"I want to marry my daughter!" In BC, an ancient Egyptian pharaoh saw his young daughter, who looked like a beautiful daughter, and even thought of marrying his daughter. And this idea actually made the pharaohs who followed suit after him.
This scene took place in ancient Egypt and was very frequent.
For example, during the Middle Kingdom period of ancient Egypt, Pharaoh Amenemhet III had hundreds of concubines, some of whom were Pharaoh's sisters or daughters, and the mother of the female pharaoh of the twelfth dynasty, Sebeknefru, was the daughter of Pharaoh Amenemhet III, so Sebeknefru was both the daughter of the pharaoh and the granddaughter of the pharaoh.
Sebeknefru, whose name means "beauty of Sobek", was born in an environment of extreme indulgence, the product of the royal harem and nursery, and her mother was the king's concubine, and the king's daughter; And Sebeknefru grew up, and if the king still lived long, she could also be the king's wife.
She witnessed their political intrigue, each trying to seduce the king better than the other women so that she could give birth to the royal heir and become the mother of the next king.
This behavior of ancient Egypt, on the one hand, was modeled on their myths and legends, the sacred relationship between the brothers and sisters of the god-king Osiris and Isis, but their union produced Horus, the god of falcons, representing the omniscient kingship of the world.
Heroes with extraordinary ways of birth have always had extraordinary births, and about the blood union of the hero's parents, as the French scholar Boulogne said: "Just as noble blood and lowly blood cannot be mixed, and heroes are like Egyptian pharaohs, in order to maintain the purity of blood, they can only reproduce among themselves." ”
On the other hand, this behavior actually makes political sense, because blood marriages for political and economic reasons are compelling, which keeps wealth and power in a close-knit kinship group.
If a powerful person had a daughter, he would find a young man from a powerful family to be her future husband, so that the power and wealth of the family would not be lost, but would expand, such as the Rothschilds.
As a result, many Egyptian princesses remained in the palace throughout their lives and never left to start their own families. Many of these royal daughters, as extensions of power to their surviving fathers or brothers, held important priesthoods and performed complex ceremonies in Egyptian sacred temples, serving and accompanying them.
So, what are the odds that descendants of blood unions will be elected kings? The answer is very frequent. For 3,000 years, the ancient Egyptians used royal inbreeding as a lifeline, and they used royal inbreeding again and again.
However, choosing offspring who are united by blood can pose another problem, the next king is in poor health and may be infertile.
Some of the royal descendants, especially the king's sisters, had weak hearts, cleft lips, strange facial shapes, huge or earthly scales, oversized heads, deformed limbs, deformed feet, and mental retardation.
Part of the reason for the end of the Sixth Dynasty may have been blood marriage, and probably the Twelfth Dynasty was also the same. The Tutankhamun dynasty began with a complete sibling-sibling marriage, which almost perished when Amenhotep I had no children of his own, and he was the product of this sibling marriage.
Therefore, from the perspective of Egyptian culture, in ancient Egyptian society, in order to maintain the family's property and power, intermarriage between siblings was a normal behavior, and even it was not unusual for a father to marry a daughter and a mother to marry a son.
Osiris, the king of Hades in Egyptian mythology, married his sister Isis, and Hera, the wife of Zeus, the god Zeus in Greek mythology, was his own sister. The interaction between Egyptian and Greek civilizations can be seen.
These were the marriage and culture needed by the society and politics of the time, and they had the significance of the times behind them, and these marriage customs could not be viewed separately from the real society of ancient Egypt.
At that time, the Pharaonic family's intermarriage of close relatives in order to maintain the purity of the bloodline and the killing of close relatives in order to consolidate power were tolerated by the society and culture of the time.
The Ptolemaic dynasty abandoned their ancestral Greek cultural traditions and instead made the male successors of the dynasty marry their sisters and share royal power with them, in accordance with Egyptian cultural traditions. This respect for local religion and culture made the foreign dynasty of Ptolemaic accepted by Egyptians as the longest-lived Hellenistic kingdom.
Bibliography:
On the Royal Marriage of Ptolemaic Egypt
Married Life in the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt
"On the Writing of Blood Marriage in the Creation Myth of Ancient Egypt"
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