Bizarre Human Mating Rituals That Challenge Your Understanding Of Romance

Published April 15, 2015
Updated September 6, 2018

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Bizarre Human Mating Rituals Auction

Source: Alain Truong

This one comes from ancient history, so take it with a grain of salt. Worse, it comes from Herodotus, who was a notoriously unreliable narrator who never let the truth get in the way of a good story. According to Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, Babylonian girls were married off in annual auctions, with potential husbands bidding for them sight-unseen.

Herodotus was writing in an age before anyone discovered hurt feelings, so he was pretty much free to describe the process accurately. Each year, he wrote, all of a village’s prettiest and ugliest unmarried girls would be brought together. The bidding would start with the prettiest girls being sold to the highest bidders, with progressively less attractive girls fetching lower and lower prices.

After the pretty ones were all married off, the auctioneer would bring up the ugly girls and ask who would take them for a small dowry. The dowry got larger and larger as the girls got less and less desirable, with the money coming out of the previous bidders’ bride prices.

In this way, the wealth of the village would be spread around, every girl caught a husband, and everybody got something fun to gossip over for a few weeks as every woman in town shared her opinion of which girls were really worth what price.

author
Richard Stockton
author
Richard Stockton is a freelance science and technology writer from Sacramento, California.
editor
Savannah Cox
editor
Savannah Cox holds a Master's in International Affairs from The New School as well as a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and now serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of Sheffield. Her work as a writer has also appeared on DNAinfo.