Tag: Egypt

When Did We Stop Marrying Our Siblings?

On By Jennifer Mugrage8 Comments

… and why do I care?

I might be in the process of drafting a book that takes place before the Flood. So that is forcing me to tackle this issue. Besides needing to get it settled in my own mind, this post is meant to test the waters and see how you, my readers, react to this concept. If I even bring it up, will I be kicked out of polite society?

So, this post is a historical survey of sister-marrying. And it starts in Egypt.

Royals did it

Marrying one’s sister, or half-sister, was not unheard of in the royal families of Ancient Near Eastern cultures. See the following two links for some hair-raising proof that it happened in ancient Egypt:

https://fount.aucegypt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6097&context=faculty_journal_articles

https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/ancient-history/egypt-brother-sister-marriage/

The practice of royal inbreeding continued so long in Egypt that, by the time we get to Tut-ankh-amen, he has a myriad of health problems and is rather strange-looking.

This was such an established part of married love, at least among royals, in the Ancient Near East that calling someone “my sister” became a conventional endearment. Here, for example, is Solomon:

You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride,

you have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes,

with one jewel of your necklace.

Song of Solomon 4:9

And why did they do it? The obvious answer is to keep the royal bloodline pure. Most ANE cultures tended to believe that their royal family was descended from the gods (see my post Genetic Engineering in the Ancient World), and to add another layer to this, their myths about the gods also often featured sibling-marriage. Typically, you’d have gods and goddesses all being descended from the same being (Father Sky and Mother Earth, say), and then reproducing with each other to produce all the typically observed features of the cosmos. (Please, for the love of God, take my word for this and don’t read the Sumerian creation myths. I’m begging you–don’t!)

Speaking of Sumerians, here is an article that argues that Abram married his half-sister Sarai (whose name means princess) for the same reason: because their family was some kind of royalty in Mesopotamia before he left on his journey.

https://biblicalanthropology.blogspot.com/2011/03/sister-wives-and-cousin-wives.html

My question, however, is this. Did this practice of royals marrying their sisters represent breaking an established taboo for a “good” reason, or was it a case of carrying on a common practice a little longer than most people? My contention is that it’s the latter.

Let’s Go to Genesis

Genesis is, as I have often said, my favorite ancient history book. The more I study all of this, the more I realize that it is by far the most accurate written record we have of really ancient history, and of course it’s the only written record we have for some events that are, nevertheless, corroborated indirectly by archaeology, genetics, and historical traditions from around the world.

So, in Genesis, we have humanity starting out with one single couple. If we take this seriously, we have to conclude that the first generation would have had to marry their brothers and sisters, because there was nobody else around.

Nowadays, this would be an impossible genetic problem, besides being taboo. However, clearly it wasn’t taboo at the time. By producing families, people were obeying God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.” (Gen. 1:28) Based on the extremely long lifespans recorded in Genesis, we can infer that the newly created people were much healthier than we are, with a much more varied and robust genetic code. They would have had few diseases as yet, and almost no harmful mutations to inherit. Adam and Eve, who didn’t die until they were into their 900s, could have had literally a hundred or more children in that first generation. Furthermore, these children need not all have looked alike, except in the sense of being human. We have to remember that Adam and Eve had within them the potential to produce every genetic variation we see today (and actually more, since most of the variety was lost during the Flood).

By the time Cain kills Abel, there are enough people in the earth that Cain can complain, “I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” These other people that he is worried about would have been his siblings, nephews and nieces, grandnephews and -nieces, and so forth. If we figure that Seth was born not long after the murder of Abel, then the murder of Abel took place just under 130 years after the Fall. (Genesis 4:25 – 5:3) Apparently, that was enough time for the world to be populated.

In this video, starting at about 20:00, geneticist Nathaniel T. Jeansen discusses how our ancestors had to have been more closely related “than we are usually comfortable with.”

A Detour into Evolutionary Theory

“But wait!” you may say. “All this is nonsense. People didn’t all come from one founding couple, we evolved from several different but related species of hominids.”

