of the other in the masculine line: “Each of these statues,” he says, “represents a Piromis born of a Piromis.”[997] 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.[998] 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: “The sister of the emperor appears in public mounted on a mule richly caparisoned, having by her side her women bearing a daïs over her. From four to five hundred women surround her, singing verses in her praise, and playing the tambour in a lively and graceful manner.”[999] And at the present time, among the Malagasy nobility, marriage between brother and sister is very common.[1000] There is certainly nothing farther from exogamy than marriages between brothers and sisters; but, to say the truth, there is no logical and necessary connection between the form of filiation and exogamic or endogamic customs. The Malagasy contract what we should call incestuous marriages, while preserving maternal filiation; the Arabs and Kabyles, on the contrary, in obedience to the prescriptions of the Koran, have a horror of incest. The sacred book prohibits a man from taking to wife his mother, daughter, sister, his paternal or maternal aunt, his grand-daughter, his mother-in-law, his daughter-in-law, or even his nurse and foster-sister. A man was not to marry two sisters at the same time.[1001] This is indeed a limited exogamy; and yet the Koran establishes the paternal and even patriarchal family very clearly. The study of the family in Malaya and among the aborigines of India will complete the proof that in the same country, and in the same race, various systems of marriage, family, and filiation, may coexist, and that consequently we must guard against formulating too strict sociological laws in regard to them. III. _The Family in Malaya._