If a society is to last beyond a single generation, it is necessary to promote and encourage appropriate reproductive practices within the group. Very few societies have chosen to do so by allowing unregulated sex. Children born out of wedlock are stigmatized because many societies had patterns of paternal inheritance. Sons were guaranteed most of the inheritance and daughters only the bride price, or a gift given to the husband's family for taking the daughter. We can almost always determine who a child's mother actually is, but it is much more difficult to determine who the father is. As societies became more complex and the amount of people who owned and could pass on grew, it became necessary to ensure authorship. The institution of marriage was a solution to this problem. As the laws become more sophisticated, written records of adultery, divorce, and inheritance laws appear. By stigmatizing inappropriate reproduction from a legal and social point of view, we can guarantee the citizen, within the limits of human error, that his son is indeed his heir. This increases his desire to produce and acquire and is generally beneficial to society. Sumeria was one of the first civilizations to come to this conclusion, and as is the case with many of their other laws, their ideas about love and marriage spread throughout the civilized world and still have some influence in the modern era . marriage between commoners was generally arranged by parents (Kramer, 1963, p. 78). The engagement was not legally binding until the bride's family presented the bride price to the groom's family. Many marriage contracts have been found engraved on tablets in Sumerian ruins, showing that… half the paper… ok are part of numbers commensurate with the popularity of the king. The attendants would lay the body down and completely seal the tomb. Upon its opening they would make sacrifices to their fallen king and then bury the entire tomb except the top of the walls. Inside the tomb, the king was buried in a brick room in the center of the structure. Adjacent branching chambers would have housed attendants buried with the king. On a clay floor, people sacrificed human lives to the king. They would then build a platform over the bodies and offer further human sacrifices. As the sacrifices continued, the importance of the lives sacrificed increased until a major sacrifice, such as that of the queen, was made last. He would take a coffin right on top of the sacrificial tomb and a chapel would be built over the entire structure indicating the location of the tomb..•