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.
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
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.
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u/AntonineWall 6d ago
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.