Ancient Apocalypse - Ancient types sacrificing and eating children? Really?

[likelysuspect]

Ive just started watching a series on Iplayer about the downfall of various ancient civilisations and only halfway through the series to find each one seems to end or have some degree of cannabilism and child sacrifice of some degree

I mean I know its good drama and people love a bit of blood and gore but as I get older I find it harder to believe that these things happen.

AIBU to believe its a bit exaggerated, I mean how come we hear about it in very very very ancient civilisations but not really in later ones. I dont recall this about the Romans, ME peoples or the Chinese dynasties. (for example)

I love history - I can't get enough of it in books, TV, YouTube, films, art etc.

But I'm under no illusions that for all the ugliness of the modern plasticky consumerist world, with towns and road systems spreading all over the countryside, we are SO lucky to be living now in this unnaturally and unprecedented peaceful time in the UK. I'll take that over any romantic view of the past.

War is pretty endemic elsewhere - and the threat is always there. We're so used to peace in this country that it's sometimes easy to forget just how aggressive and savage human beings can be.

If we were ever really hungry, though, we'd see a different type of behaviour altogether - even in complacent Western Europe....

Carthaginian child sacrifice widely believed to be Roman ‘blood libel’ to excuse their destruction, and again with the Druids. Ditto the Spanish with the Aztecs. Most early civilisations did practice sacrifice, but probably not to the extent reported.

Whether child sacrifice happened or not, it's difficult to assess the scale. Another area where I wonder if the numbers quoted should be taken literally is the Roman games.

You read of thousands of victims (I think for one games at the Colosseum, something like 5,000+ people were said to have been killed). If you think about this, how on earth would that number of bodies be quickly disposed off, especially in the hot weather of Rome?

The lions can only eat so many bodies. Lions tend to hunt, kill, eat and then sleep for a few days. And where would all these corpses be buried, if there were several games a year on this scale? Surely vast mass-graves would have been found. Plus, if you think of the effort it would take to dig a grave for one body.....it's hard to believe thousands could be regularly dealt with.

Similarly with gladiators. They were the highly-trained Premier league heroes of the time - and popular with the punters. I don't think they'd have been allowed to be killed as often as Hollywood films might imply. Yes, prisoners and 'criminals' but not the top, star players.

Quibble point - please can we say Maya - Mayan was the language (well one of 30!), not the people. I did a stint working in archaeology on a Maya project and now I am am too nit picky about this point!

Totally agree with all of this. Hollywood (and Seneca) have a lot to answer for! I could write a whole load of dribble about 21st life in Swansea (and some people may even say now that I do!) and if it happens to survive over other annals and people take it as gospel...

@RedTagAlan fair enough (in return). I was a bit careless and didn't realise you'd posted the original story, or see the irony in your post. I have zero patience for Bible literalists and an irritable temper, these last months.

A lot of the Bible is far older than 400AD agreed, I was going by when it was decided what books would be considered canon and what not.

@CoffeeCantata Hard to work out the logistics precisely but the Romans must have had some method of mass corpse disposal - the death rates from mass industry were apparently huge, according to Tom Holland. Slaves must have been extremely cheap, since it was not worth treating them well enough to extend their working usefulness beyond 3-5 years.

There were Roman mining slaves and Roman house slaves. Totally different existences. There was a time when slaves suddenly flooded into Rome from some of their military campaigns, can’t remember when. There’s nearly 2000 years of total Roman history.

Yes - that must be true. But what happened to the bodies? They'd have to get the job done quickly for hygiene reasons.

I remember going to Edgehill in Warwickshire where I read that, after the battle in 1642, both sides just left, leaving the villagers to bury the bodies - about 100. That job alone was a huge undertaking for the small number of villagers, and it was difficult to find a suitable spot even for that number of dead.

This triggers me because I find digging in the garden (even a tiny hole!) absolutely exhausting!

I think we sometimes have to take statistics from history with a pinch of salt. I think there was a battle in the Wars of the Roses where one army was said to number over 30,000. That's phenomenal - surely an exaggeration?

Where though? In London we know where he plague victims are buried - Charterhouse Square has got, what, 50,000 people? Ground penetrating radar supports that. There has to be evidence, otherwise it's unreliable narration and dare I say exaggeration?

It’s the late republican times (part of the economic changes triggering the death of the republic) I was thinking of.

It was a long time ago now; an enormous amount of knowledge has been lost and the location of pauper and slave burial pits might very well not have been recorded? A few might be known but not all.

Do we know the location of all the mines, even? They won't have been in big population centres, I guess, though probably small settlements grew up to service them.

There are records of mass deaths though eg the 400 slaves killed after one murdered their owner in AD61. Admittedly that was seen as harsh. But field/industry slaves far outnumbered house slaves and were presumably casually disposed of once dead.

