How would people in the bronze age be able to medically determine, with precision, if a girl was a virgin?

Question

...Do you trust their judgement back then, knowing how ignorant people were only a few hundred years ago about anatomy, especially of women?
These are life and death determinations,
it would mean burying a 12 year old girl up to her waste in the dirt and throwing large rocks at her head and face until she was blugoned to death...
or maybe you really don't know what "stoning" entails.

And I just want all of you to imagine,
guilty or frikken not,

several old men forcibly spreading a young girl's legs in order to examine her vagina (back then it's doubtful whether they even knew what a hymen was) to see if she had sex..... how they would determine this is anyone's guess.
But the very violation of this itself on young girls is RAPE>

n9wff: Not all women break or even have a hymen, do you know anything about women?

EDIT: Waist.....

......

Answer 1

It is still impossible to always tell.

Love and blessings Don

Answer 2

I'm not sure why you are so upset over something that happened millenia ago. There are more human rights violations today to worry about than ancient history.

Having said that, many primitive cultures relied on blood stains on the marriage bed as the determination. If it wasn't there, the girl was assume to not be a virgin and was dealt with accordingly. Obviously, there is no precision in that method, but it was a primitive society and they ASSUMED it to be accurate. There were also well-known strategies that women shared with each other to circumvent this evaluation, i.e., secreting a small container of chicken or menstrual blood in the marital bed and pouring it onto the sheets (or whatever) at the proper moment.

Answer 3

The hymen was in the same place then as now.I think if they had put grave consequences on the fact of it being intact they would have known quite a bit. In Judaism the marriage night sheet was taken to a priest they did not do the finger test. You are speaking of Muslim actions not Hebrew or Christian.


They had no way of determining the kind of blood on the sheet. So I am sure that most parents prepared their daughters before hand.

Answer 4

thanks for the interesting story..but sometimes the anchients were wiser then we give them credit..after the first stone hit the young women she probably was renedered senseless..thus felt no more pain. my brother hit me in the back of the head with a large rock when I was very young...i felt no pain...only when the blood ran down the back of my neck and then it was because my brother was screaming for me to go back home to see our mother.
The Anchient Mayans Calendar is still considered the most accurate calendar ..even now and it ends Dec. 23, 2012,,,is this just a conincidentce? Well, there were a lot of ignorant people then and for all the education I don't think we have progressed much as a world in general. The average Russina women gets about eight abortions in her lifetime..the Chinese kill their babies in the womb if they are female (x-ray..one child only society and they want males_) Look at the waste in wars that we fought and are still fighting? The Indiands left their elders to die when they were too old to be of any use and we put them in nursing homes instead. Not much difference.
People have children and don't provide for their safety or show interest in their education...these number of missing children in American is in the hundreds of thousands--most just end up on the streets and homeless.
The homeless in the major cities..Washington DC, New York, and L.A. is a national disgrace..Aides?
Well, the anchients were ignorant people..but what is our excuse in 2007? We are the most educated, well fed, overmedicated society in the world but our morals as a country are in the sewar.

Answer 5

People knew their neighbor very well in those days. Parents knew their children and what behavior they were engaging in. A father "would know" if his daughter was a virgin. The whole town would know! And they'd know if she wasn't! Imagine living in a small town in America today where everyone knows your business to the point where you couldn't buy a new shirt without it being on the front page the next day. It happens. Im sure there was a mistake now and then where a girl was fratranizing with a young man too often, and she was labeled for it. Meaning that it could lead to accusations of her no longer being a virgin.

Answer 6

Your question is intriguing but I'm just a little confused. Why would you bury a girl in her own waste? I'm sure there was some one who was the high priest of hymen examination who was duly authorized by the King to do the checking out of such things - or perhaps the King was a dirty old man who kept the job for himself.

Answer 7

Old women shaman would examine young women to see if their hymen was intact. Just how do you know how ignorant people were of women's anatomy a few hundred years ago? I believe you are ignorant of it now. Maybe you don't know what you are talking about.

Answer 8

The was a cloth laid down on the marriage bed and the blood that flowed from the broken hymen pour out onto the cloth and that cloth was give back to her father as proof that she was a virgin and if he husband ever question it to acquire a divorce her father had proof that she was a virgin at the time.
Stoning was not done in this fashion in the middle east. They were taken outside of the city walls surround by people who threw the rock at them until they expired.

Answer 9

Unfortunately in many parts of the world little has changed, stories come out weekly regarding honour killings in Pakistan for example.

Answer 10

Politics were as corrupt back then as they are now. The examiners simply said whatever they wanted to say (or were instructed to say), and the girl was punished or released accordingly.

Answer 11

yes, aren't you glad you dont live in the bronce age or whatever,
similar rituals are being practiced still today by muslims in a few country's.In Jordan, a girl who get's raped must be killed by her family to preserve the honor of that family.