Like the Bible, and nearly all other legislations, the Koran only allows the marriage of a widow after a certain term of delay. In the Koran, this term is four months and ten days;[856] and if the woman is with child, the delay must extend till after her delivery. But there are some pregnancies that are either imaginary or fictitious, and which come to nothing, yet in Arab countries successions are suspended on account of them. If, at the moment of her husband’s death, a woman thinks herself with child, she places her girdle on the body of the deceased; note is taken of it, and the time awaited. If the waiting is vain, at the end of eleven months the widow is visited and examined by matrons; and if nevertheless the professed pregnancy has no result, the child who refuses to be born is called “asleep” for an indefinite time. Henceforth the widow is free, and if she ends by becoming a mother, her child, awaited so long, is reputed to be the son of the husband dead years before, and inherits from him.[857] This singular prejudice is common to the Kabyles and to the Arabs. A number of Mussulman legists have vainly tried to overcome it. All that they have been able to do is to limit to four or five years, generally to four, the duration of this pretended “sleep” of the fœtus.[858] The widow has not been more worthily treated at the origin of Greco-Roman civilisation than in the other barbarous civilisations. It would be strange if it were so. We have seen that at Athens the woman, even when married, was part of the paternal patrimony; that the dying husband could leave her by will to a friend, with his goods, and by the same title; that at Rome the wife was bought and subjected to the terrible right of the marital _manus_.