Family Life in Early Mesopotamia the Renaissance and the Pax Romana

¶ … isolated life of the Old Testament Mesopotamians was strictly tied to the fertile plateau the varied civilizations occupied. The groups were largely divided into Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian; under the unifying leadership of Ur, the people were divided into three legal categories that defined their daily lives: aristocracy, commoners, and slaves. While documentation of the cultures are based most commonly in religious texts, further excavation by Sir Leonard Woolley in the Twentieth Century elaborated greatly among the lists of kings, artifact preservations, and spheres of influence among the united cultures.

The daily life of the families was inevitably tied to their life source, the rivers. Marriage, with institutional roots dating back to the Mesopotamians, was more than just alliance among two people, but extended into the larger connections between family clans, exchanges of power, and utility in tilling the land. Overall, marriage served the purpose of being an economic, political, and agricultural relationship cemented with the reproduction of heirs. Land, passed down generational, was inextricable from power; marriage served as its gate. Religion, math, and sciences were important to the daily lives of the Mesopotamians, whose fertile irrigation patterns implied a quotidian knowledge and application of botany and honed skills. Children were educated by their families in not only the ways of the land, but the languages of their people; written language was introduced across-the-board, and in this most early era of urban development, the common people adopted the cuneiform method of Sumerian print, modified to their own language, and taught it to their children. The Mesopotamians were part of large family clans, an organization critical to the start of villages, then towns and cities, and provided a successful key to the power of Mesopotamia not only for the viability of the land, burgeoning trade with the Egyptians, and start of the Jewish people and Old Testament culture, but also for the dissemination of knowledge.

Like the Mesopotamians, the families of the Pax Romana assumed the role of educating their children. Through a variety of rulers, including the gentility of Marcus Aurelius and the madness of Caligula, the family life of the Pax Romana society was very homogenous. The families were organized on a patrilineal scale, and the most senior male served as the paterfamilias, controlling all aspects of the lives of "his children," those of all ages under his guise. While the life expectancy was still in the thirties, the power of the paterfamilias remained threateningly high; not only could a son work to earn wealth that would legally belong to his father, the father had pure legal right to kill his own children; infanticide was all too common. The household was large, the paterfamilias, at the helm, was accompanied by his wife, their sons, their sons' wives, their unwed daughters, any further offspring, and a plethora of slaves. Most marriages were arranged, and by the Second Century, divorce was a legal practice. Girls were legally marred at twelve, and, as a wife, served a central role in the social life of the household. Motherhood was centered to the moral guidance of her children, and with a declining birthrate, the Roman government also instituted laws requiring parents to increase the number of their offspring. Because of the great infrastructure of the Roman Empire, and the collective urban life that defined most families, education consisted of less agricultural knowledge and more academic and political. Families were the basic unit of society, and not only important for maintaining the education value, they were the backbone of this most advanced political state.

In its reclamation of the old Roman ideas and similar life expectancy, it is not surprising that most states in Renaissance Europe allowed for the girl's legal marrying age to be twelve; her male counterpart could be married at ten. Regardless, Thomas Moore recommended that girls married at eighteen and boys four years later to ensure the adulthood and readiness of those future spouses. A contract between the families would solidify a marriage, and an exchange of dowry and jointure (cash settlement) was expected. Marriage was largely a perfunctory means of power acquisition or stability, ideally shown by the marriage of the royals, like Lord Darnly and Mary Queen of Scotts.