ordered the names of contractors to be registered according to the paternal name.[1] Also, in the valley of the Nile, the hieroglyphic funeral inscriptions frequently bear the name of the mother without indicating that of the father, and it is only in demotic inscriptions that paternal filiation is mentioned.[2] We must add that in Egypt women could reign, and that during the lifetime of the monarch who was their husband they divided with him the sovereign honours, and even, according to Diodorus,[3] received the larger share of them. All these facts seem to attest that in Egypt free women enjoyed an exceptionally favourable position, and they render probable the ancient existence of uterine filiation in the valley of the Nile. There are, however, some contradictory facts, especially the genealogy of the chief priests, of which Herodotus speaks, and also the incestuous endogamy customary in the royal families. According to Herodotus, the Egyptian priests showed him, at Thebes, three hundred and forty-one wooden statues representing high-priests, all born one of the other in the masculine line: "Each of these statues," he says, "represents a Piromis born of a Piromis."[4] From which it would result that in Egypt, at least in the sacerdotal caste, masculine filiation was established from the highest antiquity, for a hundred and forty-one generations represent something like ten or eleven thousand years. Maternal filiation is also generally connected with exogamy, while the Pharaohs habitually married their sisters. According to Diodorus, this was even obligatory.[5] In the ancient royal records the qualities of sister and wife of kings are often found united. Under the Ptolemies, all the queens have borne both these titles; and we may perhaps refer to an ancient tradition of Egyptian origin certain customs which recently existed in the Soudan, Abyssinia, and Madagascar. At Massegna, in the Soudan, Barth tells us that Othman Bougoman, Sultan of Massegna, had among his wives one of his sisters and one of his daughters. At the end of the seventeenth century, the sister of the king of Abyssinia displayed a sumptuous style of living peculiarly feminine:
