Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications, Volume 34 : Incestuous and Close-Kin Marriage in Ancient Egypt and Persia : An Examination of the Evidence

This work examines the evidence for marriage and sexual relations between siblings and between parent and child in ancient Egypt and pre-Islamic Iran. Incestuous relationships, as a cultural feature, is usually dismissed for both ancient Egypt and Iran on the grounds that the evidence for it is unreliable or that it is only found as the exception, being allowed for royalty as repre-sentatives of the divine on earth. Neither view, from the perspective of this study, is tenable. This book restricts its examination to the sources for incestuous relationships between members of non-royal nuclear families and puts forth arguments against the generally held axiom that the prohibition of incest is a universal phenomenon. FRONT COVER 1 TITLE PAGE 4 COLOPHONE 5 CONTENTS 6 PREFACE 8 Acknowledgments 11 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 14 Nature vs. Culture 14 On the research history 18 Aim 24 THE UNIVERSALIST VIEW 26 THE PRACTICE OF INCEST 34 Incest exists/existed, but is not a problem 34 The prohibition against incest is not universal 35 The Egyptian evidence 37 Pharaonic Egypt 37 Brother-Sister Marriage 37 Parent-Child Marriage 40 Dreams 42 Curses 44 Incest with affines 45 Graeco-Roman Egypt 49 Economics 51 ‘Salonfähig’ 52 ‘Camp’-mentality 53 Other explanations – and the Greeks 55 The Persian evidence 61 The law texts 65 The ranking system and raison d’être of xvētōdah 71 On Ranking 71 Raison d’être 77 Earlier history of Persian close-kin marriage 89 Achaemenids 90 Strabo 92 Quintus Curtius Rufus 93 Inscriptions from Dura-Europos 94 Pausanias 94 Tatian 95 Bardesanes 96 Clement of Alexandria 97 Kartir 98 Diocletian 100 Basil the Great 100 Priscus 101 Agathias 101 Laws of Justinian I and Justin II 103 Summary 103 Persian Christians contra Zoroastrians 104 Theodoret 104 S. Eustathius the Cobbler – a source from Georgia 105 Armenian Sources 106 Mar Aba I 109 Jesubokht 111 S. Pethion 113 Abu Qurra 114 Summary 115 Arab Sources 116 History writing 116 On religious superiority 118 Literary texts 119 Oriental influence: ‘Mesopotamians’ and Hittites 121 CONCLUDING REMARKS 126 NOTES 132 BIBLIOGRAPHY 170 INDEX OF NAMES 206 INDEX OF SUBJECTS 212 INDEX OF TEXTS CITED 218 Ancient Near Eastern Sources 218 Persian sources 219 Scriptures 221 Classical Writers, Writers of Late Antiquity, Writers in Arabic 222 BACK COVER 226