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safer, if more bitter, decision for wives simply to put up with their husband’s misbehavior.
    Rivers were also involved when wives were accused of adultery without solid proof. Under what has become known as the “river ordeal,” a woman could clear herself of suspicion by having herself thrown into the water. If she survived, she was declared innocent; if she sank, she was guilty. In either instance, the matter was decided. In one case that unfolded in the Sumerian kingdom of Mari, an unnamed woman made a detailed public statement just before the start of her river ordeal. She declared that she had indeed had sex with a father and his son before marrying the father. After her wedding, while her husband was away, the son came back to her to demand sex once again. “He kissed me on my lips,” she reported. “He touched my vagina.” She insisted, however, that they never went past the heavy petting stage: “His penis did not enter my vagina.” Moreover, she scolded her aggressive stepson for coming after her, telling him that she would never do her husband “unforgivable harm” by letting him possess her again. Her declaration reads as if she doubted that she would survive the river, but the gods apparently believed her story. She floated.
    A married Assyrian woman who invited a man to have sex with her could be punished by her husband in any way he chose. The lover usually walked away, but not always: If a man knew the woman in his bed was married, both were put to death. The problem for the courts was figuring out who knew what and when they knew it, especially when everyone’s stories were plausible. To decide the undecidable, the Assyrians also used the river ordeal. A man who insisted he did not know his companion was married, or who claimed that there had been no sex, could prove his case by being thrown into a river. If he lived, he was exonerated, though he still had to pay the husband for the trouble. If the accused man sank, then the matter was over for him anyway. The errant wife’s fate at that point was her husband’s decision.
    One knotty Assyrian sex case began when a wife left her husband and went to another man’s house, where she stayed in the company of the host’s wife for a few nights. The runaway wife’s husband tracked her down, at which point he had the right to take her home and mutilate her to his heart’s content. The woman who had taken care of her was presumed to know she’d harbored a disloyal woman, and was subject to having her ears cut off. The male host was at risk of paying a big fine if it could be shown that he’d known his guest was married. If no one believed him, he would have to undergo a river ordeal.
    Thousands of years later, the spicy details of this dispute are left to the imagination. Why did the woman leave her husband? What brought her to the new home? Was she seeking sex with the host or refuge with the host’s wife? As critical as each of these questions might seem to us, they were irrelevant to Assyrian justice. By law, husbands owned their wives, and were free to treat them as they wished. The sole issue was whether or not there was any way to assuage the fragile pride of the runaway’s husband.
    THE FREEDOM OF husbands to do violence to their adulterous wives seems to have diminished slightly by the Neo- and Late Babylonian periods (roughly the seventh to sixth centuries BC). By then, punishments against wives for taking lovers were often spelled out in advance, in marriage contracts. Several of the contracts that have survived contain an interesting clause, loosely translated as “Should [the wife] be discovered with another man, she will die by the iron dagger.” Why this kind of language was put into marriage contracts at all, when the law had long allowed husbands to kill their adulterous wives, is the main question here. Were the contracts simply reminding young brides what awaited them should they stray? Perhaps, but a better interpretation is