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5. Marry a sister as a wife?

In modern literature, the forbidden consanguineous marriage within the ancient Egyptian royal family has always been a topic that people talk about. In the long comic "Daughter of the Nile", this aspect is described - Queen Esis and Pharaoh Memphis, who have been engaged to marry since childhood and rule Upper and Lower Egypt respectively, are actually a pair of biological brothers and sisters who are related by blood!

In real history, the marriage of the ancient Egyptian royal family is even more unbelievable, and the love between sisters and brothers is already pediatric - the first pharaoh of the Third Dynasty of Egypt was born of the union of father and daughter; And Ramses the Great of the Nineteenth Dynasty also married his own daughter.

As for the Pharaoh Amenhotep III of the Eighteenth Dynasty, he was even more extreme in terms of close relatives: his first queen was his biological mother Didi, who gave birth to two daughters. The second queen was his cousin Niffrey. The fifth queen is actually the daughter of him and his mother Di Di, and she also gave birth to two daughters for the pharaoh...... **** is so chaotic that the generations within the royal family don't know how to arrange it......

Even at the end of ancient Egyptian civilization, this crazy **** royal custom was still maintained. For example, the last Egyptian pharaoh in history, the famous Cleopatra, in addition to hooking up with Caesar and Antony, also married her two biological brothers.

――To sum up, the entire history of ancient Egypt can be said to be "starting with **** and ending with ****"!

In fact, in ancient Egypt, not only did the royal family have long used consanguineous marriages, but nobles and commoners also strongly admired consanguineous marriages - ancient Egyptians generally believed that consanguineous marriages would protect the family's lineage and prevent outsiders from entering the family. All kinds of siblings, siblings, uncles and nieces get married, and they are taken for granted!

However, unlike the royal family, among the nobility and commoners of ancient Egypt, the ideal choice was usually to marry cousins, then cousins, and then to consider the need for marriage between various families.

But the ancient Egyptian royal family strictly institutionalized and clearly stipulated that every pharaoh should marry his own biological sister!

In fact, the ancient Egyptian royal family had always been only married in international dealings - the pharaoh himself could marry foreign concubines, but the Egyptian princess would never marry outside the country in any case, and at most could only marry the nobles and ministers of Egypt itself.

Moreover, although the pharaoh could have many foreign concubines, only a princess with Egyptian royal blood, that is, the pharaoh's biological sister, could become queen. In addition, only children born to close relatives of Pharaoh and his sisters could have the right to inherit the throne.

Of course, although the ancient Egyptian royal family did theoretically stipulate the right of succession in this way, once the time came to last, it would occasionally be flexible.

So why did the ancient Egyptian royal family engage in such forced consanguineous marriages?

According to the public statements of the ancient Egyptian royal family, because the Egyptian pharaohs were descendants of the gods, they had to intermarry with the holy royal family in order to maintain the purity and nobility of the bloodline...... But behind this high-sounding statement, there are hidden political considerations about the succession of royal power.

It should be noted that the ancient Egyptian civilization was a precocious civilization, when the Egyptians were still in a state of transition from a matrilineal clan society to a patrilineal clan society, and the concept of male superiority and female inferiority had not yet been fully formed, Egypt had already entered the stage of a civilized country. Therefore, compared with other civilizations in the future, the "women's rights" of the ancient Egyptian civilization are relatively high, for example, women in ancient Egypt can also hold official positions, inherit property, and even be the masters of the house. Due to the general social perception of the time, it was difficult for the pharaoh to completely deprive the princesses (in fact, sons-in-law) of their inheritance. In order to prevent the son-in-law from competing with his son for the throne and the division of the country, the pharaoh of ancient Egypt simply let his son and daughter marry on their own, so as not to cause a decentralization of power.

From the perspective of the security of the succession of the throne, this provision can not only prevent dangerous elements from entering the royal family through marriage, but also prevent the queen's family members from usurping the royal power as relatives, and even empty the entire royal family (during the Eastern Han Dynasty of China, the problem was very strict in this regard), and it can also prevent foreign kings from claiming to be qualified to inherit the throne of the pharaoh on the grounds that they married an Egyptian princess or that their mother was an Egyptian princess. And then provoked the inheritance wars in Egypt (many succession wars in European history were fought in this way, and even the Franco-Prussian War, which was very late in the era, was the direct cause) - this is the fundamental reason why the ancient Egyptian royal family insisted on consanguineous marriage for thousands of years and did not let women from other families become queens.

Therefore, in "Daughter of the Nile", Pharaoh Memphis wants to force Queen Escis to marry Babylon, which is not very reasonable. According to the custom of the time, if Fa honestly did not want to marry his own sister, he usually had to marry her to a minister, or let her be a priest and be lonely for the rest of his life. If Pharaoh's daughter is insisted on marrying a foreign country, it will be an unprecedented "revolutionary initiative" that will definitely cause a national uproar.

Returning to the topic, after expounding on the ancient Egyptian marriage of consanguineous marriage, what should we make of this strict custom that violates modern ethics and morality?

First of all, we cannot look at the problem in isolation from the background of the times, let alone use the standards of modern people to demand ancient people.

