Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Incest in Ancient Egypt

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

From recent research we know that the great boy king Tutankhamun was a result of incest.How did it effect him? And was incest in Ancient Egypt mostly for symbolic reasons of retaining power, or did it go further than that?Joining Kate today is the wonderful Sarah Parcak, archaeologist and Egyptologist, to help us find out more. Importantly, they also touch on why the Ancient Egyptians found lettuce sexy.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Voting is open for the Listener's Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards, so if you enjoy what we're doing, we'd love it if you took a quick follow this link and click on Betwixt the Sheets: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/votingEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my loveliest of lovely betwixters. How the hell are you? It's me, K-Lister. I am back once more for another episode of Betwixed the Sheets. But before we can get going, I have to tell you that this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way,

covering a range of adult subjects and you must have to be an adult too. And if you can't take all other as boxes, well, just sod off. But before you sod off, if you could possibly do it, as the teeniest, tiniest, tiniest, littlest, baby, a favour, and maybe vote for us in the Listeners Choice Awards at this year's British Podcast Awards. And all you have to do to do that is go to British Podcast Awards.com forward slash voting and click on betwixt the sheets. We could do it this year, guys. We were so close last year. And if you have voted, well done. You can have a gold star and stay smug throughout the rest of this episode.

And for those of you that haven't voted, well, there is only one way to ease your conscience, and that is to take seconds of your time and go and vote for us. Go and do it right now! Okay, on with the show. It's November 1922, and we are deep in the Valley of the Kings. What's taking place is about to change how we view ancient Egypt forever. British archaeologist Howard Carter is poised at the entrance of a lost tomb, lit only by candlelight.

Personally, I wish we should get a fucking move on because it's cramped as hell back here. But as the ancient doorway creaks open, the candlelight illuminates a remarkable discovery of golden shrines and treasures, which haven't seen the light of day or a candlelight, for over 3,000 years. This is Tutankhamun's tomb, and it tells the story of King Tut, the 19-year-old boy king who ruled as Pharaoh during the 18th dynasty. Interestingly enough, Tut was not only loaded, quite clearly, but he was the result of inbreeding.

His parents were brother and sister. What else do we know about incest in ancient Egypt? If it was all right for the king, was it all right for everyone else? I think we need to get out of this tomb and find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect coppence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. Whilst imbreeding and royalty have a long and unfortunate history, how common was incest in ancient Egypt? DNA testing of Tutankhamun found evidence of various genetic disorders and health issues, like a club foot and possibly compromised immunity, which could have led ultimately to his death. They also found two mummified fetuses with him in his tomb, who were likely,

his own offspring with his wife, who was also his half-sister. Was incestious confined to royalty in this period? Or did they play by a different set of rules to the rest of us? Joining us today is Sarah Parkak, archaeologist and Egyptologist to help us find out. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Shades. It's only Sarah Parkak. How are you doing? I am so great. As always, it is glorious and a delight to be here. Well, it is because we are talking about incest.

And if there is one group of people who seem to know a lot about incest, it's the Egyptians. Is that an unfair reputation that they've got that kind of Game of Thronesy thing going on where everyone's having sex with everybody's relatives? I mean, yes and no. I mean, we can try to detangle some of it. But it is, to, I think, a larger extent than other ancient civil. I think incest is a lot more prevalent in ancient Egypt and more accepted. When people think of incest in cultures, Egypt is right up there, but they're certainly not

the only ones. Incest is all around the world. It's practiced all over the place, and it seems to be the richer you are, the more it seems to be practiced. Yes, and even today, which is sad and gross. But it's complicated though, right? Like, even just the word for beloved, so they would call a significant other, a lover, my sister. Yes. But it was also a term of endearment. So you could call your sister, your sister. You could call a friend your sister.

So just because someone had the term sister, you know, maybe they were your relative. Maybe they were your wife. They weren't necessarily your sister. They do that in Samarian literature as well. I was reading some of that this week and was quite surprised to see the really erotic verse about, you know, plow my burrow and stuff. And then it would say, my dear bruce. brother, you're like, oh, hello, okay. Right. Why do the Egyptians seem to practice incest more than any

other culture? Is it something that you see in Egyptian culture going right back as far as the records go, or was there a point in history where they went, let's try this, let's try it this way for a while? So I think for, you know, first of all, it seems that brother-sister marriages, it's something that you would see only amongst the uppermost classes. So this is not something that's common, that's everyday life, that, you know, everyone's sleeping with everybody's sibling. That certainly wasn't the case. I think they would have realized very quickly that if you start sleeping with your sibling,

you know, maybe not within that generation, but within two generations, you would have, we call them FLKs in the U.S. Funny looking kids, right? the hapsburgs with the funky chins and the ears that are like wing flaps. So it would have been taboo just for reasons of genes and what your kids look like. But you see it in Kings, certainly going back as far as the Middle Kingdom. What age is that? What kind of dates are we looking at?

