During the Ptolemaic period (305 to 30 BCE) the practice was even used by King Ptolemy II as “a major theme of propaganda, stressing the nature of the couple, which could not be bound by ordinary rules of humanity” (Chauveau, M.).įig. They were often privileged to do what was forbidden to members of the ordinary family. parents, children) were common among royalty or special classes of priests since they were the representatives of divine on Earth. There is an abundance of evidence showing that marriages or sexual relations between members of the “nuclear family“ (i.e. Incest in Ancient Egypt: the case of the 18th Dynasty Let’s first take the case of the 18 th dynasty, the first dynasty of the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. So why is it that incest was accepted and practised in ancient Egypt and more recently among members of the royal family such as the Habsburg (16 th-18 th century)? And how did science shed the lights on family relationships, incestuous practices and the diseases resulting from them? But this theory seems contestable in view of the Egyptian case. More recently, modern philosophers and thinkers argued that the prohibition against incest was a universal phenomenon, the so-called incest taboo. From the half of the 9 th century CE, the church even raised this limit to the seventh degree of consanguinity and the method of calculating degrees was also changed. It is surprising that the practice continued for as long as it has when religious and civil laws started to forbid it and when the risks associated to this practice started to be known from the 5th century BCE, Roman civil law already forbade couples from marrying if they were within four degrees of consanguinity (Bouchard 2010). Many others questions followed: If incest was accepted in ancient Egypt among the ruling class, was it tolerated by the whole population? What makes it unacceptable in Western countries today? Health? Morality? Are marriages among siblings and/or first cousins still allowed nowadays in some countries? And what are actually the risks of incestuous relations?įrom ancient Egypt to the Habsburg family in Europe, throughout history cases of consanguinity - mainly among members of the ruling classes - are numerous.

1: Limestone statuette of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Princess (Tell el Amarna).

Egyptian pharaoh