著者

高橋 亮介

出版者

公益財団法人史学会

雑誌

史學雜誌 (ISSN:00182478)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.115, no.2, pp.169-193, 2006-02-20

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Egypt saw a great expansion in the popularity of the local custom of brother-sister marriage during the first two centuries of the AD era, especially among metropolites, a privileged class in the Roman province. Why did this custom unfamiliar to the Romans flourish under Roman rule? How did the practice of sibling marriage function in Romano-Egyptian society? These are the questions this article addresses. Previous scholarship has attributed the reason for such popularity to the introduction of a rigid status system, under which provincial elites needed to prove their ancestry in order to acquire privileged status. Sibling marriage allegedly made the proof easier. However, another perspective is worth considering; that is, the economic function of brother-sister marriage. While scholars have admitted that sibling marriage contributed towards preventing the fragmentation of family property, this function has not been sufficiently explored in the historical context of the transition from Ptolemaic to Roman society. The question to be asked is how the significance of family property changed. Changes in the local administrative system and their effect on the economic situation of the provincials, especially their land holding system, stand out as particularly suggestive. Rome's rule over her empire depended not on a highly centralised bureaucracy down to the lowest level of local administration (like that of Ptolemaic Egypt), but on indirect control through cities, and especially their wealthy elites. When Egypt was made a Roman province, therefore, the Romans set out to create there a wealthy elite class by legitimating and expanding the private ownership of land. While these landowners had fiscal privileges and relatively large properties, they were expected to expend their wealth on local administration. They needed to be keenly concerned about the management of their property, in order to leave their offspring enough to perform the public services which accompanied their status. In terms of the motivation for brother-sister marriage, what needs most emphasis is women's acquisition of land as the result of its privatisation. Although some provincial families tried to limit women's acquisition of land through inheritance or dowry, it seems that, nevertheless, landholding by women considerably increased. Brother-sister marriage was an effective method to prevent fragmentation of family property in this situation of a significant increase of property coming into the possession of women. The Roman policy of governing the province indirectly was therefore responsible for the expansion of the local custom of brother-sister marriage. This article shows the complexity of the impact of Roman rule on a society and how the history of a local, non-Roman, custom also became part of the process of "Romanisation."