Let me point out here that in ancient times, before the civilization of mankind, the state of marriage was very chaotic all over the world, not only by collateral blood relatives, but also between direct blood relatives. In that wild and obscurantist time and space, the marriage of brother and sister or brother was a common occurrence, not a special case of ancient Egyptian civilization.

This is described in Egyptian mythology, Japanese mythology, and even the Christian Bible. Even the more conservative Chinese gradually emerged in the Western Zhou Dynasty to strictly prohibit the marriage of close relatives.

In the "barbaric areas" of the same era, such as Western Europe before the birth of ancient Roman civilization, some of the more backward Germanic people at that time simply even had a vague marriage system, and the men and women of the entire tribe were "**** and multiplied like wild beasts", and most of the children could not tell who their father was.

Therefore, for the consanguineous marriage of the ancient Egyptians, we don't have to accuse it of being backward and ignorant, a shameful symbol of betrayal of morality, or even any inferior nature - other peoples living on the earth in the same era are basically much more backward than the ancient Egyptians!

That is to say, the various ethics and morals that our modern people follow today were not clear at all at that time, and naturally they could not be talked about ****.

Of course, according to the findings of modern scholars, it is not good to marry consanguineously - not only with low fertility and high mortality from offspring, but also with frequent congenital malformations and hereditary diseases. For example, when a cousin or sister marries, the birth rate of children with dementia is 15o times higher than that of non-consanguineous marriages, and the neonatal mortality rate and malformation rate are also more than 3 times higher than that of non-consanguineous marriages. The mortality rate of children of consanguineous marriages before the age of 2o is 13. 9%, but only 1 for non-consanguineous marriages. 7%。

In ancient Egypt, many pharaohs also suffered from genetic diseases due to long-term consanguineous marriages. For example, the famous young pharaoh Tutankhamun was a sickly boy with misshapen feet and a cleft jaw that needed the help of crutches to walk – archaeologists found more than 1oo crutches in his grave, apparently prepared for Tutankhamun's afterlife.

According to the results of the above-mentioned scientific research, it is absolutely an unmistakable axiom that consanguineous marriage is not conducive to the healthy growth of future generations.

But on the other hand, the life expectancy of ancient humans was very short, with the infant mortality rate usually being more than half, and the mortality and disability rates of adults in natural disasters, plagues, and wars were also quite high. Until the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the average life expectancy of Europeans, who were known as the most civilized and advanced at that time, was still less than 4o years old, and in the distant ancient Egyptian era, the average life expectancy and quality of life of Egyptians were even more tragic.

Here you can give a counterexample, the ancient Roman Empire, which was once debauched, began to strictly implement monogamy after the whole people converted to Christianity in the third century AD, prohibiting all kinds of bad habits that betrayed morality and pursuing an honest and temperate attitude to life. It stands to reason that the survival rate of babies in this way should become relatively high! In fact, according to a census of the families of the citizens of Constantinople conducted by the Eastern Roman Empire in the seventh century, the survival rate of babies born in the city was only 6o%, and a large proportion of them died before the age of three.

Therefore, in ancient Egypt, the chance of babies suffering from genetic diseases became higher, and it seems that it is not a serious problem, because the original mortality rate has already been more than half. In fact, children with the Yan zhòng genetic disease often have no chance of becoming adults at all. The Egyptian pharaohs, on the other hand, would generally breed a few healthy babies under the "wide planting and thin harvest" of the body, so there was no need to worry too much about the heirs.

In addition, an analogy can be made: according to the content of a foreign novel, a young soldier was killed by a beautiful **** on the front-line battlefield, although the soldier was very excited, but he was worried that she had AIDS. So **** "taught" this rookie very old-fashionedly: As a person who is likely to be killed by a bullet tomorrow, why should you worry about a life-threatening disease that will only be life-threatening in ten years?

In the same way, if a time-traveler had come to ancient Egypt and become a prince or pharaoh, he would have been free to overthrow his sister and sister without having to worry about certain ethics that did not exist at the time, and genetic diseases that were insignificant compared to plagues, wars, and natural disasters, provided that you could survive the hurdles in your heart......

However, as a responsible person, I think it is necessary to remind everyone here: no god has ever stipulated that the Pharaoh's daughter must be a fairy-looking, gentle and lovely beauty, not an ugly girl with crooked melons and cracked dates, hunched over, lame and blind...... As for the grumpy and naturally dissolute shrew, or the sinister and vicious and cruel wicked women, there are countless more in the royal family.

If there were a large number of biological sisters, Pharaoh might be able to pick a more desirable candidate from among them and make her queen. But if there are only one or two Egyptian princesses in this generation, and none of them are very good in character and appearance, then the marriage of the pharaoh will be more difficult.

However, due to the sacred law of consanguineous marriage, the pharaohs still had to marry these not-so-beautiful biological sisters - as long as you recall a little about the fate of Cleopatra's two brothers and husbands (one was defeated and killed in battle by her sister's concubine Caesar, and the other was directly poisoned by Cleopatra), you should not have too many beautiful illusions about the forbidden marriage of "taking a sister as a wife".