I’m always amazed at how many people are like OP and find some things so horrible, so impossible to stomach, that they’re tempted to believe that they can’t actually have happened. I’ve noticed the same pattern with some news stories of today - if an especially horrific atrocity happens, some people refuse to believe it’s real - particularly if it was committed by the wrong people or supports the wrong politics eg gun control

I’ve actually just been reminded, via a programme on the Old Kingdom of Egypt, that there was a worldwide episode of climate change between 5000 and 3000 bc. That would cause issues, as it did in Egypt and destroyed Sumer. Tens of thousands of starving people.

We have it to come. Thanks neoliberalists.

I was a bit careless too in asking if they were saying the bible was wrong v might be wrong. The bible is one of my favourite debate/discussion topics, especially against YECs and other literalists. But this is not really the thread for that. I do that over in religion. So the direct question " are you saying it is wrong" is really more of a shutdown, in my defence.

As you know, and have probably had before, when it comes to stuff like this, where a theist claims the bible is being misinterpreted, it often ends up an argument over what specific Hebrew words mean. And that opens up a whole new can of worms for them. Translations supposedly being divine inspired and all that.

Cannibalism was a ritual practice by the Maori people in New Zealand as recently as the 1840s.

One of the texts I read for Latin O-level stuck with me: the author (critically) described agricultural slaving practices. Workers were shackled together in long lines, on rigid poles. None lasted more than a couple of years; most lived a few months. They ate and shat where they stood. They slept, shackled to the poles, in the field. When one died, they just unclipped him and buried him there. Millions of them must have become fertiliser, all over the farm lands.

I find it very easy to believe the only reason the Romans didn't invent better machinery was that they had so much disposable human labour, there was no need for automation.

In one part of Papua New Guinea, the local people practised ritual cannibalism as part of their funeral rites. They believed that consuming the deceased person's body, particularly the brain, allowed their spirit to pass on. This continued until it was banned in the 1950s

The custom became internationally notorious, after it was identified as having been the cause of a new neurological degenerative disease, named Kuru. Kuru is a prion disease, similar to BSE in cattle or Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease in humans. Prions are abnormally shaped proteins, which cause deterioration in the brain. I can't explain the mechanism better than that, because I don't know myself.

Nowadays it is thought that patient zero for kuru may have been a sufferer of CJD. Anyway, the loved ones of this unknown person must have paid their respects at his or her passing by eating the late person's diseased brain matter. In the years after consumption, those mourners would have also experienced neurological degradation leading to their premature deaths. Then their brains were consumed, and then the brains of their mourners in turn. In the end, hundreds of people died.

The incubation period for kuru was between 5 and 50 years after the consumption of infected flesh, so people continued to develop kuru years after funerary cannibalism had been banned. Google tells me the last recorded death from it was in 2009.

It's hard to believe anything happened. I have now lived long enough to see "history" that I have actually lived through, and witness, be changed by others right in front of my eyes. So, I imagine there have been instances like this for millennia and pertains to all history to some degree.

A 'bit' exaggerated?

It's utter bilge from start to finish, made for the gullible who like to think they're cleverer than people who have done the actual research.
Von Daniken re-run.

There were civil war burials at my childhood church roughly 15 + miles way from edge hill - a small village church - there was building work disrupting burrials and work was done with dating and injuries.

Possible the church or other local authorties stepped in - even in the civil war they were still around - and called in wider help. There are at least two mass graves near the hill and prominate burials in nearest churches and clearly more scattered round the regional area.

Battle fields often had scavengers on them afterwards looking for valuables-Napoleonic Wars were a source of teeth for dentures at the time - people lieterally pulling the teeth out of the fallen soldiers.

Without good records and in fog of war always going to be hard to know how many were involved in any battles.

However larger section of poulation did manual labour and access to animals strength and some tools plus prepearing bodis for burrial was a thing done by ordinary people as was animal slaughter - so while never a pleasant task perhaps less shocking than for people in our societey removed from nastier side of life and death.

You don't have to look far to find people who will dispute the holocaust. Despite the availability of detailed evidence.

I think you've put your finger on it here with the whole 'divinely inspired' thing, and either you accept that or you don't (generic 'you'). After that it's just arguing where you draw the line.

The main objection I have is that people will distort evidence, and translations, to fit their viewpoints and then try to ram that viewpoint down your (or my) neck, despite palpable evidence to the contrary at times.

good lord @GarlicFind - did your latin books give any sources for this? Though honestly it doesn't seem unrealistic given other info.

@SerendipityJane you only have to look on this thread, two posts up from you! Very odd post.

I think US style Christian apologetics conditions people to be dishonest. If you are teaching people to argue that the earth is 5k years old and ignore evidence, then I reckon it rubs off onto other aspects of life. Especially politics.