Posted on 01/23/2014 5:51:08 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Don't mean to be offensive, but that is pretty feeble. The Carthaginians were a Phoenician, or Canaanite, culture. The literature from the Hebrews, not associated at all with the Greeks or Romans, also insists that these people sacrificed their children. That's three independent witnesses, so to speak?
IMNSHO, the burden of proof lies with the naysayers, not the deniers. Next they 'll be telling us there was no evidence of cannibalism among indigenous American peoples.
The practice of exposing unwanted children was (almost) universal in the classical world. The sole exception, AFAIK, were the Jews. Ancient travel writers would comment on this extremely odd Jewish custom.
The Spartans were thus quite ordinary in their practice of exposing unwanted children. They were unusual only in that this determination was made by the State, not the male head of the household.
A common PC view during the last decades of the 20th. Lots of claims were made that European observers invented the cannibalism to justify and legalize their attacks on the Indians.
This POV seems to have fallen somewhat out of favor recently.
Yeah, but Western art is beautiful, too. Or was, anyway. They never cut the West a break. I’m sensing a pattern here.
Yeah, but when the Israelites did it, they were going against God's commands. When the Canaanites did it, they were following their's.
Maybe sorta like when Christians wage holy war vs. when Muslims do the same?
No. Satan is the Prince of this world, and until Jesus comes again, it will only get worse, overall.
Yes, I was being a little ironic.
My favorite was the claim that the cliff dwellings of the SW, which are obviously defensive in nature, were sited for passive solar heating or some such nonsense. The popular claim in the 80s and 90s was that the Anasazi were a peaceful people.
They recently found an Anasazi coprolite (preserved feces) and analyzed it, finding human proteins. IOW, the gentleman had been dining on people.
If the neighbors got into cannibalism, I think I’d move into a cliff dwelling too.
I’ve often wondered if the change from mesa-top unfortified pueblos to cliff dwellings might have had something to do with influences from Mexico, where human sacrifice and cannibalism was an ancient way of life.
Yeah.
It’s amazing that anybody, no matter how stupid, ignorant, or uneducated he is, could mistake what we have today as worse, much worse, than the past. We are simply better at slaughter than they were, but they were no less willing to engage in it, and would do it for reasons we no longer would.
And also, we are much better at the good stuff, too.
May I recommend a most excellent book?
http://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savage/dp/0195119126
Demonstrates conclusively that most primitive societies were orders of magnitude more violent than even the most violent society of today. Causes liberal heads to explode.
Thanks!!
Just added it to my Amazon wish list. I’ve got a birthday in a few months.
:)
Sort of like abortion excpet now its for convenience, not divine favor.
Horrible people deserved to be wiped by Rome.
It would seem that some experts agree with me, give or take a little....a quick look at Wikipedia....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sacrifice#cite_note-plosone.org-13
“The accuracy of such stories is disputed by some modern historians and archaeologists. At Carthage, a large cemetery exists that combines the bodies of both very young children and small animals, and those who argue in favor of child sacrifice have argued that if the animals were sacrificed then so too were the children. However, recent archaeological work has produced a detailed breakdown of the age of the buried children and based on this, and especially on the presence of pre natal individuals - that is still births, it is also argued that this site is consistent with the burial of children who had died from natural causes in a society that had a high infant mortality rate - as Carthage is assumed to have been. I.e. this data supports the view that Tophets were cemeteries for those who died shortly before or after birth, regardless of the cause.”
From the article...”Skeletal Remains from Punic Carthage Do Not Support Systematic Sacrifice of Infants”
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0009177
Wikipedia also states..
“Phoenician sacrifice has been debunked as nothing more than a myth....”
....which refers to the article (synopsis, really) “Still Born Fetuses in Urns & the Perpetuated Lie of Diodoro Siculo” which states...
“....the greater part of approximately 6,000 children urns found in Carthage, contain bones of fetuses, therefore of still born babies.”
http://phoenicia.org/childsacrifice.html
I am not an archaeologist, but one thing that I definitely believe about the subject is that there is a very great deal that they are not really sure of....
This is an issue of political correctness, IMO.
There are those that do not want to believe that mankind is capable of this or any other such brutality, despite the evidence that it occurs even today, both on an individual and a cultural level. For example, Detroit.
Wikipedia is useful for some things, but it is hardly authoritative.
I’ll take the Biblical narartive over Wikipedia, any day. But, hey, I could be wrong. I just don’t think so.
gleeaikin, you have made some valid points. Nobody’s hat is truly white. I also concede that the Spaniards would have had no chance toppling the Aztec empire without the help of indigenous tribes who also hated the Aztecs. My overall point is that the world is better off without the Aztecs and their bloody gods.
Yeah, the Phoenicians didn’t practice child sacrifice (even though THEY documented that they did), and there was no slavery in ancient Egypt (even though that’s modern propaganda), and there was never an Aryan invasion of India, even though the Aryans themselves documented it.
The Spartan practice wasn’t exposing, it was throwing the children to their deaths. One could argue that it was more merciful to implement immediate death. Of course, mandatory pederasty, fetishistic “marriage by capture”, the communal rearing (ahem) of children to ensure that they grow up twisted elitist killers takes a little of the shine off that.
The practice has been documented among the Canaanites, including the Phoenicians, not only from the records of contemporaries, but from the digs (clearly it’s been more difficult to excavate Phoenician sites in Lebanon than it has to excavate many others, because hardly any of the ancient Phoenician sites have ever been abandoned and remain occupied). It’s interesting that the purported debunking began with the usual cast of characters, who during the 19th and 20th centuries made unsubstantiated claims that this or that from ancient sources (including pretty much the entire the Old Testament, and even the clear descriptions of the Oracle of Delphi) had no basis in fact. One joker even went so far as to claim that not only was there no evidence for the erstwhile existence of Abraham, but that his existence had been disproved for all time.
Interestingly, not too many decades earlier, it was an Aztec chief advisor who promoted the program of “flowery wars” when he said let us make [our neighbors] our bread basket, or something to that effect. War captives were ritually slaughtered and eaten. They had no large animals for protein, only birds and fish.
Actually, there are still a lot of Aztecs, it was only necessary to destroy the leadership to succeed. When I was in Mexico there were 1/2 million Aztec language [Nahuatl] speakers who spoke ONLY Nahuatl. I studied it a little in a linguistics class. The name of the Tlaxcallan tribe that allied with Cortez is interesting. Tlaxcali means tortillas. One unique feature of the language is that in addition to prefixes and suffixes, it also has infixes. So to say “I eat tortillas,” you can say “Nicua tlaxcali,” or “Nitlaxcalcua”. The x sounds like sh.
Could the human proteins come off the intestinal walls as the food traveled through the body? Have they done DNA studies? If cannibalism there should be DNA from both the eater and the eaten.
If you are referring to cannibalism as an “ancient way of life” are you thinking of the Aztecs or earlier groups? The Aztecs had only been city dwellers for a few centuries. The Toltecs were far more ancient, but I don’t know their practices. The Mayans were far older and did engage in human sacrifice, but I don’t remember cannibalism being a significant part of it. They often threw their sacrifices into sacred wells, sinkholes known as cenotes. Hard to eat them down 80 feet below the surface.
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