Posted on 01/23/2014 5:51:08 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Just as ancient Greek and Roman propagandists insisted, the Carthaginians did kill their own infant children, burying them with sacrificed animals and ritual inscriptions in special cemeteries to give thanks for favours from the gods, according to a new study. “This is something dismissed as black propaganda because in modern times people just didn’t want to believe it,” said Josephine Quinn, a lecturer in ancient history at Oxford, who is behind the study, with international colleagues, of one of the most bitterly debated questions in classical archaeology.
“But when you pull together all the evidence – archaeological, epigraphic and literary – it is overwhelming and, we believe, conclusive: they did kill their children, and on the evidence of the inscriptions, not just as an offering for future favours but fulfilling a promise that had already been made...
“The inscriptions are unequivocal: time and again we find the explanation that the gods ‘heard my voice and blessed me’. It cannot be that so many children conveniently happened to die at just the right time to become an offering – and in any case a poorly or dead child would make a pretty feeble offering if you’re already worried about the gods rejecting it.”
“Then there is the fact that the animals from the sites, which were beyond question sacrificial offerings, are buried in exactly the same way, sometimes in the same urns with the bones of the children.”
(Excerpt) Read more at pasthorizonspr.com ...
Yup. I have never quite understood the fascination some Americans have with the Spartans. They had many admirable traits, of course. Courage, honor, military prowess.
They were also the world’s first and arguably most total ever totalitarian society. The Spartans, as such, were a democracy. But it was a democracy in which all individual choice and freedom was utterly subordinated to the group. And that group itself survived only by tyrannizing in the most appalling ways over other groups and individuals.
They were in most ways history’s first and most extreme fascists.
My earlier point was that infanticide was ubiquitous in the ancient world, as was slavery. I have seen a surviving fragment of a letter written from a Greek merchant in Cyprus back to his pregnant wife in Egypt. Around 100 BC or so.
It instructs her to keep the child if a boy, but expose it if a girl. The tone of the letter is similar to a discussion about picking out curtains.
-—They were also the world’s first and arguably most total ever totalitarian society——
I had a conversation with a young employee of mine yesterday who was all pumped up over seeing the new “300” movie...
I injected some reality into his young mind about who and what the Spartans were...aka your post....
Hope I didn’t ruin the movie for him...LOL...
Here’s an article about the evidence for cannibalism as a way of life from the Olmec (1000 BC) down thru the Toltecs and Mayas to the Aztecs. The Aztecs invented little in MesoAmerican civilization. Much as the Romans with the Greeks, they largely elaborated on and carried to their logical conclusion earlier trends and practices.
We tend to forget that MesoAmerican civilization was around 3000 years old when the Aztecs showed up.
http://www.heretical.com/cannibal/mamerica.html
Here’s a (somewhat fanciful) article about the evidence for Anasazi cannibalism.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/45644
The author posits an invasion and conquest of the Anasazi by Toltecs, which due to distance and logistics is a little silly.
Although we have actual written and physical evidence of a Toltec army conquering a Mayan city, which was something like half or a third the distance to the US Four Corners.
I particularly enjoyed the part in 300 where the Spartans sneered at the Athenians for being boy-lovers. LOL
Inaccurate, in the long run.
Once contact was made between the two "worlds," it was all over but the shouting for the civilizations of America.
This is because the Aztecs and Incas were defeated primarily by germs, not Spanish arms.
The results for the original Americans would have been much the same had contact first been made by Aztecs sailing up the Thames.
You are correct in that the conquest, as it occurred and when it occurred, was much more a result of Cortez organizing native opposition to the Aztecs that it was of Spanish valor.
LOL..I enjoyed that part as well...How un-pc of them !
What's really sad is this employee of mine...good kid...was completely clueless on ancient history...a product of our "outstanding" liberal union driven educational system...
He had no idea the Spartans were who they were primarily because they used slave labor to do almost all the manual work it takes to run a society so they could maintain their military prowess...
This employee was a black guy...so that sort of struck a nerve...
My comment about the sneer at the Athenians was, as you are probably aware, based on the fact that Spartan society was based on institutionalized ephebophilia. Much more so than Athenian society, which was bad enough in that way.
When a Spartan girl got married, her hair was cut and she was dressed as a boy for the wedding night, on the assumption that the groom would have to pretend she was a boy in order to “function.”
Agreed. The Spaniards would have ultimately conquered Central and South America but Cortez’s success depended on the rebelling Mexican tribes to defeat the Aztecs so soon after first contact.
Amen brother.
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