I Had Always Thought,

that prenuptial weeding agreements, 

 were a fairly modern thing, but it appears not, researchers have found a 4000-year-old Assyrian clay tablet found at an dig in Turkey, the tablet has been translated as a marriage contract and some of the terms are spelled out quite explicitly, particularly what would happen if the wife doesn't produce a child,

 the contract, written in Old Assyrian and signed before four witnesses, stipulates that the wife in question was to hire a hierodule, or female slave, to serve as a surrogate mother if the couple failed to conceive a baby two years from the wedding date. It also specifies that the husband could not marry another woman, Mesopotamians were monogamous, and that if one of them opted for divorce, he or she would owe the other five minas of silver (more than five pounds, or about $1,500), the researchers were led by Harran University in Şanlıurfa, Turkey, examined a 4,000-year-old Assyrian tablet found at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Kültepe-Kaneshe, the site of the dig above, near the modern city of Kayseri, “The female slave would be freed after giving birth to the first male baby [to ensure] that the family is not … left without a child,” Ahmet Berkız Turp, from Harran University’s gynecology and obstetrics department, said to Turkish television channel NTV, a paper on the find coauthored by Turp appeared in the journal Gynecological Endocrinology, since archeologists started digging at Kültepe-Kanesh, occupied from around 2100 to 1700 B.C., they have unearthed about 1,000 cuneiform tablets, but alas none of them say whether the surrogate hierodule was necessary after all.