section_path: Culture/Social and family life
section_name: Social and family life
paragraph_text: Social and family life
  
  In the early Sumerian period, the primitive pictograms suggest that
  
  There is considerable evidence concerning Sumerian music. Lyres and flutes were played, among the best-known examples being the Lyres of Ur.
  
  Sumerian culture was male-dominated and stratified. The Code of Ur-Nammu, the oldest such codification yet discovered, dating to the Ur III, reveals a glimpse at societal structure in late Sumerian law. Beneath the lu-gal ("great man" or king), all members of society belonged to one of two basic strata: The " lu " or free person, and the slave (male, arad; female geme). The son of a lu was called a dumu-nita until he married. A woman (munus) went from being a daughter (dumu-mi), to a wife (dam), then if she outlived her husband, a widow (numasu) and she could then remarry another man who was from the same tribe.
  
  In early Sumer women played an important public rule as priestesses. They could also own property, transact business and had their rights protected by the courts. Sons and daughters inherited property on equal terms. The status of women deteriorated in the centuries after 2300 BC. Their right to dispose of their property was limited, and the female deities also lost their former importance.
  
  Inscriptions describing the reforms of king Urukagina of Lagash (c. 2350 BC) say that he abolished the former custom of polyandry in his country, prescribing that a woman who took multiple husbands be stoned with rocks upon which her crime had been written.
  
  Marriages were usually arranged by the parents of the bride and groom; engagements were usually completed through the approval of contracts recorded on clay tablets. These marriages became legal as soon as the groom delivered a bridal gift to his bride's father. One Sumerian proverb describes the ideal, happy marriage, through the mouth of a husband, who boasts that his wife has borne him eight sons and is still eager to have sex.
  
  The Sumerians considered it desirable for women to still be virgins at the time of marriage, but did not expect the same of men, although one author considers premarital sex in general to have been discouraged. Neither Sumerian nor Akkadian had a word exactly corresponding to the English word ' virginity ', and the concept was expressed descriptively, for example as a/é-nu-gi -a (Sum.)/ la naqbat (Akk.) 'un-deflowered', or giš nunzua, 'never having known a penis'. It is unclear whether terms such as šišitu in Akkadian medical texts indicate the hymen, but it appears that the intactness of the hymen was much less relevant to assessing a woman's virginity than in later cultures of the Near East. Most assessments of virginity depended on the woman's own account.
  
  From the earliest records, the Sumerians had very relaxed attitudes toward sex. Their sexual mores were determined not by whether a sexual act was deemed immoral, but rather by whether or not it made a person ritually unclean. The Sumerians widely believed that masturbation enhanced sexual potency, both for men and for women, and they frequently engaged in it, both alone and with their partners. The Sumerians did not regard anal sex as taboo either. Entu priestesses were forbidden from producing offspring and frequently engaged in anal sex as a method of birth control.
  
  Prostitution existed, but it is not clear if sacred prostitution did.