[719] Thus in Lovrec, Dalmatia, where the bride-price is no longer customary, when the _Brautführer_, on the day before the nuptials, comes to the bride's home for the _Brautkiste_ containing her trousseau, he finds a child sitting upon it, who must be bought off through payment of a piece of gold: POST, _op. cit._, 177. Sometimes the symbolical purchase coexists for a time with real purchase: _ibid._, 177; _idem_, _Geschlechtsgenossenschaft_, 73; _idem_, _Grundlagen des Rechts_, 235. [720] WESTERMARCK, _op. cit._, 409 ff. For many examples of exchange of gifts see KOHLER, "Studien," _ZVR._, V, 340, 341, 347-49, 351, 353, 365; POST, _op. cit._, 177-79. [721] WESTERMARCK, _op. cit._, 409, 410, giving examples. [722] The marriage contract had already reached this last stage among the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians. They had a remarkably high ideal of family life. The facts disclosed by the records are wholly inconsistent with Herodotus's story regarding the sacred prostitution of the unmarried women. At the nuptials it was customary to state that the bride was "pure" or "without stain." Polygyny existed only as the rare luxury of the rich. As a rule, the formation of a second marriage was equivalent to a divorce from the first. Two principles, declares SAYCE, the maternal and the paternal, "were struggling for recognition." Perhaps "they were due to a duality of race; perhaps they were merely a result of the circumstances under which the Babylonians lived. At times it would seem as if we must pronounce the Babylonian family to have been patriarchal in character; at other times the wife and mother occupies an independent and even commanding position. It may be noted that whereas in the old Sumerian hymns the woman takes precedence of the man, Semitic translation invariably reverses the order: the one has 'female and male,' the other 'male and female.'"--_Babylonians and Assyrians_, 13. The practical result was that the sexes were nearly equal in marriage. The individual and not the family was the social unit; and the individuality of the woman was fully recognized. She controlled her own property. She could buy and sell, borrow and lend, sue and be sued, and inherit equally with her brother. She might become a priestess, the head of a city, or the queen of the state. The wife was her husband's equal in the business world. The possession of property "brought with it the enjoyment of considerable authority." She "could act apart from her husband, could enter into partnership, could trade with her money, and conduct law-suits in her own name."--_Idem_, _Social Life among the Assyrians and Babylonians_, 50, 51. The bride's dower was paid by her father to the bridegroom; but it was her property. Sometimes the husband enjoyed the use of it for life; sometimes the wife disposed of it as her private capital. It