“The marriage contract”: an unusual artifact was found 4000 years ago

Stone “contract” was discovered in Turkey.

Four thousand years ago in the Assyrian Empire (now Turkey) the spouse had the right to use the womb of another woman – a surrogate mother to conceive a child. This is confirmed by the text found an ancient marriage contract.

4 000-year-old marriage contract, found in Turkey, contains the first known reference to about infertility and says that a woman can be used as a surrogate mother.

Ancient contract looks like a clay tablet. The text says: if a couple cannot produce a child within two years of marriage, the surrogate will be used by a female slave.

Assyrian contract was written in cuneiform cuneiform font, one of the earliest forms of writing.

It provides that the wage-slave, known as hierodule, is released after the birth of their first boy.

“The female slave will be freed after the birth of my first boy-men, ensuring that the family will not be left without a child,” said lead researcher Professor Ahmet TURP Berkiz of the Turkish Harran University.

The tablet found by the archaeologists from a number of Turkish universities in the Central province of Kayseri.

Currently he is represented in the Istanbul archaeological Museum as the earliest known mention of human infertility.

The study is published in the journal “Gynecological endocrinology”.

The Assyrian Empire was the complicated Mesopotamian civilization relating to the 25th century BC. Mesopotamia, an ancient region of Asia, was the place where people first gathered in large cities, created by the government and learned to write.

Along with other Mesopotamian groups such as ancient Babylon and Sumerian city, the Assyrian Empire was one of the oldest civilizations of world history.

In the area of It in Turkey, where he found a plate, was once the village of Old Assyrian Empire from the 21st to the 18th century BC. More than 1,000 cuneiform tablets were discovered in the area in 1925, opening a rich and complex cultural heritage.

A significant part of our knowledge of early human societies comes from these stone tablets, which leads some scholars to designate Mesopotamia, “the place of the beginning of history.”

paradox