Actually, if you think that way, you probably stopped reading this article before you got to this section. But let’s dip a toe into natural selection, just in case there is anyone hate-reading or any readers who are intrigued by what I’m saying about history, but are bothered by the science side of things.

Natural selection, in order to work as a mechanism, has to have a population of creatures already in place, with some genetic variation already in their genome. And–this is critical–they have to be already reproducing. That way, natural selection can operate on the subsequent generations of the population, encouraging variety here, stamping it out there, etc.

This creates a big problem if you want to argue that people evolved from (ultimately) one-celled animals. Now, how one-celled animals reproduce is itself a beautiful, complex mystery, but it’s basically by subdividing, producing clones of themselves. In other words, it’s not sexual reproduction.

How did sexual reproduction come about through natural selection? It would call for a wildly improbable series of (already vanishingly rare) beneficial mutations to the genetic code of two different creatures of the same species, such that one ended up male and one ended up female, with their systems perfectly corresponding to each other for reproduction. And it would have to work perfectly the first time.

If you want several different populations of human species, then you need this miracle to happen not once but several times, in different places. If it only happens once, then you’re back to what Genesis describes, which is just one founding couple.

What I’m saying is that introducing evolutionary theory doesn’t make the believability problem smaller, it makes it bigger.

Stephen Meyer explains why beneficial mutations are mathematically impossible.

Back to Genesis Again

We’ve established that in the pre-Flood world, there was no taboo on marrying one’s sibling (or probably, cousin or niece either), and also no health cost to doing so. Also (probably) it would not necessarily mean marrying someone you had grown up in close proximity with, given the size of the families we are talking about.

Then we get the Flood, in Genesis 6 – 9 and also attested in numerous local histories worldwide. At the Flood, the human population of the earth, previously vast in genetic diversity, gets culled down to just four couples, and the men of these couples are all related to each other. It’s from these four couples (perhaps just three of them?) that all of us today are descended. (We are literally just one big family!)

Think about the implications of this. The most distant relationship that any of Noah’s grandchildren would have had to each other would have been cousin during that first generation. Perhaps they married their cousins, and then their second cousins and so forth, but there is nothing to indicate that the possibility of marrying siblings had been closed to them. In Gen. 9:1 -17, God makes a new covenant with Noah and his sons. He reiterates the command to increase in number and fill the earth. He gives them the animals to eat, institutes the death penalty for murder of humans, and promises never to send another worldwide flood. He does not mention any new rules about not marrying your sister.

Next, in Genesis 11 and 10 respectively, we get the Tower of Babel and the Table of Nations. Though the Table of Nations comes before the account of Babel, the fact that we are told which geographical areas these nations settled in hints that the Table of Nations is at least a partial elaboration of where people went when “the LORD scattered them over the face of the earth.”

In the Table of Nations, the peoples are sorted by father. We see the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japeth listed by a paternal line, and we see them scattering to found cities, kingdoms, and peoples. This implies, though it does not directly say, that they were having a lot of children per family, and that they were practicing in-group marriage.

Now we get to Abram, who was a Sumerian basically, or was living in that region of the world and in that culture area. As has been covered, he married his half-sister Sarai, whether because theirs was an aristocratic family or because it was still common practice in Mesopotamia at the time. Later, on two separate occasions (Gen. 12:10 – 20 and 20:1 – 18), he “lies” by telling a local ruler that Sarai is his sister. On both occasions, the local king understands this to mean that Sarai is not Abram’s wife and is fair game for his harem. This shows that, probably, most wives were not sisters at the time, at least in Egypt (Gen. 12) and southern Palestine (Gen. 20).

This would be about 2,000 B.C.

In Genesis 24, Abraham asks his servant to get a wife for Isaac from among “my own relatives.” The servant, guided by the LORD (!), finds Rebekah, the daughter of Abraham’s niece (Gen. 24:15). One generation later, Rebekah herself encourages Jacob to marry one of his cousins, daughters of her brother Laban. So by this time, we are practicing in-group marriage, but with cousins, not siblings.

