > > For those who doubt that this is a literal story, the evidence is a little bit thin. Well, the OP asked who invented marriage, and this is certainly one possible answer, which is shared by a good many people. ---
**Author:** ![mallocks](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f4b2a3/32.png) [@mallocks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mallocks)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/16 "2003-03-21T14:25:08Z")
hmm, ok, I was wrong, but bear in mind that that’s only a translation BFG, the original words may well have been different. ---
**Author:** ![FatBaldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ecd19e/32.png) [@FatBaldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FatBaldGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/17 "2003-03-21T14:27:11Z")
Fair enough, but I would assume that God would have at least as much authority as a priest to perform a marriage. ---
**Author:** ![FatBaldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ecd19e/32.png) [@FatBaldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FatBaldGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/18 "2003-03-21T14:34:08Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![ShibbOleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/848f3c/32.png) [@ShibbOleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ShibbOleth)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/19 "2003-03-21T14:40:17Z")
**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. ---
**Author:** ![mallocks](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f4b2a3/32.png) [@mallocks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mallocks)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/20 "2003-03-21T14:42:32Z")
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… ---
**Author:** ![Scuba\_Ben](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/278dde/32.png) [@Scuba\_Ben](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scuba_Ben)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056/21 "2003-03-21T15:15:56Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by mallocks \* > **But you’d have to know 1) the original language of the Old Testement,** Hebrew. > [@](#): > > \*\* and 2) when it was written to pinpoint that particular mention. \*\* [The SDSAB speaks.](http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbible1.html) Around 450 BCE at the latest. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-the-idea-of-marriage/163056.md?page=2)