Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/307

 Marriage Ctistoms of the Bedii and Fellahin. 271

last century), and, within a limited geographical area, Lady Burton.

The nature of marriage usages depends, primarily, upon the status of man and woman respectively, and the con- ditions of the social organisation under which they lived during the period of their development. The Semite races lived, as the Bedu still do, in tribes, the basis of which was blood-relationship, and the end to be kept in view that of increase in the number of fighting men and marriageable women. The tribe was a compact whole, and this con- ception of solidarity required that the woman, with her children, — (named by her according to her own tribal usage), — should remain with the clan to which she belonged. She had the right to dismiss her husband at will, and the children were traced by descent from the mother only. Of this we may expect to find certain traces.

Gradually, however, the matriarchate gave place to a new system of regarding the descent of the child as from its father, and the woman followed her husband to his own tribe, thereby losing all rights over herself. The husband now assumed a new position. He was called her ba^al ^ or owner, and was in a position to divorce her at will. The fact of being an alien among her new surroundings was in some degree an element of weakness, but at the same time a con- dition of security in a race in which the sense of kinship is, as among the Semites, enormously strong and reaching far beyond the third and fourth generations. To injure her was to arouse her tribe, to whom that of her husband had to account, so that she could not receive physical injury nor be sold as a slave. It seems at first sight sur- prising that a people with so strong a sense of relationship should be willing to hand over women of their blood to a stranger, to whose will she was entirely subject. In pre- Islamic times, however, — as now, — her own family received a considerable payment, usually in camels or small cattle.

^Cf. Hosea, c. ii., v. i6.