Some groups still do this. See my post on The Iroquois Kinship System.

Finally, A Taboo in Leviticus 18!

Finally, in Leviticus 18, we get an explicit prohibition on marrying your sister.

Leviticus comprises the details of the giving of the Law, right after the exodus from Egypt, so about 1400 B.C. If you plop your finger onto Leviticus, it looks really early in the Bible. However, it’s 600 years after Abraham and a couple of thousand years after the Flood, so it is coming rather late from this blog’s perspective on ancient history.

The intended recipients of Leviticus are a large population of tribes who have just spent 400 years becoming culturally Egyptian. Since Moses’ parents were both from the tribe of Levi (Exodus 2:1), we can infer that they are still practicing in-group marriage.

Leviticus chapter 18 begins this way:

The LORD said to Moses: “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘I am the LORD your God. You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices. You must obey my laws and be careful to follow my decrees. I am the LORD your God. Keep my decrees and laws, for the man who obeys them will live [i.e. find life] by them. I am the LORD.

“No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the LORD.”

Lev. 18:1 – 6

There follows a very comprehensive list of close relatives who are off-limits. This list includes everything you can think of, and some things that you perhaps haven’t. It ranges from very sick perversions, to this:

“‘Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere. (v. 9)

“‘Do not take your wife’s sister as a rival wife and have sexual relations with her while your wife is living.'” (v. 17)

Verse 9 gives us a clue of what types of family arrangements were possible among the Israelites of 1400 B.C. You might have a half-sister who was raised in a separate household. Verse 17 describes a behavior that Jacob famously engaged in with Rachael and Leah (additionally, both women were his cousins). In fact, the two women’s rivalry was how we got the twelve tribes of Israel. Marrying two sisters at the same time (not to mention their respective maidservants) was apparently something that was normal in the age of the patriarchs, but now, giving the Law 600 years later, God forbids it.

Leviticus 18:24 – 29 makes it clear that “all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you,” but God considers them to be things that defile a land. I gather that this means the wide variety of disordered sexual relationships described in Leviticus 18 were not unheard-of, probably not just among the Egyptians and Canaanites, but among many or all of the many tribes in the surrounding areas.

We have God to thank for this taboo

So, now we know approximately when marrying your sister became taboo. 1400 B.C. And people didn’t come up with this on their own; God had to enforce it.

The overall picture is one where we start off with is marriages taking place among close family, in sort of a wholesome way, before and immediately after the Flood. Then, instead of branching out and marrying more and more distantly related people as the earth’s population increases, we see cultures in the Ancient Near East curving back in on themselves and coming up with more and more perverse ways to approach this. I gather from Lev. 18 that, once an ANE man had bagged a wife, he seemed to feel entitled, or at least have an eye out for the opportunity, for sexual rights to everyone related to her.

The time of the Israelite patriarchs, enslavement in Egypt, and Exodus also overlaps with the Minoan civilization on Crete, which gave us the legend (?) of the Minotaur, the offspring (allegedly) of Queen Pasiphae and a white bull. That gives us a clue that such horrifying practices were not confined to the Levant. “Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how that nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled.”

Ancient People Knew About Mathematics

On By Jennifer Mugrage9 Comments

“Babylonians used the Pythagorean theorem 1,000 years before it was ‘invented’ in ancient Greece”

If you know me, you’ll know that I think this finding is cool, but not surprising. I believe that advanced mathematics were widely known in the ancient world. How else could the Giza pyramids have been built as a model of the stars of Orion’s belt (using pi in their proportions) … the temple complex at Teotihuacan been built as a model of the solar system (with the pyramids there also using pi in their proportions) … Stonehenge been built as an astronomical observatory that also functioned as a calculator … or the circular chambers at Gobekli Tepe been laid out forming a perfect equilateral triangle?

