Page 198-199
"The six independent "civilizations" of early history - Babylon, Egypt, India, China, Aztec Mexico, and Inca Peru - were remarkable less for their civility than for their concentration of power. They were all ruled by men, one man at a time, whose power was arbitrary and absolute....WITHOUT EXCEPTION, the cast accumulation of power was always translated into prodigious sexual productivity.... The Babylon King Hammurabi had thousands of slave "wives" at his command. The Egyptian Pharaoh Akenaten procured 317 concubines and "droves" of consorts. The Aztec ruler Montezuma enjoyed 4,000 concubines. The Indian emperor Udayama preserved 16,000 consorts in apartments ringed with fire and guarded by eunuchs. The Chinese emperor Fei-ti had ten thousand women in his harem. The Inca Atahualpa...kept virgins on tap throughout the kingdom."
The women were kept to breed the emperor's children...
"Measures to enhance the fertility of the harem were common... Wet nurses, who allowed women to resume ovulation buy cutting short their breast-feeding periods, date from at least the code of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century B.C... The Tang dynasty emperors of China kept careful records of dates of menstruation and conception in the harem so as to be sure to copulate only with the most fertile concubines... These harems could hardly have been more carefully designed as breeding machines, dedicated to the spread of emperors genes.
C Matt Ridley 1993 HarperCollins was the publisher
