Did you know that I (probably) have royal blood in me. I can’t flaunt it too much, though, because you probably do too. Yup, according to the Washington Post, we’re all royal:
Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say, the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.
“Millions of people have provable descents from medieval monarchs,” said Mark Humphrys, a genealogy enthusiast and professor of computer science at Dublin City University in Ireland. “The number of people with unprovable descents must be massive.”
By the same token, for every king in a person’s family tree there are thousands and thousands of people whose births, lives and deaths went completely unrecorded by history. We’ll never know about them, because until recently vital records were rare for all but the noble classes.
It works the other way, too. Anybody who had children more than a few hundred years ago is likely to have millions of descendants today, quite a few of them famous.
I’d polish the sceptre and orb right now, but I can’t find them under the piles of unfolded laundry.
Filed under: Silly Stuff
I’ll bow to you if you bow to me
I always knew this! I am the lost heir to the king of the lost tribe of Israel. Now where did I leave my glasses?
BW, your kids surely have been encountering “Huckleberry Finn,” where the escapades of those famous rascals, the ‘King’ and the ‘Duke,’ perhaps prompted your post.
Norman Rockwell pictures Twain’s ‘lost royalty!’ (link below)
http://www.bradley.edu/las/eng/lotm/illustrations/huck4.htm
I’ve wondered about this. I once asked Rabbi Wein, an expert in Jewish history what percentage of Ashkenazi Jewry descended from Rashi (1040-1105). He answered 80%. I actually thought that the number was closer to 100%.
Of course the same thought could apply to Mohammed. The Hashemites seem to use their direct lineage from the prophet as a justification for leadership.
What if though, geneaologists started asking the question about Muslims? What percentage of Arabs are descended from Mohammed? Given that he lived 1300+ years ago I’d think that the percentage would actually be quite high. And what would happend when you’d reach critical mass of poor illiterate (illiteracy rates in the Arab world are high and those not of the ruling class are often not rich) people getting the idea in their heads that they deserve better because of the holy blood in their veings?
Oh, bah. I’m an American. We did away with that whole royalty schtick about two and a half centuries ago, as I recall(and not a moment too soon, if you ask me). Who wants to admit they’re connected with those inbred, self-centered slobs anyway? Not I!