This doesn’t mean that every people group since the dispersion of mankind has had a knowledge of advanced mathematics. Obviously not. But either it was known to a central civilization and then lost in many cases, or else human beings are so clever that they are capable of discovering mathematical principles independently, whenever they have the need and the interest. Or both.

People are probably going to tell you that crediting the Pythagorean theorem to Pythagoras (through whom we first heard about it), rather than to the Babylonians, is racism. It’s not. In one sense, the fact that we credited Pythagoras was harmless. It was ignorance, not a cover-up. That was the farther our knowledge went; now, it goes a little farther.

But if we are super duper surprised that this theorem was in use 1,000 years before we thought it was, then we might be dealing here with an equally wrongheaded attitude. Instead of looking down on some peoples based on their skin tone, this is looking down on them based on the fact that they lived and died just too long before we were born. It’s the assumption that modern people are better at abstract thought, science, and technology than ancient people. Though self-flattering, this belief isn’t just an irrational prejudice. It’s a consequence of the evolutionary presupposition that people started out as animals, and that we had to slowly develop things like language, music, art, religion, mathematics and all kinds of higher thought. Thus, by definition, modern people should be smarter and our technology and mathematics more advanced than those of ancient people. The silent testimony of megalithic monuments all around the world belies this.

Egyptian Red Hair

On By Jennifer Mugrage11 Comments
Photo by Alex Azabache on Pexels.com

This is my second post about non-stereotypical hair. See my first one here.

If I were to ask you to draw an Ancient Egyptian, you would probably draw someone with gold, reddish, or dark skin, long dark eyes, and black hair. Red hair would probably not appear in your drawing. However, there has been a red-haired strain in Egyptian genetics apparently from time immemorial.

Ramses II, 90 years old when he died, was tall, thin, and by the time of his death he was stooped and had a tooth abscess. He also had red-gold hair. “Specialists who examined the strands under a microscope found that it had been dyed with henna and in all likelihood had been auburn in Ramses’ youth” (Time-Life, p. 153). Tall, thin, red-haired and hook-nosed, Ramses II does not match my mental picture of a typical Egyptian.

But he is not the only one. A number of red-haired Egyptian mummies have been found. Archaeologists used to assume that the hair was once dark and had been bleached out by the embalming process. But a recent study treated hair samples with the natron salts similar to those the Egyptians used, and found that the process did not change the color of the hair. Apparently these were actually redheads.

When I was taught Egyptian mythology in school, I was told that Seth, the villain of the story of Isis and Osiris, was red-haired. He was also Osiris’ brother. I found this intriguing, and it reminded me of the Semitic story of Jacob and Esau, who were twins one of whom was a dark-haired (?), “smooth” man, and one of whom was “hairy” and “red.”

Now I find out that Seth, as his legend later developed, was a trickster god, usually portrayed as a composite of different animals, with red hair or fur. Also, red was a symbolic color that could represent vitality or anger (no surprise there). So it’s possible that Seth was an entirely invented character and that his unusual hair color was picked to match his personality and symbolism. But, since this is an ancient origin myth, I can’t shake the possibility that there once was actually a founding pair of brothers, one of whom was dark-haired and one of whom was red. (Also, shades of the original Thor, a quick-tempered, red-haired, trickster god!)

If Red Hair is Native to Egypt, Does This Mean that Ancient Egyptians were Indo-Europeans?

No.

It just means that, as for most people groups worldwide, their genetics were more complex than the layperson would first imagine.

The ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians has been a hugely contested topic. Their civilization is so intriguing that everyone wants to claim them. Eurocentrists have tried to claim that the Egyptians were actually “Mediterranean” (specifically the Hellenistic, European-style Mediterranean), because this supports their dogma that Europeans have been the only source of civilization and there has never been a high civilization to come out of Africa. Afrocentrists have countered by claiming the ancient Egyptians were not only not white, but were truly black, the ancestors of the modern-day sub-Saharan Africans. The world’s first high civilizations were African, and everyone else has stolen their ideas!

