Well, in the Book of Maccabees (which was written shortly after the events recorded occurred), it says that the Greek ruler of the Modi’in area in Israel did insist on droit du seigneur, which was one of the triggers to the Maccabean revolt.
Not too much reason for propaganda after the fact, so it’s pretty safe to assume that the account is valid. However, we’re not talking about the Dark Ages in Europe here, but in the years 167-160 BCE.
Just saying…
I’m no geneticist, but I imagine the Lord’s DNA would be all over the fiefdom and the inbreeding factor would lower the overall health of the community, ultimately breeding the practice of droit du seigneur out of the human community.
Which is why losers in wars, and the colonized and enslaved, never fiercely remember and mythologize past wrongs and even the smallest victory against their enemies (as in Maccabees).
GThe Maccabean revolt wasn’t a “smallest victory,” but established the Hasmonean dynasty which lasted for almost 200 years. Certainly the victors may exaggerate the importance, but it shouldn’t be under-stated, either.
I remember something like this in the Epic of Gilgamesh. One of Gilgamesh’s crimes was droit du seigneur and Enkidu was sent to fight Gilgamesh because of it.
It seems an ancient practice even if it was never really practiced.
That’s not actually in the Book of Maccabees. It’s in the scholion to the Megillat Taanit, which (the scholion, I mean) was written somewhere between the 7th and 11th centuries based on earlier commentary. Maccabees itself says that the revolt happened because the Greek king put an idol in the Temple, banned circumcision, and forced the Jews to eat treif and sacrifice to idols. The actual trigger happened when Matthias, the father of the Macabees, saw a Jew who was sacrificing to idols, and killed him and the Greek official who was overseeing the sacrifice.
Certainly, it was an obvious thought in any society where the rulers wielded theoretically absolute power (“One word, and my enforcers would bring that hottie to my bed”). The catch is that word “theoretically” – most rulers who stayed in power for very long knew that pissing off the peasants that much just wasn’t worth it, especially when there were always plenty of hotties susceptible to the persuasions available to the wealthy and powerful.
Also, some of most of us here are aware that in countless places the reliability of the Bible for matters of historical fact is quite extraordinary, and in many cases dispositive when consulted with other documentation, broadly speaking.
Calling the reliability of the Bible “extraordinary”, particularly in regards to “countless” instances, is itself extraordinary. I should think it would be a struggle to identify 10 such instances.
Powers &8^]
It is estimated that 16 million living men today are direct descendants of one man, Genghis Khan. About 1 in 200 Russian Tatar men are his direct descendants and 1 in 10 Mongolian men. There are several ethnic communities in central and east Asia where similarly significant percentages of men have what is thought to be Genghis Khan’s Y chromosome.