Incest

Incest is sexual activity or marriage between very close family members. It is a taboo, as well as a criminal offense, in virtually all societies. In many societies premarital sex is allowed or encouraged; in most such societies, the same restrictions apply to sexual unions as to marriage.

History

Ancient Egypt

Some experts claim that incestual marriages were widespread at least during part of Egyptian history, such as Naphtali Lewis (Life in Egypt under Roman Rule: Oxford, 1983), who claims that numerous papyri attest to many husbands and wives as being brother and sister.

Related Topics:
1983 - Papyri

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:When instances of brother-sister marriages first began to appear in the papyri, they were greeted with great scepticism in some quarters, where doubt was expressed that any society would really have countenanced such common violation of the incest taboo... Such arguments are ingenious, but they collapse completely in the face of the cumulative evidence of scores of papyri, official as well as private documents, in which the wife is unequivocally identified as the husband's "sister born of the same father and the same mother". (pp.43f)

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Joyce Tyldesley (Ramesses: Egypt's Great Pharaoh: London, 2000), writing about the pre-Roman Egyptian period, expresses the opposite viewpoint. She states that within the royal family there was a tradition of hypergamy, where a king or his son might marry a commoner, but his daughter could not marry beneath herself, without the act be considered degrading herself. As a result, the royal princess often found herself either marrying her royal brother, or living her life without a spouse.

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Incestuous unions were frowned upon and considered as nefas (a violation of the natural and social order) in Roman times, and were explicitly forbidden by an imperial edict in AD 295, who divided the concept of incestus into two categories of unequal gravity: the incestus iuris gentium, who was applied to both Romans and non-Romans in the Empire, and the incestus iuris civilis who concerned only the Roman citizens. Therefore, for example, an Egyptian could marry an aunt, but a Roman could not.

Related Topics:
Roman - 295

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Royal dynasties

Adult incest has been notable in royal dynasties, probably in order to help concentrate wealth and political influence within the family (historical evidence suggests that this practice actually weakened the genetic makeup of elite society family lines, resulting in abnormally high occurrences of rare genetic defects and diseases). Although the marriage unions were often not consensual, with young adults or children forced to marry close relatives, this does not imply the sex was non-consensual. Best known for this practice, which included brother-sister marriages, are some of the dynasties of Ancient Egypt (as explained above), ancient Hawaii, and the Precolumbian Mixtec.

Related Topics:
Hawaii - Mixtec

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Dynasties of the modern era where there was frequent familial intermarriage were the mid-Habsburgs, one branch ruled over Spain and the other over Austria. Spanish princesses, however, did marry French kings, Louis XIII and Louis XIV who were not Habsburgs. The Spanish branch died out in 1700, but the last Spanish Habsburg king, Carlos II had been married to María-Lüisa of Orléans, grand-daughter of King Charles I of England and niece to King Louis XIV of France. However, over the last century, Kings Philip II, Philip III, and (for his second time) Philip IV all married their Austrian cousins. The Austrian branch continued to rule until 1918, and they are still alive and prospering today.

Related Topics:
Habsburg - Spain - Austria - French - Louis XIII - Louis XIV - 1700 - Carlos II - Charles I of England - Louis XIV of France - Philip II - Philip III - Philip IV - 1918

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In Christian society, in which most of the great royal dynasties of the early modern era functioned, incest was a terrible taboo. In 1536 Queen Anne Boleyn of England was falsely accused of incest with her brother in order to blacken her name and enable her husband to execute her and marry again.

Related Topics:
1536 - Queen Anne Boleyn of England - Her brother - Her husband - Marry again

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