The Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs Fair The Negative...

Throughout history, incest, or consanguineal mating, has largely been considered taboo in cultures around the world. This belief may not simply be culturally motivated, but evolutionarily advantageous and biologically enforced. Despite this, in multiple cultures, the prestige of royalty and nobility seem to outweigh this fundamental virtue. Nowhere is this more true than in ancient Egypt, where members of the royal family were encouraged to marry and mate with close relatives, even siblings or parents. How did the ancient Egyptian pharaohs fair the negative repercussions of an incestual bloodline? While grandiose archeological findings may indicate that the nobility of ancient Egypt lived a spectacularly lavish lifestyle and were revered as gods, this romantic viewpoint often overlooks the underlying biological truth - noble bloodlines were often ravaged by congenital disease, a consequence of their consanguineal pairings. Consanguineous marriages, both in the past and in the modern day, are dangerous practice because offspring resulting from these pairings are often afflicted with congenital disorders and birth defects. The reason why this occurs can be found in Mendelian genetics. Samia Temtamy and Mona Aglan, in their study of consanguinity and genetic disorders in modern Egypt, state that â€Å"The majority of birth defects arise as a consequence of homozygosity for recessive traits† (Temtamy and Aglan 2012: 13). When two people that are closely genetically related mate, it