A Book on Pre-Modern Kinship Marriages

[osiris]

For anyone with an interest in history, a new book coming out by Walter Scheidel, professor of Classics at Stanford University should be interesting.

The working title is Brother-sister and parent-child marriage in pre-modern societies, and although his website doesn't indicate when the book might be out, it does link to an abstract with a pretty intensive bibliography:

http://www.stanford.edu/~scheidel/incest.htm

Here's a preview:

The spread and force of incest avoidance make cases of socially and legally condoned marital and/or sexual relations within the nuclear family all the more intriguing. Paradoxically, they have been given short shrift in global surveys of incest.

In a number of pre-modern societies, relations of this kind were the exclusive prerogative of kings and remained forbidden to commoners. ‘Royal incest’, which serves to emphasize the supernatural qualities of the rulers (strongly associated with mythological traditions of divine incest) and insulates ruling families against intrusions, can be found around the globe, from the Pharaohs and Ptolemies of ancient Egypt and ancient Near Eastern rulers (e.g., Elam, Persia, Phoenicia, etc.) to kings in Central Africa, the Inca of Peru and the Mixtec aristocracy of Mexico, and the chiefs of pre-contact Hawaii. In other cases, mostly in tribal societies, incestuous behaviour could be imagined to confer magical powers. By contrast, habitual nuclear-family incest outside ruling families was exceedingly rare. The census returns of Roman Egypt, preserved on papyrus, provide quantifiable documentary evidence of brother-sister marriage, mostly for the 2nd and early 3rd centuries AD.

At that time, one in five attested couples in Middle Egypt consisted of brothers and sisters. The incidence of incest in the city of Arsinoe in the Fayum was higher still, indicating that virtually every man with a living younger sister married her instead of someone from outside the family. At that level, this custom must have assumed the function of a cultural norm.

Mazdaean (‘Zoroastrian’) religious doctrine, originating from Iran, not only legitimized but encouraged and extolled sexual relations between parents and children and between siblings. The very substantial corpus of pertinent evidence combines prescriptive Zoroastrian texts (mostly from the early Middle Ages) and descriptive accounts by outsiders, ranging from the 5th century BC to the Middle Ages and from western Europe to Tibet and China. Half-sibling unions are also attested for a number of other societies but have so far eluded systematic investigation.


Looks like we were all simply born in the wrong millennium.