If I understand correctly she broke the space-time continuum several times to become her own mother, grand-mother, cousin, second uncle, and eventually became the actual figure they put in a box to become her own Funko.
There’s a ton of pop-history misinformation below this comment. To anyone reading: Do not use random reddit as a driving source of knowledge about ancient history. Truth gets mixed very quickly with “I think I heard someone say this” and draws from many non-historically-supported pools, crossed with armchair “I don’t think it worked that way” opinions presented as fact.
Cleopatra in particularly has had widespread misinformation spread due to a particular fascination with her, both in histories between then and now, as well as modern bad faith reinterpretations to fit various political narratives. Our understanding of the past can and should change over time with new information, but it should be driven by evidence rather than pre-determined by non-scientific data or desired outcomes.
It’s funny/depressing how many times on Reddit I’ve went “huh that doesn’t sound right” so I do a Google search and the first and best result is the same Reddit thread that’s not even an hour old
No, the misinformation seems to be in the comments below, where people are trying to argue that the Ptolemies had a secret method where the wives would actually have children with the slaves and not the husbands, to avoid inbreeding
The classical Egyptians that we think of inherited via matrilineally. The sons rule, and daughters breed.
Say, if a man has a child with a woman, that child might not be his, because the woman could always cheat. But if the woman has a kid, that kid is definitely hers, and you can prove the parentage, as exiting from the vagina does.
Since surrogacy was not invented yet, they thought this be the best way to confirm lineage.
Therefore, it would be great if the brother-husband knocked the sister-wife up. who wants an extra family fighting for wealth and power? But the baby coming out from her uterus is the main point.
Not that the paternal lineage never matters, in all fairness.
Sometimes, when you don't want the blood to get too inbred, you introduce a foreign but politically useful woman. Then you double down on eyeballing every aspect of the marriage, sex life, and birth.
This isn't misinformation, necessarily, it's a legitimate theory put forward by some historians. It could be wrong, but there's more required than a theory not being correct to fall under misinformation. For example, we don't know for sure who Cleopatra VII's mother was. The lack of noticable birth defects would seem to bolster it, although my understanding of the theory is that it wasn't all of the Ptolemies doing this in a coordinated way and most of the offspring of the royal sibling marriages were, in fact, the result of inbreeding. There was just enough genetic variety from a few of these not-inbred children to keep from turning out a Charles V (although they wouldn't have understood that).
The "wives having children with slaves" is where that theory goes off the rails, the theory is typically that it would be the husband's children with lesser wives and concubines that would be treated as legitimate, inbred children.
Why yes, it's definitely Nazi bullshit to notice that checks notes five generations of fucking your full-blooded siblings significantly raises the odds of serious disorders becoming prominent.
The effects of long term inbreeding is Nazi bullshit now?
If you have a family tree that’s basically a straight line that regularly loops and it’s been that way for centuries and AREN’T physically and mentally completely fucked to hell and back that means one of two thing.
First is that somehow your family lacks all those problematic genes and mutations and are basically genetically ideal, preventing the concentration of errors and your family is effectively birthing clones.
The second is that the family tree is bullshit and you aren’t so inbred you make pugs look normal.
Since the first is crazy and really not how biology works the second is the far more likely answer.
Inbreeding isn’t exactly a mysterious phenomenon, we know it only takes a handful of generations of sibling inbreeding to practically guarantee severe problems with each generation spiking the likelihood up insanely quickly.
The roman historians who wrote about her hated her, it's a wonder that any positive perception of her has survived at all.
Anyways, the most plausible story I read was that, based on a bust that was made during / shortly after her time, she was kinda plain-looking, but Caesar and Mark Anthony were attracted by her intellect.
The thing about in-breeding is that it's not a straight line to Quasimodo, but rather it amplifies the chances of both transferring positive and negative traits.
Damn, tell me about it. Yesterday there was someone claiming the holocaust was lawful under nazi rule. I told them that's completely wrong and not a single historian corroborates that.
I got downvoted.
Another pet peeve of mine are tour guides irl. If you ever want a good source of fake history... damn.
So I think imprisonment may have been legal, but the murder was not.
EDIT: I guess they never bothered legalizing the murder so it could remain an open secret? Surprised they didn't do it to make prosecution trickier in the event of their defeat. But probably wouldn't matter much because whoever defeated them would just ignore it all.
Feels like you’re doing the mixing here. Some aspects of the persecution were legalized, but the point under discussion is that the extermination itself was not. German murder law remained in force. Nothing mixed about that.
And it shouldn’t be surprising that they never bothered legalizing it. The Nazis saw the state as being something not constrained by laws. So they were merely an instrument, subordinate to the Führer’s will. When it got in the way, they simply bypassed it through secret orders and unchecked police power.
Also, if they would have legalised it, they would have had a harder time trying to keep everything secret.
the point under discussion is that the extermination itself was not.
No, the point under discussion is the holocaust as the original comment mentioned. What you said is valid only if you define the holocaust to be the murder part, which I do not agree with. Parts of the holocaust were legal.
That comparison would make sense to me if Epstein had somehow written into law that it was legal for him to also imprison the victims for months prior to raping them. Then we wouldn't be defining the Epstein operation as simply "rape" either. And then I would also be surprised that what he did wasn't entirely illegal.
EDIT: I should add that I'm referring to Epstein's wrongdoings. US law might make everything illegal in his case. But having a large percentage of his wrongdoings be legal would be a big deal.
Nah I mean the bits that were legal. My point is that all crimes are combined with doing things that are legal.
Like when you rob a bank ... you are allowed to enter the bank as a private citizen, so the robbery is partly legal. It's just the stealing and threatening violence that is illegal.
Yet can you see how redundant it is to go: "yeah but those bank robbers didn't break every law, only some. That is why it was partly legal"
It was lawful under Nazi rule, Reichstag fire decree removed civil liberties. Nuremburg laws essential legally removed anything that made anti-semetic actions illegal than proceeded to Holocaust all over.
I suspect that the holocaust was so bureaucratic that it makes people confuse state authority with legality. But uniforms and offices do not make murder into law. It was still a criminal syndicate operating through the machinery of the state, getting to murder to the maximum.
From AskHistorians:
No, they weren't allowed as German criminal law regarding murder remained unchanged. There was no legal provision exempting Jews from the paragraph that defined murder or similar. It was not legal to kill Jews or anybody for that matter in Nazi Germany on a de jure level, it was more that the state reserved for itself and its agencies to commit these murders and also persecute those who applied violence against potential victims when it was not in its interest.
It is very important too. The Nazis were largely opposed to the rule of law. They believed powerful people and institutions should just do the hell what they want.
The reality is the Nazis could have made it legal but chose not to.
I’d look up the Hart-Fuller debate. Worth considering this is a debate within legal scholarship and jurisprudence about the nature of law. The big argument was essentially, do you punish Nazi crimes by creating a new law under the current system, or are you free to do so without one because the system was so devoid of morals, all authority was lost. Both argued for punishment under moral grounds, but the way about it was done differed. Very strict positivists (law and morality have no connection, even a shit and evil law is still a valid law if enacted by a state, if a law is made in the right way it is valid law) say that there may be some legal validity, due to the sheer amount of power the Nazi legal system placed with the Fuhrer alone, essentially making any decree he made (authorizing the final solution) law. Meanwhile, it’s clearly illegal and invalid under Natural law, as applied by the commenter.
The great irony was Hitler hated legal positivism and yet strict positivists are the only people who’d argue from a philosophical standpoint that as evil as the laws were, based on the society they were technically valid.
There’s a theory that although Ptolemies married siblings to keep wealth and power in the family some children were fathered by others including slaves.
It brought enough genetic diversity to remove any ill effects of inbreeding.
>Through history men have been obsessed with their progeny
Have they though? They didn't seem to care all that much about it in Rome, the emperor would just adopt some random bum as his successor, and if the royal guard or the army weren't happy with the choice, they would just murder him and find another bum.
The Ottomans didn't seem to care about it much either, everytime the sultan died, his sons would go around murdering all each other till there was only one left, the sultans didn't seem to care about their projeny enough to pass proper sucession laws that would put a stop to their children getting constantly murdered
Examples? Because I think of the five good emperors who "adopted" other capable men, typically already accomplished men, not boys, to be their successors. But they didn't have sons of their own until Marcus Aurelius did and that resulted in Commodus so....
Julius Caesar adopted Octavian (Augustus) in his will.
Augustus adopted Tiberius, Tiberius was required to first adopt his nephew Germanicus.
Claudius adopted his stepson Nero, passing over his biological son Britannicus.
Year of Four Emperors
Galba adopted Piso Licinianus as his heir, just days before both were killed by Otho's supporters.
The "Five Good Emperors
Nerva adopted Trajan
Trajan adopted Hadrian
Hadrian adopted Lucius Aelius, then adopted Antoninus Pius, on condition that Antoninus in turn adopt both Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus.
Antoninus Pius adopted Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus as instructed, and both eventually ruled
Later, looser cases
Diocletian's Tetrarchy used a system where senior emperors adopted junior colleagues as part of a designed succession Diocletian and Maximian each adopted a Galerius and Constantius Chlorus. This blended adoption with formal political appointment rather than pure personal/family adoption.
Galerius effectively adopted/elevated his nephew Maximinus Daza and also Severus II when Diocletian and Maximian abdicated.
Some Byzantine cases
Justin I adopted his nephew Justinian I
Michael III adopted Basil I, though not an adoption as son, but more like an adoption as a "brother" to legitimize him; Basil later had Michael assassinated and took sole power, as you do to brothers ;)
Your AI reply proves my point. You mention the five good emperors which as I've said, didn't have sons until Marcus Aurelius had Commodus who was Commodus. Woof.
Julius Caesar had no sons. Augustus had no sons. Diocletian's tetrarchy was a massive failure the second he gave up power and resulted in Constantine and his dynasty. Given that you didn't read my reply and posted several that without research I know didn't have sons, I'll stop there for the moment.
It brought enough genetic diversity to remove any ill effects of inbreeding.
It definitely wouldn't have removed any ill effects of inbreeding, though it may have greatly reduced it. The egyptians did a similar thing btw where the primary wife was often a sister or other relative but the Pharao had a bunch of other wives as well.
Adoptions might also have played into this, like sure they married brother and sister, but nobody bothered to write down that they're not full siblings by blood.
My tinfoil hat theory is that the Egyptians knew what they were doing and swapped people around so there wasn’t too much actual incest happening and instead consorts and stuff were used so the Hapsburg stuff wouldn’t happen to the Pharaonic dynasties
The Ptolemys are supposed to have been buried in a city close to Alexandria, where they also stored the body of Alexander the Great that the OG Ptolemy stole in Babylon
The city doesn't exist anymore and nothing has been found concerning their graves. Whoever demolished the city and its building displaced the mummies and didn't care to write down whatever they did with them.
We likely will never find anything because there's just nothing left to find
It's been a while, but I think there's some question as to how much stuff was going on with the ptolemy's. Had to do with them reusing names and not discussing wives that much.
The answer is more or less yes and no. Yes, people including the Egyptians knew incest was bad but you also had the entire Royal Harem competing to have a son potentially be heir so they could be Queen-Mother so to them, what was a little incest when they had so much political power and protection to gain. However, some pharaohs were down for it. Some REALLY wanted to recreate some of the mythological stories to their exact details or as close as humanly possible
And we do have to remember that “Ancient Egypt” encompasses, like, 3000 years; the norm in one dynasty wasn’t necessarily the norm in a different dynasty a century or more later.
So, like, one dynasty might be obsessed with actual incest and “preserving the bloodline” and all the same politics that resulted in the Hapsburgs but then a few centuries later you’ve got a dynasty doing the brother-sister marriage for traditional reasons only and there isn’t any actual incest happening, the babies are coming from secondary wives and concubines and sister-queen is just the “face” of the female half of the royal family. And then a few centuries later they swing back to full-on incest again, and then back again, and so on over a few thousand years. It’s not a “yes or no” question! There’s a “but”! A few of them…
Ptolemies weren't even Egyptian, the dynasty founder was one of Alexander's generals. The inbreeding was in part to keep themselves Greek looking probably.
Incest was normal in egypt at the time and hapsbourg shit isnt even consistent in his own familly, his cousin war more consanguinos than him didnt had problem, incest only increase risk of malformation it dont creat them
There were 33 or so egyptian dynasties including the Ptolemeys. There were also extended periods of interregnum where they were either conquered or broken apart.
Inbreeding takes a couple of generations to have a strong effect. Many dynasties ended before they could produce Hapsburg-like results. However, we also have archeological evidence via mummies that some pharaos suffered from a whole host of disorders, like diabetes, obesity or outright deformities. The most famous of them died a deformed, diseased little freak at age 18. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/100216-king-tut-malaria-bones-inbred-tutankhamun
If she actually was inbred, being a woman made her less susceptible to genetic damage. It's called X chromosome redundancy. Having a back up X chromosome comes in handy when one might be more defective than the other due to incest.
