THE RED QUEEN by MATT RIDLEY : BOOK EXCERPT : THE SIX CIVILIZATIONS OF EARLY HISTORY and FERTILITY

THE RED QUEEN by MATT RIDLEY  

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

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THE RED QUEEN by MATT RIDLEY : BOOK EXCERPT : COURTLY LOVE

THE RED QUEEN by MATT RIDLEY 
COURTLY LOVE
pages 218-219

"Human mating systems are greatly complicated by...inherited wealth... indeed in more stratified societies the poor often favor their daughters over their sons. But this is not because of certainly of paternity but because poor daughters are more likely to breed than poor sons. A feudal vassal's son had a good chance of remaining childless, while his sister was carted off to the local castle to be the fecund concubine of the resident lord... Sure enough, there is some evidence that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Bedforshire, peasants left more to their daughters than to their sons. In eighteenth-century Ostfriesland in Germany, farmers in stagnant populations had oddly female-biased families... It is hard to avoid the conclusion that third and fourth sons were a drain on the family unless there were new business opportunities....

"But at the top of society, the opposite prejudice prevailed. Medieval lords banished many of their daughters to nunneries... Through the world rich men have always favored their sons and often just one of them. A wealthy or powerful father, by leaving his status or the means to achieve it to his sons, is leaving them the wherewithal to become successful adulterers with many bastard sons. No such advantage could accrue to wealthy daughters... "

Harper Perennial is the publisher.
C 1993 by Matt Ridley

C 2010-2025  Ancestry Worship Genealogy BlogSpot

All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights