Close-Kin Marriage in Roman Anatolia

Abstract

Many societies have a normative preference for close-kin marriage of one or another variety. Whether this was true of any part of the Roman world has been hotly debated in recent decades. Earlier scholarship suggests that marriage between close kin may have been considerably more common in some parts of the Roman world (e.g. Egypt) than in others (e.g. the Latin West). This paper assembles the evidence for close-kin marriage throughout the Asia Minor peninsula during the Roman Imperial period, and concludes that close-kin marriage – particularly in the form of FBD (father's brother's daughter) first-cousin marriage – may have been unusually common and/or normatively desirable in Lykia and neighbouring regions.

A Lesion on the “King of Kings”: Neurofibromas in the Parthian Empire’s Arsacid Dynasty

“…While the “Parthian state was an absolute inherited monarchy with a traditional principle of passing down the rule to the eldest son” [ 2 ], the lineage of the Arsacid Dynasty can be difficult to track; the Arsacids often practiced polygamy, and in the cases of Artanabus II and Vologases I, it was a member of a minor branch of the family that rose to the throne [ 2 ]. Further complicating the matter is that the Parthian royal family, much like other contemporaries in the region including the Ptolemies and Seleucids, often practiced sibling marriage [ 8 ]. Mithradates II, the founder of the dynasty, married two of his half-sisters, setting the stage for “marriage among relatives and even siblings [to be] possible and permitted at the royal court” [ 1 ].…”

“…Multiple studies have found that while “both genders receive the gene equally, most patients are young to aging adult women due to lessened expressivity and penetrance in men” [ 12 , 17 ]. As discussed earlier, the Arsacid Dynasty did have a high degree of consanguinity and often practiced sibling marriage, similar to other neighboring powers in the region at that time [ 8 ]. The reduced genetic diversity that results from inbreeding may lead to the homozygosity of previously low-penetrance cancer genes [ 19 ].…”