Incest in ancient Egypt

Brother-sister incest was a common practice throughout the history of Ancient Egypt with father-daughter incest also at times accepeted. It is well documented among the pharaohs, and was also regularly found among the common people of Roman Egypt.

The prevalence of incest in Ancient Egypt is a challenge to the idea that incest is a universal taboo in human societies. A fact asserted regularly in sociology by thinkers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Royal families

Brother-sister marriages among the pharaohs date from at least the 11th Dynasty in 2000 BCE. The family trees of the pharaohs are complicated, with the exact parentage of many queens uncertain, but many of them include brother-sister and more rarely father-daughter pairings.

An example is the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. Thutmose I's two children Thutmose II and Hatshepsut married. Genetic testing on Tutankhamun proves that his parents were full siblings, Akhenaten and the mummy known as The Younger Lady.

Father-daughter marriage was less common. One clear case is Ramses the Great who married at least two of his daughters: Bintanath and Meritamen.

The practice of royal incest was fully adopted by the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt for 275 years. Of the fifteen marriages made by the Greek rulers, ten or eleven were to their full sibling. The famed Cleopatra, last queen of Egypt, was married first to her older brother Ptolemy XIII and then to her younger brother Ptolemy XIV.

Common people

The most detailed historical records come form the final centuries of Ancient Egyptian civilization of Roman controlled Egypt. The Romans conducted a census every fourteen years. Some of those records have survived giving detailed descriptions of households and the relations of the people living in them. Keith Hopkins did a detailed analysis of those records and found that 15 to 20% of all marriages recorded were between brothers and sisters. These records covered a diverse economic and geographic slice of the population and show that sibling marriage was common in all classes and regions of society in Roman Egypt.

Hopkins found 113 marriages recorded in these census documents. Of those 17 were certain sibling marriages, with another 6 probably so. 11 of those cases were full brother-sister. 8 between half brothers and sister. One limitation pointed out by Sabine R. Huebner is that the standard census phrase "wife and sister from the same father and mother" does not rule out adopted siblings who were not blood relations.

There are other pieces of evidence. Both wedding and divorce records of sibling marriages survive. Also surviving are wedding invitations: "Dionysius invites you to dinner at the marriage of his own children ... to-morrow, that is the 30th at the 9th hour."

It is less clear if incest was common outside the royal family in pre-Roman periods. Jaroslav Černý looked at 500 families of the Egyptian elite outside the royal family. He found no clear evidence for incestous marriages. Greco-Roman writers including Seneca, Diodorus, and Philo of Alexandria all make mention that according to Egyptian law, unlike that of the Greeks, Romans, and Jews, sibling marriage was legal.

Effects

Statue of Akhenaten in the collection of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo

The children of incest are at high risk of genetic abnormalities, but little clear evidence has been found for this in the Egyptian royal line. The unusual depictions of the Pharaoh Akhenaton led to long of speculation of possible genetic disorders, but when his DNA was sequenced there was no evidence found for any genetic diseases.

Scholars have attempted to look for the effects of inbreeding depression on the Ptolemaic dynasty. The royal house with the clearest evidence for generations of close interbreeding. Fertility, mortality, deformity, intelligence. The Ptolemy family showed non of the problems that may result from generations of incest. As Sheila Ager points out likely does not mean inevitable. Incest may increase the risk of ill-health but does not guarantee it.

The problem of incest would be reduced in a culture where it is ubiquitous. In societies without high rates of incest the main danger is the inheritance of harmful double recessive traits that cause the most problems. That is because in a society where incest is rare it is common for many people to carry harmful recessive traits to no ill effect. In a society with common incest those traits would become more of a barrier to reproduction and become less common.

Explanations

There have been many attempts to explain the acceptance of incest in Ancient Egypt, with no scholarly consensus as to why the culture was so distinct from human norms.

The religion is a part of it. Chief gods Osiris and Isis were both brother and sister and husband and wife. Though this is also common in other mythologies where incest is not common practice such as Zeus and Hera. It is also impossible to know if the religion influenced culture or if the culture influenced the religion.

The pharaoh his parents and children were considered to be gods. The gap between the rulers and nobility was vast making it hard for the pharaoh to marry anyone not part of his direct family. Similar combinations of divine monarchs and incest are seen in Incan and Hawaiian history. Pharaohs married many women. Their sisters were only one wife among many and many of the heirs were not from family unions.<ref name=":1">

Among the common population one theory proposed by Hopkins is the relatively strong legal protections for women in Ancient Egypt. Women married late, in the mid 20s as opposed to their mid-teens in the rest of the Roman Empire. Surviving love poems and romantic stories indicate that women could chose who they could marry, rather than it being arranged. Upon the death of a husband the wife, not only the kids, would receive a share of the estate. No-fault divorce was the law. Either couple could end a marriage contract and when done so the wife would have claims on some portion of the husbands wealth. Sibling marriages would prevent the risks of a failed marriage stripping a family's wealth.

Suppression

Under the Roman Emperor Caracalla all Egyptians became Roman citizens. This put them under Roman Law rather than traditional Egyptian laws. Roman Law forbade incestuous marriages. Such marriages disappeared from the public records. That Diocletian 70 years later issued a decree condemning incest hints that the practice was still practiced. By the time Christianity came to Egypt it does seem the practice had vanished. Incest does not appear often among pagans sins attacked by the early Egyptian Christian writers such as Origen.