Both groups are wrong about the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians. Genetic studies of mummies are difficult to do, and this is truer the older the mummies are, but so far, they have concluded that Egyptians have more or less always been … Egyptian. Uniquely themselves, more closely related to the peoples of the Levant than to any others, and genetically, more or less just like the Egyptians of today.

Also, Could We Stop the Tug-of-War?

And may I just add, this is stupid, human race? Could we please (and when I say we, I mean you, human race) stop all this “I started civilization” “No, I did”?

First of all, Egypt was not the world’s first civilization. Contemporary with them, we have the Sumerians, who though they did not live in Africa were probably also black, and the little-known Balkan civilization that gave us the Vinca signs. And there are good indications that many civilizations existed just as advanced as, and prior to, these. See all my posts about The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age by Richard Rudgley.

The Afrocentrists are closer to being right than the Eurocentrists. Arthur C. Custance makes the case,

One does not think of Africa as particularly inventive. As a matter of fact, however, so many new things came from that great continent during Roman times that they had a proverb, “Ex Africa semper aliquid,” which freely translated means, “There is always something new coming out of Africa.”

It is true to say that whatever inventiveness [Indo-Europeans] have shown in the past three or four centuries has almost always resulted from stimulation from non-Indo-Europeans. Our chief glory has been the ability to improve upon and perfect the inventions of others, often to such an extent that they appear to be original developments … [I]t does not seem proper to call a people “inventive” who once in a while do invent something, but who 99% of the time merely adapt the inventions of others to new ends.

Custance, Noah’s Three Sons, pp. 199, 215

That said, the idea that any one nationality can claim to have founded civilization is … stupid, human race. Human beings are really smart and civilization springs up wherever they go. Lots of people have invented civilization, many times.

(Furthermore, even if your ancestors did build the Parthenon or the Pyramids or Notre Dame, you didn’t build them personally, did you? Do you really want to start taking credit for amazing stuff that people who share your genetics did 3,000 years ago? Are you also going to take credit for all the atrocities they committed? Human race, you are too smart for this stupid idea.)

Egyptian Red Hair Makes an Appearance in The Long Guest

Nimri, the anti-hero of my novel The Long Guest, is a Cushite, who per Genesis is related to “Egypt.” Mid-novel, after being separated from his own people and dragged off on a journey over the Asia steppes, he observes some red-haired Indo-Europeans.

When I first saw that redhaired fellow I was reminded of my relative Mizra.  He had red –gold hair and bright burnished skin like my own – only even more ruddy, just a shade darker than his hair.  He was tall and thin, with a long thin arrogant face.  Between that and his unusual coloring, he was a very striking-looking man.  He used to stalk around the architects’ complex like a very god … how we all admired him, and wanted to be like him!  But no one could compare to Mizra. 

The Long Guest, Chapter 13

The Hebrew word for Egypt is Mizraim, which is actually plural: “Egypts.” Rather than making Nimri’s relative’s name plural, I have simply called him Mizra.

Nimri never manages to tell anyone about Mizra, because he cannot yet communicate at this stage in the story. But I can tell you. In case you didn’t know, I’ll whisper it in your ear: Some Egyptians had red hair.

Sources

“Color (iwen)” Ancient Egypt: the Mythology

Custance, Arthur C. Noah’s Three Sons, The Doorway Papers series vol. 1, Zondervan, 1975. pp. 155 – 216 discuss “The [Technological] Inventiveness of the Hamitic Peoples.” Or you can read the chapter here.

“Isis: Egyptian Goddess,” Britannica.

“New Research Shows that Some Ancient Egyptians were Naturally Fair-Haired,” Ancient Origins, 2 May 2016

Perry, Philip. “Were the ancient Egyptians black or white? Scientists now know,” Big Think, June 11, 2017

Ramses II: Magnificence on the Nile, by the editors of Time-Life books, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1993. p. 153 shows the red-gold hair on the mummy of Ramses II.

Schuenemann, Verena J., et. al., “Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods,” Nature.com, 30 May 2017. This is the study that the Big Think article is summarizing.

“Seth: Egyptian God,” Britannica.