I was lookingat this tableof allowable relations referencing OT Bible rules and wondered at the statement that
What governed who could marry or boink who in these ancient pre-Old Testament / Koranic middle east cultures?
With absolutely no authority or research, i would say “proximity.”
There was probably a local village/tribal leader who put his seal of approval on marriages. Marriages were probably pretty much arranged in the early teen years, so love almost certainly played second fiddle to the parents’ wishes.
I don’t think there are any societies where brother-sister marriage is common. But even up to a few centuries ago brother-sister marriages were sometimes found among royalty in an attempt to keep the royal title in the family.
I seem to remember that in Sigmund Freud’s book ‘Totem & Taboo’ he says that one purpose of totemic tribal identification was to show who would be a legitimate mate i.e members of the Squirrel tribe could legitimately have it away with those of the Beaver clan, as they’d be genetically distant enough. I may be misremembering, in which case, apologies.
Chortle. For the most part marriages were love marriages. always.
I am almost (but not 100%) sure that pre-Qur’an Arab tribes usually only enforced the rule that you marry outside of the nomadic group that you were going around with, and that they generally married in the same tribe.
FWIW, Muhammad and his first wife Khadija were both of the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe (by this point not really “nomadic,” as they were the custodians of Mecca and the Ka’aba) and were related in some nebulous way.
Various nomadic tribes had different rules for this sort of thing. Traditionally the Kazakhs can only marry someone 7 generations removed from them. That normally tight clan structures would, for the purposes of marriage, go so far away to find mates, seems to me to be a sign that they were at least primordially aware of the dangers of inbreeding.
I think people naturally evolved to favor genetic variation and so they practiced that to the extent that it was practical (Sometimes there’s no one around but that cousin… I shuddered just typing that…), and this is reflected in rules governing who one can marry. I would say that restrictions against marrying someone too distant, on the other hand, are more easily attributed to ideological reasons.
Muhammad was of one tribe in Hijaz; a very Roman influenced area (and still technically subject to Byzantine overlordship). Someone in say South Iraq would be more influenced by Sassiniad traditions. Anyone on the Euphrates had the added complication of Legionairres and Cataphracts needing stress relief.
And incidentally, she was a businesswoman for whom he worked for a time for, and she asked him to marry her. It was quite a step up, for an orphaned, young man with little influence, to marry a wealthy widow.