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Sunday, August 6, 2023

World-Wide Human Sacrifice: Measure of Social Development in Cultures Part 1

 Nadene Goldfoot                                               


Abraham of the 2nd millennium BCE, born in about 1948 BCE, over 4,000 years ago,  believed in human sacrifice.  He is known to have made the attempt to sacrifice his son, Isaac, so dear to Isaac's mother, Sarah and Abraham.  The story is told in order to relate that this act was the last try allowing human sacrifice.  It was not to be practiced thereafter.  For Abraham's descendants, that may have been true, but not for the rest of the world. 

The practice continued in Israel as they took in people from other cultures.   Foreign wives would bring the practice with them in Israel.  A Phoenician princess who worships Baal, the pagan god of fertility, Jezebel, daughter of king of Sidon- now in Lebanon (Phoenicians) ,  marries King Ahab,(876-853 BCE)  son of King Omri  of the northern kingdom of Israel. It was Omri that had forged an alliance with Sidon.  According to the Moabite Stone, he subdued Moab, today's Jordan. Worship of Moloch  was an extension of Baal worship.  The god, Moloch, especially Baal-Melkart, was from Sidon and was their god of hell.  

She persuades him to tolerate her alien faith of Baal worship, then becomes entwined in the vicious religious conflict that ends in her death.  Solomon (961-920 BCE)   had many wives, some that also brought such worship into Israel.  

The practice, seemingly coming from a genetically induced thought, (fear and overcoming it) continued to be practiced. This took place after Abram and Sarah had left Ur for good.  The Hebrew Bible mentions human sacrifice being carried out by Israelites several times; however, researchers do not agree on how often the practice occurred or whether it took place at all. Prophets fought against the practice constantly. As to the Temple, sacrifice continued but only with animals, meal offerings, and libations; never people.  

When Moses (1391-1271 BCE)  sent his spies out to view Canaan, they were also searching for answers:  belief in what gods and were they human being sacrificers...at least that's what Moses wanted to know;  and they were.  Evidence of this was not mentioned.    

Ur, Abraham's city of birth, The Great Death Pit at the ancient city of Ur, in modern-day Iraq, contains the remains of 68 women and six men, many of which appear to have been sacrificed. Dating back about 4,600 years, a variety of fantastic treasures, including a statuette known as the Ram in the Thicket, which is made of silver, shell, gold, lapis lazuli and carnelian, were found in the death pit. Archaeologists believe that the pit was used to bury Ur's rulers. (Sir Woolley's finds)   

Canaanites and Human Sacrifice: 

Canaanite belief in the god, Moloch included human sacrifice, especially of 1st born children to Moloch, through a passage of fire.  (Lev.18:21; and 20:3-5) but persisted in the northern kingdom and even in Jerusalem in a period where altars were built at Topheth in the valley of Hinnom.  Seems as if the whole world was under the cloud of sacrificing humans, wherever one went, and would not die out.                                         

Human sacrifice occurred around 5,000 years ago during Egypt's early history. Human sacrifices have been found by the graves of early pharaohs at Abydos, a city in southern Egypt that served at times as Egypt's capital and was the cult center for Osiris, the god of the underworld. The practice appears to have become less common or completely phased out by the time the Giza pyramids were built around 4,500 years ago.  Seems that Egypt was the original center of many things, a very early cultural center.  
AN AZTEC PRIEST REMOVING A MAN'S HEART DURING A SACRIFICIAL RITUAL, OFFERING IT TO THE GOD HUITZILOPOCHTLI. in 1521, only 500 years ago

The Aztecs of Central America much later on were known to practice human sacrifice on a large scale.  The rationale for Aztec human sacrifice was, first and foremost, a matter of survival. According to Aztec cosmology, the sun god Huitzilopochtli was waging a constant war against darkness, and if the darkness won, the world would end. The keep the sun moving across the sky and preserve their very lives, the Aztecs had to feed Huitzilopochtli with human hearts and blood.  So was from the fear that the workings of the cosmos would come to an end. They realized their dependency on the sun for life.  When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, they described witnessing a grisly ceremony. Aztec priests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods. They then tossed the victims’ lifeless bodies down the steps of the towering Templo Mayor.  They practiced such sacrificing only 500 years ago. While most pre-Columbian historians believe that ritual cannibalism took place in the context of human sacrifices, they do not support Harris' thesis that human flesh was ever a significant portion of the Aztec diet.      

A  Native American sacrifice was going on  1,000 years ago.  A 10-foot (3 meters) mound called Mound 72 by modern-day archaeologists holds the remains of 272 people, many of them sacrificed. It is located at Cahokia, a city located near modern-day St. Louis, Missouri that flourished from A.D. 1050 to 1200.  The archaeology of the mound is complex, but it appears as if people were sacrificed gradually in a series of episodes. In one episode, 52 malnourished women ages 18 to 23, along with a woman in her 30s, were sacrificed at the same time. In another episode, it appears that 39 men and women were clubbed to death. The mound also holds the remains of two individuals who were buried with 20,000 shell beads. It's possible that some or all of the sacrifices were dedicated to the two individuals.  (Seems that the original reasoning of human sacrifice can evolve to suit a different reasoning).  


Archaeologists in China found hundreds of tombs, some of which held human sacrifices. One sacrificed victim was around 13 years old. Archaeologists have also found thousands of human sacrifices at Shang Dynasty (1600 – 1040 B.C.) around 3,600 years ago,  sites in the modern-day city of Anyang. The practice of human sacrifice seems to have stopped or become very rare by the time China was unified in 221 B.C. by Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. The first emperor's Terracotta army, made up of thousands of life-size clay warriors, allowed him to take an army with him to the afterlife without sacrificing real-life warriors. 

Hawaiian islanders practiced human sacrifice.  Periodically, they would throw a sacrifice into the volcano that threatened their lives.  Other forms of human sacrifice were also practiced here.  Captain Cook was shown the remains.  These graves marked where the bodies of those sacrificed lay, confirming human sacrifice was practiced in the Hawaiian Islands. The truth was that sacrifice was not uncommon. War captives and those that broke a kapu (taboos) were brutally sacrificed. Methods ranged from strangulation to bone breaking and removal of intestines. Significant events like the dedication of a war temple to the tiki war god Ku were considered appropriate times for sacrifices. The practice of human sacrifice persisted until the collapse of the kapu system after the death of King Kamehameha in May 1819.  (Why is it that I feel this had evolved into punishment and sadism along with"sacrifice"? ) 

Stonehenge is a possible center.  Stonehenge was constructed between roughly 5,000 and 4,000 years ago, and was part of a sacred landscape that included shrines, burials and additional circles made of stone or wood. Not all archaeologists are convinced that human sacrifice took place at Stonehenge, but future research into the nearby landscape and its burials may help resolve the debate. The skeleton of a man found buried in a ditch at Stonehenge has been interpreted by Jacqueline McKinley, an osteoarchaeologist with Wessex Archaeology, as a sacrificial victim. The man, who McKinley said was 5 foot 10 inches and had a robust muscular build, was shot repeatedly with arrows. McKinley interprets the location of his burial and nature of his execution as indicating that he was killed as part of a human sacrifice. Her research was featured in 2014 in a Smithsonian channel documentary showing a re-creation of his sacrificial execution.                                    

The upper part of the teenager’s skull was missing, while the body was laid among two lines of stones on an east-west axis, with stone slabs covering the pelvis. Photograph: Uncredited/AP.  The discovery of a 3,000-year-old skeleton in Greece has excited archeologists, who believe that the finding may confirm one of the darkest legends of antiquity.

Skeletal remains 'confirm ancient Greeks engaged in human sacrifice'. Bones found on Mount Lykaion – where animal offerings to Zeus were also made – but some are urging caution over how to interpret the discovery.  Bremmer said that until now, most studies of human sacrifice in ancient Greece had concluded that it was probably fiction.    



          

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