So that would have been roughly 1800 BC, so roughly 3,800 years ago. We have evidence of a king called Sam Wasrat, who has one of his pyramids at the site where I work at Lished. He is married to his sister, Nofru. And I think like married, married, and there are kids. Married, married. You've mentioned before about symbolic marriages between brothers and sisters in Egypt. And that would be where they weren't having sex? I think, first of all, like, for the ancient Egyptians and the upper classes and certainly for kings and queens,

marriage was about power. Marriage was about wealth and more than anything else. Marriage was about inheritance, right? Inheritance of titles, land, and goods. And so you had to have that relationship with your wife slash husband be very clear. And you did not want all that property, all those titles falling into the wrong hands. You wanted everyone to recognize the legitimacy of that power transfer and certainly throughout ancient Egyptian history, there were all sorts of power struggles, who is the legitimate heir, you know, the king would have had his principal wife, and then second and third wives, and then of course, the partners in the Harines. So major power struggles were very common in Action Egypt for the throne. And so if you married your sister

and you had a child with your sister, there could be no argument about who that child was where they came from and what they would inherit. I don't know why, but I thought that incest in Egyptian royal families was a thing about the Ptolemy dynasty because they turned up and were Greek and were doing Greek things

and we're very proud of being Greek, eating Greek salads and everything. So I had this idea that they married brother and sister to go, because we're still Greek, and now like we're Greek squared. We're super Greeks over here. But is it even older than that? It isn't necessarily about just being Greek.

It's not. It's about power. Power. And for such a long time, right? We read about it. We heard about it. Okay. In ancient Egypt, there's incest.

And, you know, I think it was maybe 15 or so years ago, 12 years ago. I can't remember the exact date. But there was a big publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And all the mummies got tested. from the new kingdom. And what we learned is that the great pharaoh, you know, the tomb we knew, well, not like the great great Pharaoh,

but certainly he's great because of his tomb, Tutankhammon, he was the product of incest. How incesty? He only had one set of paternal grandparents. So his mother and his father were brother and sister, a hundred percent. It's not a family tree, is it?

It's just a stick, that one. It's a stump. It's a stump. Stump. Yeah, I didn't go anywhere. And you feel terrible for him because, you know, he wanted to have kids. And the fetuses from miscarriages from his wife were found in his tomb. So I think he had a lot of genetic defects. And I think it prevented him from having healthy sperm and being able to bear children.

So his dad and his mom were a brother-sister. So that's proof, right? There's 100% proof in genes of it being carried out. And during that time, there are all these power struggles. There's all this controversy around Akna and moving the royal court to Amarna and who is whose father and who did Akhtna marry after Nefertiti or during Nefertiti. So there's all this instability. And what better way to ensure that you will have a child? who can inherit the throne, then you sleep with your sister and lo and behold. And by the way, like, it's not just about power. It's about mythology. So they were able to get away with it because they were emulating the myth of Osiris and Isis. Who were brother and sister. Right.

So the Gab and Tefnut, the goddess of earth and sky, had four kids. They had Osiris, ISIS, Seth, and Nephth. And Osiris was the favored one. He was powerful and he was king. And he married his sister, Isis, and all was well until Seth got really mad. So Seth was also married to his sister, Nephys. And Seth killed Osiris in a fit of jealousy. And Nephys felt really bad for Isis because Seth didn't just kill Osiris. He hacked off bits of his body. put them all over Egypt. And ISIS is like, can I just go get him, please? And this is like, okay, go get your husband. It's very sad. And ISIS put him back together. And she resurrected him. And then he became king again. So this whole myth of resurrection out of death, it's core. It's foundational to Egyptian mythology and how their whole society operated, right? Their whole economic system, their temple system was connected to a series of rituals that celebrated death and resurrection and

rebirth connected to the annual flooding of the Nile. So the idea that you could marry your sibling, like, well, Osiris did it with ISIS. You know, it's the same mythology, right? That was their justification for it. I mean, I suppose if you're the Pharaoh and you get to go, yeah, well, the gods did it. So I'm the Pharaoh, so tough tits, everybody. but was there any sense in any of the surviving archaeology that you found or the hieroglyphs or the text or anything that people were going, it's a bit fucking weird, isn't it? Or was it just fine and completely standard? Like no one would have even battered an eyelid about it.

