Interesting Stats on Marriage in the 1st Century

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I don’t have a point to make with all this – I simply found it interesting. Maybe you will too.
Lynn H. Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009): 119.

“Based on a survey of inscriptional evidence, men married for the first time in their mid to late twenties. Women entered marriage for the first time by their late teens or early twenties. Using statistics from modern, preindustrial communities to estimate demographics in the ancient world, we find that the average live expectancy was twenty-five years. If a woman married at age twenty, and her husband was thirty years old, then the likelihood that her father was alive at her wedding was approximately fifty percent.
I will say, however, that this makes me feel old…

Comments

Erlend said…
The average is 25 for Roman life expectany because of high infant/child mortality rates. People who got past their infant years had, relatively speaking, good life expectancy rates until their mid/late. The drop between 20and 40 years was about 15-20%, not 50%. Infants wouldn't have children whose wedding they would miss [obviously].

Sorry to be a pedant. Nice blog by the way. Just found it an reading through the archives.
January 20, 2010 8:22 AM
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