Marriage practice of the ancient Egyptian royal houses

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The marriage practice of the ancient Egyptian royal houses is one of the central topics in Egyptology , as the marriage of an ancient Egyptian king's daughter involved different motives.

background

A contemporary assessment of the ancient Egyptian marriage policy is usually different from the point of view of European Egyptologists , since archaeological finds are assessed in comparison to European culture and thus an ethical assessment is made. A back projection of today's kinship systems can therefore automatically lead to incorrect conclusions.

Kinship systems

The question of lineages in the ancient Egyptian royal houses is often related to the term " blood relationship ", which is why the marriage practice is sometimes declared as illegitimate or incest from today's perspective . However, practice shows that the declared relationship had very little to do with "blood". Rather, the function of the marriage practice in connection with the communities was subject to a funerary cult. From this point of view, according to the historical interpretation of the inscriptions on steles , family groups were therefore actual “relatives”.

Sibling marriage

King Mykerinos and his wife and possibly sister Chamerernebti II.

In ancient Egypt, marriage within a "household" was the rule; that is, all family members and distant relatives. In the dynastic times of Ancient Egypt, marriages between full siblings were rare in royal families; but with half-siblings quite normal. All marrying partners were automatically considered senu or senut (brothers or sisters).

There was no problem with polygamy from a legal point of view . However, economic reasons made monogamous marriages the rule. Marriage, detached from moral ideas, was seen as a free decision to secure supplies. The man assumed the role of “breadwinner” while the woman took care of the household and the offspring. Without the protective role of the family, women had no secure social status. In this respect, marriages were not concluded “emotionally”, but mostly according to “sober” criteria.

Ancestors in the female and paternal line were in principle considered to be of equal rank, as they belonged to the "household". According to this definition, “strangers” really took on the status of full family members after marriage; as if they had always been sons or daughters from the same family. The term “closest relatives” was just as unknown in Egypt as the restriction “of the closest family members” in the vicinity of the husband and wife.

In the New Kingdom the term senet (sn.t) was also used as a term for “wife”. The "problem of the ancient Egyptian marriage" could for the most part be clarified in Egyptology through precise studies in the historical perspective.

literature

  • Šafīq Allam: On the position of women in ancient Egypt in the time of the New Kingdom (16th – 10th century BC). In: The ancient world. Vol. 16, Issue 2, 1970, ISSN  0002-6646 , pp. 67-81.
  • Jan Assmann : The picture of the father. In: Jan Assmann: Stone and Time. Man and Society in Ancient Egypt. 3. Edition. Fink, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7705-2681-3 , pp. 96-137.
  • Jan Assmann, Erika Feucht, Reinhard Grieshammer (eds.): Questions to the ancient Egyptian literature. Studies in memory of Eberhard Otto. Reichert, Wiesbaden 1977, ISBN 3-88226-002-5 , pp. 155-170.
  • Mustafa El-Amir: Monogamy, Polygamy, Endogamy and Consanguinity in Ancient Egyptian Marriage In: Bulletin de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale. (BIFAO) No. 62, 1964, ISSN  0255-0962 , pp. 103-107, online (PDF; 400 kB) .
  • Martin Fitzenreiter: On the ancestor cult in Egypt. In: Göttinger Miszellen (GM). No. 143, 1994, pp. 51-72.