ANN ARBOR—A short-term loan designed to elicit fidelity through indebtedness was a tool once used by women to safeguard their marriages. Papyrus documents at the University of Michigan from first-century Egypt indicate that such financial arrangements were common practice among middle-class Egyptian couples living together.

Among the papyrus at U-M, the largest collection in the Western Hemisphere, are documents that chronicle the business and legal transactions of a family of weavers living in Oxyrhynchos, a major metropolis in central Egypt, around A.D. 70. Some of those documents are loan receipts made out to one of the sons by his bride of one year. U-M faculty members Ludwig Koenen and Traianos Gagos say these documents confirm that the practice of marriage loans was used by lower-middle-class families that could not afford dowries to secure a marriage contract.

“A woman’s position in early Egypt was precarious at best, with little stability or financial security,” Koenen said. “As long as her fiance or husband owed her money, she was guaranteed his support. The loan made divorce financially unattractive.” After a trial period or marriage, a woman could give her husband a larger loan, this time without an expiration date. She had the right to recall the loan and in this way dissolve the marriage at any time.

The U-M research team has found evidence of such loans, one a 20 drachma loan for two months shortly before a marriage?a loan repaid six months later?and a second loan for 200 drachms issued a month after a marriage.

“Most likely the couple was already living together at the time of the first loan,” Koenen theorized. “At that time, the woman could only come up with a small sum and the loan period was short, signaling a trial period for the marriage. But when she came into some money, then she upped the stakes and invested more in her marriage. This time the duration of the loan was left open. The wife was no longer bound to let her husband have the loan for any fixed time period, giving her ultimate control of the money.”

But in this case, the arrangement did not guarantee stability. A canceled loan receipt, dated little more than a year after the wedding, indicated that the couple divorced and the husband repaid his outstanding loan of 200 drachmas. “Where did he get the money? Perhaps he had a good business year, but a cynic would suspect that he had found another lady who would give him a loan,” Koenen said.

While such financial arrangements functioned as a dowry, the documents in the papyrus collection do not contain the words “dowry” or “marriage.” The loan documents do not refer to a personal relationship but indicate the transactions were simply and legally loans. However, the U-M researchers note that two of the documents contain stipulations about the husband’s obligation to pay a fixed amount if the relationship were dissolved during the wife’s pregnancy.

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