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Notes -
Our impression of historical stability for noble families is also heavily influenced by lying. Dishonesty and outright fraud have always been key elements of creating lineage stories. Cutting both ways!
The ancient frequency of Moses/Oedipus/Cyrus (Herodotus rather than Xenophon)/Arthur sword-in-the-stone myths likely reflects a way to incorporate peasant "risers" into existing lineages. The Hapsburgs were notorious for inventing spurious links to Caesar or Charlemagne. This occurred at lower, and less notable, levels of nobility all the time. A sufficiently rich peasant found a way to claim descent from so and so, and with the right palms greased the write documents were "verified" and no more peasant. I similarly roll my eyes at the western credulity given to claims by Oriental families to have lineages dating back before our earliest written documents, but without evidence to back it up. Accounts of nobility were always historically shaky in poorly documented societies with weak record keeping.
We now, of course, are so often treated to the opposite in America, false middle class consciousness. Republican family origin stories where dad was a "small business owner" (third generation multi-millionaire) and I worked my way through college (interned with a family friend's finance company); or the international student version where my parents were refugees (oligarchs who fled when their patron was ousted in a coup).
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