Year 27 of the reign of Tuthmosis III. The royal barber Sabestet appeared before the tribunal of the royal house testifying: my slave, my property, his name is Imenjui. I fetched him with my own strength when I accompanied the sovereign. I have given to him the daughter of my sister Nebta as a wife, her name is Takamenet.
New Kingdom legal document
This approach is in sharp contrast to the complex inheritance rules which were enforced in Egypt during the period of Roman control, when it was clearly regarded as desirable that people should be pressured to marry only within their own caste:
Children born to a townswoman by an Egyptian husband have the status of Egyptians and inherit from both parents. If a Roman of either sex marries anyone of the status of a townsman or of an Egyptian without being aware of their status, their children take the status of the inferior parent. If a Roman or a townsman marries an Egyptian wife in ignorance of her status, the children may take the status of the father after erroris probatio. If a townswoman marries an Egyptian husband in the mistaken belief that he is a townsman she is not to blame, and if the declaration of birth of children is made by both the status of citizen is granted to the offspring…1
The most unusual aspect of the state’s lenient attitude towards marriage was the complete lack of any taboo against the marriage of close relations. Most societies feel that the union of children with parents, or brothers with sisters, is undesirable and take steps to ensure that it does not occur. Egypt was a notable exception to this rule. However, incest was certainly not as rife as popular fiction would suggest. With the exception of the royal family who intermarried to safeguard the dynastic succession and to emphasize their divine status, there is no real evidence for widespread brother–sister marriages until the Roman period, while parent–child incest is virtually unrecorded. The brother–sister marriages which are recorded are more likely to be between half-brothers and half-sisters than full siblings. Unfortunately for modern observers, the Egyptians employed a relatively restricted kinship terminology, and only the basic nuclear family were classified by precise kinship terms (father, mother, brother, sister, son and daughter). All others had to be identified in a more laborious manner, such as ‘mother of the mother’ (maternal grandmother) or ‘sister of the mother’ (maternal aunt). To make matters even more confusing the precise family names could also be applied to non-family members, so that ‘father’ could be correctly used to indicate a grandfather, stepfather, ancestor or patron, while ‘mother’ could describe either a grandmother or even a great-grandmother. The use of the affectionate term ‘sister’ to encompass a wide group of loved women, including wife, mistress, cousin, niece and aunt, taken in conjunction with a theology which condones the brother–sister marriage of principal deities such as Isis and Osiris, has contributed to our misunderstanding of the prevalence of brother–sister incest, and there has been a general reluctance to lose the image of the intriguingly decadent Egyptian lifestyle conveyed by these errors in interpretation.
A similar misconception has grown up around the subject of Egyptian polygamy. Although there were no laws to specifically prohibit polygamous marriages, and in spite of the fact that Herodotus firmly believed that only the Egyptian priests were expected to remain monogamous – thereby implying that all other Egyptians chose to be polygamous – multiple marriages were not as common as has often been supposed. Polygamy, when not actually illegal, has always been a rich man’s hobby, and things were no different in ancient Egypt where only the more wealthy members of society could afford to indulge in the luxury of more than one wife. Confusion has arisen in this matter because of the Egyptian habit of depicting one or more dead first wives together with their living successor on their joint husband’s tombstone. The most often-quoted evidence used to support the theory of polygamous Egyptian marriages consists of a papyrus written by the Lady Mutemheb in which she clearly states that she is the fourth wife of her husband Ramose, adding that two of his other wives are dead while one is still living. Although the precise circumstances of this marriage are not spelt out to us, there is nothing further to suggest a polygamous alliance, and it would seem far more logical to assume that Ramose had divorced his third wife before marrying his fourth. Serial polygamy, or re-marriage following bereavement or divorce, was comparatively common, and again scribe Ankhsheshonq had an opinion to offer: ‘Do not take to yourself a woman whose husband is still alive, in case he should become your enemy.’