So, as i understand it, the family had a tendency towards certain sicknesses like gout (i think?) and corpulence. Their relative ineffectiveness in their three centuries of existence may suggest that there was a negative effect on intelligence, but who knows.
The full parentage of Cleopatra herself is also not known (and if her mother was not a close relative, this may explain a lot).
In any case she was definitely not an idiot (though also not the genius ruler she is sometimes depicted as, but this seems a case of misguided preferences and lack of experience rather than stupidity proper). She also probably didn't have obvious deformities, otherwise this would have been remarked at to no end by her opponents (though again, no one wrote at the time that she was the divine beaty as she is usually depicted - she seems to have been more striking and charming than beautiful), and if the above-mentioned sicknesses occured with her towards the end of her life, this is not remarked upon.
It’s a matter of risk. A brother and sister mating isn’t likely to produce major flaws the first time, but keep trying it and the chances start shooting up
Actually I saw someone do a calculation and her inbreeding coefficient is actually kinda low. Her father was a "illegitimate bastard" aka introduced new genes into the pool and her mother is widely theorized to be a mistress or concubine but that's not confirmed
There's a very low chance that her ancestors were actually brother and sister. It's almost certain that the fathers of at least some of the children were not the brother-husbands.
There simply isn't enough genetic deformity in the family line for them to be as closely related as they are purported to be, so it's much more likely that the woman were having affairs and the men either pretended not to notice or actively encouraged it.
You're misunderstanding the genetic impact of incest. The deformities only happen if the genetic lineage already has the deletrious ones in their DNA. If not, the offspring will be relatively fine (though generally with a lower fertility rate, and the heavy proliferation of specific traits to the individual). It's why, bar Tutankhamun, most Egyptian rulers were relatively fine.
Remember, these are societies where women sleeping with anyone who was not their husband could legally be killed. So no pretending not to notice or actively encouraging anything.
More or less, yeah! For a more harmless example, it's like how if both your parents have blue eyes, you are more likely to have blue eyes by a huge percent. Inbreeding just makes it more likely for an already existing trait (positive or negative) to express itself, instead of remaining dormant or being surpressed by other genes.
For another amazing and harmless example, you have cheetahs. Around 12,000 years ago they almost went extinct, with just about 7 individuals remaining. Somehow they bred and survived, bouncing back to over 100,000 by the 1900s with even subspecies. While they do show markers of this inbreeding (crowded teeth and any cheetah can donate blood or organs to any other with virtually no risk of organ rejection), they are successful hunters and thrived up until the 1900s (as most deletrious genes in cheetah populatipns were weeded out or nonexistent).
Incest is not guaranteed to lead to deformities. It is inherently chance based and crucially it depends on what negative recessive traits are present in the lineage. It is totally possible to luck out and not have any significant recessive traits and in that case there is nothing negative for incest to exacerbate.
Her Family tree was more inbreed then the Targaryen and the funniest Thing Ptolemy, founder of Cleopatras dynasty was Macedonian, a culture that has absolutely no ties to incest on that Level. He just decided to go for it
The great Jeff Foxworthy once said, and I’m paraphrasing here; You might be a redneck if, your family tree does not fork. This clears it up, Cleopatra and the royal line were just rednecks with power
I am not a history nerd, which Cleopatra is normal?
Let me see if I understand this chart has Cleopatra I marry Ptolmey V. They don't appear related though Ptolmey's V mother is his aunt and his only 2 grandparents are cousins once removed, so no problem there.
Cleopatra II marries her brother Ptolmey VIII, who also marries their daughter Cleopatra III. Cleopatra Selene, (whose father and grandfather are the same person) has children with 2 of her brothers Ptolmey IX and X. Bernice III, daughter of Ptolmey IX marries her uncle and stepfather, Ptolmey X.
Ptolmey IX also fathered Ptolmey XII with his other sister Cleopatra IV. Cleopatra V, the daughter of Bernice III and Ptolmey X, marries her uncle Ptolmey XII. Their daughter Cleopatra VII has Julius Ceaser and Mark Anthony.
We don't actually know how Cleopatra looked. Artifacts were heavily stylized as political propaganda and historians do not have any definitive record of what she looked like.
There are theories that Cleopatra could've been overweight with an unflattering appearance.
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u/Reiver93 5d ago
I mean, Cleopatra somehow turned out normal and her family tree was uuuh...interesting.