Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz Read Free Book Online

that the expression “she will die by the iron dagger” meant that the unfaithful wife would no longer be punished by the angry husband, but by state authorities , and in a public, example-setting way. As awful as dying “by the iron dagger” was, the clause was probably inserted into these contracts at the insistence of the brides’ families to limit the husbands’ options if their women were caught with other men. Rather than grant license to kill the lovers on the spot, the contracts most likely forced the husbands to bring them before the authorities. There was nothing a father could do to save his daughter’s life once she had been unfaithful, but at least he could negotiate a fair shot at justice for her.
    According to the Greek historian Herodotus, it was not easy to find a faithful wife in Egypt. He told of a king named Pheros, who had gone blind after showing disrespect to the Nile. Pheros’s journey into darkness lasted for ten years, after which an oracle told him he would recover his sight when he washed his eyes with the urine of a faithful wife. Pheros went first to his own spouse, but her urine was tainted with adultery and could not heal him. He then tried the urine of “a great many” married women, one after another, until at last he found one who had been faithful—and his sight was restored. He gathered all the adulteresses he had tested (including, presumably, his own wife), sequestered them in a town known as Red Clod, and burned them to death. For good measure, he burned down the town, too. Afterward, he married the woman whose urine had retained the healing powers of fidelity.
    Herodotus, of course, was all too often ready to sacrifice accuracy for a good tale, but he makes a fair point: Ancient Egyptian culture was deeply intolerant of women having extramarital sexual relations, and Egyptian law was ready to punish adulterous wives. The punishments were usually carried out by the husbands. In one account, dating to the New Kingdom (sixteenth–eleventh centuries BC), a man who had learned of his wife’s attempted seduction of his younger brother chopped her to bits and fed her to the dogs. Other records tell of a man named Webaoner, whose wife regularly met with a townsman for adulterous trysts. Webaoner hired a magic crocodile to snatch the townsman and drag him to the bottom of the river. On orders from the king, the adulterous wife was then burned alive. (Burning and dismemberment were punishments calculated not only to cause pain but also to do eternal damage, as failure to preserve the intact body of a corpse was believed to ruin a spirit’s chances to pass peacefully from this world into the afterlife.)
    Not every adulterous woman in Egypt was treated with such savagery. The hocus-pocus in the stories of Pheros and Webaoner only illustrates the most extreme cases. Unless an Egyptian wife was caught in the act—in which case her husband would be forgiven for killing her in a fit of rage—she was most likely punished by having her nose slit or cut off; her lover could be given a thousand lashes. Not pleasant, to be sure—but hardly as bad as being dragged to the deep by a magic crocodile. 8

GOOD GOATS, BAD SHEEP, AND LONG-SUFFERING SLAVES
     
    Female adultery was one of the worst sex crimes in the ancient world, but there were many others. The first written laws covered the full gamut of sexual behavior from intercourse with cows and horses to affairs with another’s slave. Sex itself was also used as a form of punishment. In Assyria, a married man who raped a virgin was considered a criminal, but it was his wife who paid the worse penalty: The law required that she be given up to be raped by the victim’s father. In Egypt around 1000 BC, bestiality was both punishment and blessing, depending on the animal and the circumstances. Men who damaged stone property markers were forced to give up their wives and children to be raped by donkeys, but sex with goats was regarded as a form