But, contrary to what is usually thought, the harem is not a Mohammedan institution. It long antedates Islam for, as archæological investigations in the Orient clearly evince, there were separate apartments for women in the buildings of ancient Persia, Assyria, and Babylonia.[118] Nor do the inmates of the harem consider themselves as imprisoned in their houses like birds in a cage. Far from it. Mrs. Meer Ali, an English lady who married a Mohammedan gentleman and resided twelve years in Lucknow, India, clearly states the Oriental women’s view of harem life when she writes: To ladies accustomed from infancy to confinement, this kind of life is by no means irksome. They have their employments and their amusements, and though these are not exactly to our tastes, nor suited to our mode of education, they are not the less relished by those for whom they were invented. They, perhaps, wonder equally at some of our modes of dissipating time and fancy we might spend it more profitably. Be that as it may, the Muslim ladies, with whom I have been long intimate, appear to me always happy, contented and satisfied with the seclusion to which they were born; they desire no other, and I have ceased to regret that they cannot be made partakers of that freedom of intercourse with the world we deem so essential to our happiness, since their health suffers nothing from that confinement by which they are preserved from a variety of snares and temptations; besides which they would deem it disgraceful in the highest degree to mix indiscriminately with men who are not relations. They are educated from infancy for retirement and they can have no wish that the custom should be changed which keeps them apart from the society of men who are not very nearly related to them. Female society is unlimited and they enjoy it without restraint.[119]