Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #153 - Rules of Inheritance
Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday (sorry for the gap last week... IO was in bed ill !). They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Rules of Inheritance
- How (or if) a society passes it's wealth and social standing down from one generation to the next can have a fundamental impact on the way it functions.*
In ancient Egypt, inheritance was through the female line, which is one reason why so many pharaohs married their own mothers, sisters and daughters. Not wanting to pollute what they saw as a diving bloodline was also a factor, leading to some truly impressive cases of multi-generational inbreeding. The 18th Dynasty in particular was not so much a family tree, more of a tangled bramble patch.
French inheritance laws from the early medieval period were a complex mess based on Salic Law, excluding females from inheriting land and royal succession, and frequently dividing land equally between brothers. Over generations this led to the creation of uneconomic small-hold farms which reduced agricultural efficiency. More importantly, the application of this rule (via the Treaty of Verdun) to Charlemagne's Empire after he died was the reason why France and Germany are now two separate countries (having swallowed Burgundy between them). That's a serious historical impact !
Tell me about rules of inheritance from your fantasy or scifi setting ! What are the rules, and what biases or peculiarities do they contain ? How often do they get broken or fail to work ? Who gains and who loses ? How do governments tax inheritance ? What are the impacts on society ? What are the long term effects of these rules - how do they influence history ?
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.
People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