I think we have to discern between genuine marriages that were consummated with offspring, because those clearly happened, versus highly symbolic marriages, sort of like a play marriage. Like we're reenacting the marriage of ISIS and Osiris, and we are sort of religiously married, but technically, like we both know that that's just not going to work because it's funny-looking kids. And we ate each other's boogers when we were kids. Ew, I don't want to marry you.

I know you too well, right? No. The king's like, I don't want to be with my sister. I want to be with all these hot women who are in my harim. Thank you. And also, it changes over time. So we have some instances from the Middle Kingdom, from 3,800 years ago, from the new kingdom, so roughly 3,300 years ago. But things change in the Ptolemaic period.

And it seems like it becomes incredibly widespread in the Roman period. It seems like it becomes super, super, super common. And it seems like everyone's marrying their brother. But it's not the way it seems. Because in the Roman period, the most important thing was property and inheritance. So it may seem like it became a widespread practice, you know, amongst a certain class of people. But according to more recent work by philologists who've looked at patterns and documents, because, of course, we have all of these very well-preserved papyri from Roman period Egypt,

it seems like in order to preserve property rights, what would happen is if a family had a daughter and no sons, they would adopt the man who was to be that woman's husband. And so technically, it was brother-sister marriage, but not in a genetic sense. We're back with Sarah after this short break. Okay, so rich people, they've got some skin in the game here. It's about inheritance and property and power and titles.

What about regular people? about just the regular folk of Egypt? Were they marrying brother and sister, uncle, niece, grandfather, granddaughter? Was it common for them? Or is this just a rich person thing? You know, the reality is we don't know, right? Because of literacy rates, we typically only have tombs with inscriptions from the most elite of society, certainly upper middle classes. But I think, generally speaking, it was not a widespread practice for everyday people. You know, why would you need to marry your sister? And, you know, for the ancient Egyptians, for everything we know about marriage, it was pretty chill. If you liked a boy and he liked you, you could walk across a threshold and you'd be

married. There wasn't a formal ceremony. It was recognized by the community. And if things weren't going well, you could get divorced. So it seems that there was more acceptance for relationships who had a lot more freedom, certainly as a man, not as much as a woman, but we kind of know enough from things that have been mentioned in text to be able to reconstruct what marriage would have meant, what relationships would have meant. And we know that there was, of course, contraception in ancient Egypt. Crocodile dung pasturis. Yeah, crocodile dung pesteris. And I'm sure, like all ancient cultures, right? They would have known of certain leaves from certain plants

that would have prevented making teas or whatever. Pull-out method. Pull-out method, right. But it doesn't seem like women's sexuality was as precious for lower classes because inheritance didn't matter as much. You're working in the fields. I just have a message here from my producer who's just texted as we were talking there to go,

what's that? And so if you could just tell us a little bit about crocodile dung peasant, Sarah, that would be ace. All right, well, we can call them dung bongs, right? Because that's I can't help myself. You're just you should know better than to have me on. So I think, you know,

certainly the ancient Egyptians knew, right? What is produced by man, the sperm, you know, I don't know if they would have known about an egg inside of a woman, right? They weren't studying microscopes, but they certainly knew required a man or woman, having sex, sperm, and lo and behold, a woman is pregnant. So if you can create a barrier to prevent the sperm from going inside, if that material can be absorbent in some way or a barrier in some way, then... It's like a cervical plug made of shit, basically. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think it would have been fairly hygienic. You know, it's not like they just grabbed some dung and put it up a woman's vagina. Like, that wasn't the case. I think it would have been carefully dried out, carefully prepared, and then used in that way. You know, I think they would have known that, you know, a gauze pestery or made of material of linen. That would have been another barrier method. So they're certainly aware, right, of how to prevent pregnancy. Just veering completely off topic for incest, just for a moment. But can I ask you, what is the deal with lettuce in the ancient world?

Like, I was reading some Sumerian poetry the other day. as you do. I had a reason to be doing it. And the vulva is described as a well-watered lettuce. And lettuce is used again and again and again. And then I realized that lettuce is still being used right up until the 19th century in British slang when they're talking about to get a green gown, to eat your greens, to all of this kind of stuff. And it does crop up in Egyptian mythology as well, doesn't it, with a sexual content? What was their thing with lettuce? So it was considered sort of a symbol of the god men who was the god of sex, sexuality. It's connected to fertility.

