In Australia, as in the UK, there is large cliche industry called royal watching. Numerous stories about the lives and loves of various royal family members fill the newspaper pages and clog up the tv screens. The adventures of Harry and Meghan were a staple of this particular genre. Royal watching does not interest me in the least, let alone the sexual escapades of royals and vacuous celebrities.

However, for the purpose of the current article, I am willing to combine the two topics that while marginally interesting to me, take up untold hours of tv screen time; royal families and sex.

Most of us in the Anglophone communities have heard of Tutankhamun, the king from ancient Egypt, due to the 1922 discovery of his burial place. I get asked about him whenever I mention that my parents come from Egypt. The subject of Egyptomania still occupies the fascination of Anglophone audiences.

But here is something you do not know about him, a fact that opens a window into the lives of royal dynasties. Tutankhamun’s mother and father were also siblings – cousins to be sure. The good king was a child of a sibling sexual relationship. Inbreeding, also known as consanguineous marriages, was a common practice among royal families attempting to concentrate power in a closed circle of hands.

Many unresolved questions still remain regarding Tutankhamun’s lineage, but his ancestry is full of incest and intrigue. His was certainly not the first or last royal dynasty to practice consanguineous marriages.

We all know about Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt from Macedonian Greek heritage. Richard Burton fell in love with her when he, (Marc Antony), went to Egypt and saw Elizabeth Taylor (Cleopatra). She was a member of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, descended from Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great’s generals. Seizing power in Egypt in the immediate aftermath of Alexander’s death, Ptolemy founded his own ruling dynasty. His descendants, such as his son and successor Ptolemy II, married siblings.

Indeed, Ptolemy II married his sister, Arsinoe II. Indeed, King Ptolemy II was known as philadelpus, which in Greek means ‘sibling lover.’ Keeping power in the one family was a primary motivation for this inbreeding.

However, as we all realise today, consanguineous marriages come with a host of problems – mainly medical.

The Habsburgs, once a powerful German-Austrian royal dynasty whose power and influence extended across European kingdoms, consolidated their power by consanguineous intermarriage. It was also, ironically, a cause of their ultimate downfall.

The danger of consanguineous marriages is the increasing likelihood of harmful alleles, located on recessive genes, combining in the offspring, thus finding phenotypic expression. The now famous Habsburg jaw, the jutting lower jaw which doctors call mandibular prognathism, was the result of generations of inbreeding.

When siblings have children, the homozygosity of their children increases. Having a restricted gene pool, numerous hereditary conditions arise. The final Habsburg king, Charles II of Spain, not only had a lower jaw overbite, he also suffered from multiple chronic medical conditions.

Experiencing epilepsy, intestinal problems, and unable to have children he was nicknamed ‘the bewitched’ or the ‘cursed’ by his contemporaries. Dying at barely 38 years of age in 1700, he left no heirs.

His father, Philip IV, had married his niece. This, combined with centuries of inbreeding, only amplified the inbreeding coefficient, the likelihood that two identical genes, in particular recessive ones with deleterious alleles, will combine due to the closeness of their parents’ relation.

Royal dynasties, over the years, have practiced consanguineous marriages as a matter of power consolidation. This practice is no longer such a serious problem in Europe. Well, let’s be clear, the late Queen Elizabeth II married her third cousin. While not a direct sibling relationship, it still ranks as a marriage of consanguinity.

Sibling relationships are still a large and important factor, not among the European royal families, but among the Gulf petroleum monarchies. The Saudis, Kuwaitis, Emiratis, Bahrainis and similar royal families still carefully select marriage partners from siblings. Extended siblings to be sure, but the inbreeding coefficient is still there.

No, I am not suggesting that the Arab-Muslim Persian Gulf peoples are culturally regressive or backwards – by no means. I am highlighting the physiological problems arising from frequent consanguineous marriages, and the political and economic consequences that can result.

I have only written once before about Harry and Meghan, in all these years. I have no desire to follow the soap opera saga that their relationship with the British royal family has become. The only salient point here is how the Windsor-Mountbatten-Battenberg-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha royal family of Britain has treated, or mistreated, a woman of colour.

What did Meghan expect to happen by marrying into the royal inbred dynasty as an outsider, and person of biracial background? Royal dynasties intermarry not for reasons of pure romantic love (the heart wants what the heart wants) but for reasons of consolidating wealth into familial hands. Outsiders are not easily accepted, if ever, as equals.

There is one royal event which I have kept in mind all these years. My late father would explain to me in great detail about this particular event, which involved the enforced abdication, and end of, a royal dynasty.

This was the July 1952 revolution in Egypt, when nationalist minded army officers carried out a revolutionary overthrow, ousting the British-backed hereditary monarchy of King Farouk. The latter was the head of the Alawiyya family, an Arabised dynasty of Albanian origin. My father lived through those events, enthusiastically supporting the revolution, and emphasising its singular historical importance.

No, I am not suggesting that military officers take political power in a particular nation. However, that method of removing a royal family has retained its appeal to me to this very day.