Breaking the Incest Taboo
Beginning last century, scholars developed a theory to explain the many royal brother-sister marriages in ancient Egypt. Since these marriages produced offspring, they were obviously consummated (not just ritual), and yet they broke what was considered a universal incest taboo. Clearly, a good explanation was needed.
The “heiress theory” seemed to provide one. According to this line of reasoning, the claim to the Egyptian throne passed down through the female line, from the king’s daughter to the man she married, who then became the next king. Every king, in other words, ascended the throne by marrying the daughter of a previous king. For the king’s son to succeed his father, he would therefore have to marry his own sister or half-sister. This seemed to explain the numerous brother-sister marriages in the Egyptian dynasties.
Another mystery appeared to be cleared up by the heiress theory: why Hatshepsut seized the throne from Thutmose III. According to the theory, the claim to the throne passed through Hatshepsut, the daughter of King Thutmose I. So Thutmose I’s son, Thutmose II, married Hatshepsut and thus became the legitimate successor. Now, Hatshepsut and Thutmose II had a daughter, Neferura; according to the heiress theory, the claim to the throne should have passed through her to the man she married. But Thutmose II was succeeded by his son, Thutmose III, even though Thutmose III did not marry the daughter of the king (in this case, his half-sister Neferura). The heiress theory suggested a simple answer to why Hatshepsut seized the throne: She was of royal descent, whereas Thutmose III had not legitimized his kingship by marrying the king’s daughter, through whom passed the claim to the throne.
But this construction does not hold up in an earlier generation. It had been supposed that Thutmose I (Hatshepsut’s father) married Ahmose (Hatshepsut’s mother) because she was the sister of Pharaoh Amenhotep I and thus the daughter of King Ahmose. If this were true, then Thutmose I became king by marrying a king’s daughter. But the evidence suggests that Ahmose was not Amenhotep I’s sister and King Ahmose’s daughter; had she been, she would have borne the title “king’s daughter,” which she did not.1 Texts refer to her solely as “king’s sister.” In the 18th Dynasty, the title “king’s sister” was almost never used alone; rather it was used in the combined formula “king’s daughter, king’s sister.” Ahmose is the only exception—Hatshepsut’s mother was not the daughter of a king, only the sister of one. This would be the case if she were Thutmose I’s sister, since we know that he was not the son of a king.
During the 18th Dynasty, in fact, a number of kings did not marry their sisters, and nothing from these kings’ reigns suggests that the legitimacy of their rule was in doubt. Enough evidence now exists to dismiss the “heiress theory”; brother-sister marriages had little to do with legitimizing succession.2
Why, then, did some kings marry their sisters, if they did not have to? Such marriages were not generally practiced in Egyptian society at large, though they did occur among deities. Royal families may thus have mimicked divine families; these marriages may have served to set the king apart from his subjects and place him closer to the gods.
Let us return to the marriage of Thutmose I and his sister Ahmose. We can now suggest that their marriage served to show that Thutmose I was no longer an ordinary, non-royal individual.