It was seen as a type of aphrodisiac. Wow. Even today in Egypt, there's a certain kind of rocket that if you have it in the salad, you know, my workman will kind of grab it and give it to my husband and be like, go, oh, here you go, here you go. And I try to, yeah, and I grab it. No, no, no, no, no. It's for your husband.

It's for your strong husband. I'm like, oh, wow. Lettuce. It's such a glow-up for such a humble vegetable that it's got this association all the way back through history as being a really sexy vegetable. So, you know, we know certainly from, you know, like at an Edwit Temple, the god min is using lettuce as an aphrodisiac. from the King Ramsey's the third in the New Kingdom.

So roughly 3,300 years ago, the king is part of a harvest festival honoring men and the priests in that relief are carrying large stalks of lettuce that look a whole lot like something else. Maybe this is not so much that I don't know ancient history as much as I don't know gardening

because the lettuce doesn't look phallic to me. Maybe I've just been encountering the wrong kind of lettuces. If you harvest a whole lettuce, I'm going to get a little bit naughty for a second, right? And you just have the core, the core of the lettuce looks very phallic. And if you cut it more at the base, this white oozy stuff comes out. Lettuce come. Let us come, right? And it's interesting.

So again, you're like, oh, well, okay, it looks like a penis and it kind of functions like a penis. So your greens, especially your lettuces, have a lot of... vitamin A, which we need for men, it helps with sperm production and virulative, right? And then for women as well, it helps to stimulate the reproductive cycle. So even though the Egyptians couldn't say, why, yes, it contains vitamin A, which is good for, you know, having babies. They knew that, like, gosh, you eat a lot more leafy greens when you're trying to have a baby and you're better chance of having a baby.

So thank you so much. that has been playing on my mind all week, and I knew that you would know the answer to that. Let us return to incest because they might have been... Don't get ahead of yourself. They might have been at the old lettuce because some of them were symbolic marriages where they're just trying to avoid the tax man, it would seem. Some of them they were having babies. And the results of inbreeding, especially inbreeding like this,

so it's not like a cousin or a second cousin. This is like a brother and a sister give birth to a son, and then they get married to that. And it's like really, it has had quite serious health impact. Who is it that they did the bodily reconstruction on? Was it Tutankham when he had, well, he was really fucked up, wasn't he?

Yeah, I mean, he had all sorts of issues. He had, he walked with a limp, you know, dozens and dozens of canes were found in his tomb. You know, he had all sorts of issues and problems resulting from, of course, being a child of, you know, when your mom and dad are brothers, and sister. So yeah, and I think certainly, in that case, it was within a generation that we saw genetic defects. They do come up pretty quickly. So there would have been big risks. Was it took with the big overbite as well? Yeah. And, you know, reconstructions are debated.

The people who do that kind of work have a lot of license, but he didn't look as elegant as his father or his grandparents. Did they know at the time that that's what was causing this? Why would they? They don't know about genetics, but maybe they figured it out that every time we marry a brother and a sister and they have a baby, he just sits on the floor spinning around in circles. I think they would have known, right?

Like, okay, one generation is fine, but more than that. And I think there would have been, you know, like with Tut, there were a lot of stillbirths. So I don't know how successful the continuous interbreeding would have been, certainly within a generation or two, it would have not worked. And I think they would have had to have known. They would have been like, wait a minute, these kids are normal. And this kid is eating a lot of glue, a lot of glue. Sat on the floor eating rocks. Yeah, just they would have known on a genetic level, but I think they would have certainly seen that it's not something that should be done for more than one generation.

Was Cleopatra the last Egyptian known royal case of incest? Was it continuing amongst the aristocracy even after she went? Because she married a couple of brothers, didn't she? Symbolically. So I don't know, it wasn't, I don't think there was real incest. I don't think it played out in that way. I think she was a virgin when she got together with Julius Caesar. And I don't think she would have wanted to have slept with her brothers for real. I think when she married the younger one, I don't think he would have been able to, too young. I think as well, like her sexuality, her virginity would have been heavily guarded by her family. You know, you want to make sure it counts, right, when she is able to get pregnant and have kids. But yeah, she's the last one who does a

