Mohammedan peoples generally consider marriage a duty both for men and women.[815] “Nothing,” says Carsten Niebuhr, “is more rarely to be met with in the East, than a woman unmarried after a certain time of life.” She will rather marry a poor man, or become second wife to a man already married, than remain in a state of celibacy.[816] Among the Persians, for instance, almost every girl of good repute is married before her twenty-first year, and old bachelors are unknown.[817] In Egypt, according to Mr. Lane, it is improper and even disreputable to abstain from marrying when a man has attained a sufficient age, and when there is no just impediment.[818] Among the Hebrews, celibacy was nearly unheard of, as it is among the Jews of our day. They have a proverb that “he who has no wife is no man.”[819] “To an ancient Israelite,” Michaelis remarks, “it would indeed have appeared very strange to have seen, though but in a vision, a period in the future history of the world, when it would be counted sanctity and religion to live unmarried.”[820] Marriage was by the Hebrews looked upon as a religious duty. According to the Talmud, the authorities can compel a man to marry, and he who lives single at the age of twenty is accursed by God almost as if he were a murderer.[821] The ancient nations of the Aryan stock, as M. Fustel de Coulanges and others have pointed out, regarded celibacy as an impiety and a misfortune: “an impiety, because one who did not marry put the happiness of the Manes of the family in peril; a misfortune, because he himself would receive no worship after his death.” A man’s happiness in the next world depended upon his having a continuous line of male descendants, whose duty it would be to make the periodical offerings for the repose of his soul.[822] Thus, according to the ‘Laws of Manu,’ marriage is the twelfth Sanskāra, and hence a religious duty incumbent upon all.[823] “Until he finds a wife, a man is only half of a whole,” we read in the ‘Brahmadharma’;[824] and, among the Hindus of the present day, a man who is not married is considered to be almost a useless member of society, and is, indeed, looked upon as beyond the pale of nature. It is also an established national rule, that women are designed for no other end than to be subservient to the wants and pleasures of men; consequently, all women without exception are obliged to marry, when husbands can be found for them, and those who cannot find a husband commonly fall into the state of concubinage.[825] Among the ancient Iranians, too, it was considered a matter of course that a girl should be married on reaching the years of puberty.[826]