symbolic marriage to her sibling. When Egypt was under Roman control, one of the many, many interesting quirks about it is incest was completely forbidden in the Roman world, apart from cousin, she could marry a cousin, but they got really upset about the idea of anybody, and it was like a really bad thing, incestium, and you could be put to death for it and all kinds of stuff. But they seem to have left Egypt alone. They seem to have just gone well apart from them. They can crack on with it. I think the Romans, you know, certainly Roman rulers in Rome and then the people who were put

in charge of managing Egypt realized, like, if we kind of let things go, as long as we're collecting our shares of the annual grain harvest, as long as the business end of it is functioning, they don't mind that we're here if we leave them alone. So we're going to let them keep worshipping their gods and doing their festivals and, you know, working at their temples. So we'll just let them do whatever it is that they do. And clearly the Romans are culturally distinct from the Egyptians. But ultimately, of course, there is a lot of intermarriage, right?

The soldiers retire there. They get land. They fall in love with local girls. and they too partake in local practices. And inheritance does become an issue because it's all about land and power and making sure your land can pass to your kids. And there were some incredibly rich ancient Romans living in Egypt. And so they would have wanted to be sure that everything was locked up

and that inheritance was guaranteed. So incest completely normal and accepted. We're not quite sure if poor people were doing it as well. but it doesn't seem to have been that bigger deal in Egypt. Some people were actually having kids with relatives. I suppose as a final question, has there been any long-term implications on the Egyptian population from an incest point of view?

Because there was that big study, was it in 2001, where they did a load of DNA testing around Asia, and then they realised that everyone was related to Genghis Khan or like 20% of the population, because he'd just been shagging everybody. What about the opposite where it's like in-family stuff? Does that leave a DNA mark at all? I mean, we took the, it was like through National Geographic called National Genographic.

And my husband and I had our genes done. And I think he's somehow, he's not related directly to King Tut, but he and King Tut share a distant relative, which is kind of interesting. And, you know, look, the reality is we all are cousins, roughly a million years ago, there was a mass extinction event. We don't know why it's debated, but we got down to, and I'm not going to get the number exactly right, but like a thousand. Just make it up. Yeah, 856 breeding couples. And it was pre-homosapiens, whether it was homo hydropaginous, clearly like maybe Pewge volcano, maybe environmental change. We don't know. But from

the genes, we see this genetic bottleneck. So that was it. And it wasn't just like everyone was in the same town and you could swipe left or swipe right and you know, you could match with the guy down the street. We are talking about for the world. There were not very many people left alive. We almost became extinct. Almost. And shortly after that, there was this explosion and growth. So all the sudden, we all started having a lot of kids again. So we are truly all related. Now, I'm not maybe not first cousins, but we're all cousins. We have to be, yeah. We're all related to each other a lot more than I think people would like to admit.

And then like, I think it's in Iceland because, you know, everyone in Iceland, or at least you're Icelandic, everyone there for the most part is descended from all those families that are listed in the books, right, that are in the settlement museums and other museums. And I've heard when I was there, maybe someone was pulling my leg, but there's like a dating app that you enter your name in and your parents' names and the person you're dating and you make sure that you're not more than like five generations close to them. Wow. And they're really careful about it. And I apologize if there's anyone in Iceland who's listening and I've gotten this wrong. But I think it's true. Like they're careful

about it. So like your original question, you know, I don't know that we could tell because of course, you know, it's for the most part, it's the very, very wealthy. And there have been so many indasions of Egypt over time. Certainly late period people are coming from Assyria, from Nubia, you know, and then from Greece and then Rome and then from Arabia. So there's just so much mixing going on. There's just not a lot of homogeneity in the gene pool. Sarah, thank you so much for coming to talk to me today about incest with a short layover about lettuce. You have been marvelous. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? I really want to know about the letters. It's terrible. It's terrible as long as we don't, we're not going to

live, trust it, right? Or you're going to last longer than a lettuce. So if people want to learn more about me, I can be found not as much on Twitter these days, but blue sky, hashtag indie from space. I brought a book called Archaeology from Space, how the future shapes our past, which, you know, is super cheap online. Please get it from your library or local indie bookstore. And then I have a book coming out in about a year and a half that's called humanity, a survival guide, and that can be found in Patreon, and I'm highly Googlable. So, lots of good stuff out there. Thank you so much. You have been so much fun. Thank you. It's always a pleasure. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Sarah for joining me. And if you like what you

heard, please don't forget to like, review, and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We've got episodes on everything from the origins of patriarchy to sex and scandal in UK politics all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.