Well, I think you’re moving the goalposts a bit here. You said “one’s own people”, which I took to mean people sacrificing the members of their own tribe (as opposed to members of that sub-human bunch over yonder who were captured in battle).
I don’t know of any archaelogical evidence to show whether or not the parents and other immediate kinfolk of the various sacrifice victims which have been found were proud and happy; sad but willing; or had to be violently restrained while their children were torn from their wailing mother’s grip. But the evidence does seem to suggest people sacrificing “their own”, in the sense of sacrificing members of their own tribe, village, city-state, etc.
As has been pointed out, there are certainly plenty of well-documented contemporary examples of parents killing their own children; I would add the reported reactions of many relatives of suicide bombers.
Bernardo de Sahagun, in his History of the Things of New Spain, claims to have seen Aztec child sacrifices that were approved by the children’s parents.
Going back to the Pheonician cultures - the evidence is very strong that they did sacrifice their own. In fact, the elites were apparently much more willign to make such a sacrifice. We have multiple accounts (granted, by people who often didn’t like them) over a very long period which claim they did so. So probably they did.
Not to put words in Chronos’ mouth, but I believe you misunderstood him. He said,
I took this to refer to records by a member of a particular culture of child sacrifice within that same culture. That is, while records describing the child sacrifices of a enemy people are relatively common, contemporaneous accounts of child sacrifices by the recorder’s own people are rare or nonexistent. A Roman writing about Carthaginian practices, for example, is not necessarily a most credible reporter. I don’t know if this contention is true, but that’s my understanding of his point.
That said, should such accounts surface, I would not automatically accept them at face value. An account by a native participant or spectator at the rite would carry considerable weight, as would accounts depicting the rite as a public event. I would look for more extrinsic evidence to support descriptions of private or secretive rites. Opposing factions commonly exist within a culture, and sensationalism and libel are nothing new. Remember that in the 1980s and 1990s, there were claims by Americans that thousands of infants were being sacrificed by cults in the United States, including some alleged first-hand accounts. The same panic spread through several other countries, resulting in similar claims there. Should some future archaeologists find fragmentary accounts from that period, what might they make of it?
Both Abraham and Agamemnon have some claims to historicity, but the child sacrifices (or near-sacrifices) are more likely to be mythological and / or literary, depending on when and how the idea was introduced into the tradition. It’s a little bit like cannibalism: lots of societies are said to have done it, and no doubt some aberrant individuals and a vanishingly small minority of groups actually did, but its existence is greatly exaggerated.
Does the archaeological evidence from North Africa clearly show that people sacrificed their OWN children, or just that they sacrificed children?
The evidence for Inca child sacrifice is pretty solid, IMO. You have actual physicial remains (child mummies, obviously ritual in nature, located on the tops of mountains); you have historical accounts. The weight of scholarly opinion opinion seems to be that these children were indeed Inca subjects.
The problem is that most ancient cultures that practiced child sacrifice did not leave extensive written evidence behind, much less extensive written evidence describing such details as exactly whose children they were sacrificing.
In a short story (admittedly, written in the 50’s or early 60’s) Isaac Asimov has a protagonist who’s a history professor. He wants to use a “history viewing” device to determine whether the Carthaginians actually sacrificed their own children, and the adventures trying to obtain permission and results are all part of the story.
Asimov was a history buff (among other things) and in the story goes over the usual issues mentioned above - much of our information comes from Rome and its allies who were Carthage’s enemies, and propaganda was a likely motive for libel.
I guess the short answer is, probably not and mostly it’s slander about the enemies. The Germans in WWI, remember, were killing Belgian babies with bayonets, the Jews used blood of Christian babies in their rituals according to the Protocols, etc… All lies and crap to put down the “others”.
Accounts of Inca sacrifices are among the ones I find most credible, in fact. Sacrificial rites were practiced openly, with public processions, and there is extrinsic evidence supporting them, so they meet the criteria I described above. The only point I might quibble on is precisely what groups the sacrifices in question were drawn from; “Inca subjects” can include conquered peoples as well, and the Inca did impose sacrificial requirements on those they conquered. Even if the majority of the sacrifices were drawn from conquered groups, however, it seems likely that at least some were “native”, particularly before the Inca really got their expansion going.
The ROman sources in this case didn’t seem terribly surprised by it, however. Remember, they also thought very little of exposing infants and letting other take them (or not), and didn’t routinely condemn their other enemies with this.
The Dead Past. Good story. It’s been anthologized somewhere or other.
And the Germans in WWII were running death camps, early stories of which were discounted for precisely this reason. Sometimes the horror stories are real.
Of course, we’re talking about a time when nailing someone up to a cross and letting them die slowly over the course of a few days was standard procedure. I read somewhere they sometimes liked to break a few limbs before crucifixion to reinforce the learning experience if shredding the prisoner’s back with a cat-o-nine-tails wasn’t sufficient. Stabbing someone in the side to kill him quickly before the Passover Sabbath was considered thoughful and considerate. A weekend’s entertainment consisted of watching people hack each other to death with minimal weapons, or watch them violate “Don’t feed the animals” ordinances.
I guess tossing live babies on the fire instead of letting them die of exposure was all they could dream up as sufficient to qualify as slander.
Asimov was a history buff, his “Foundation” series was based on work he did with a Roman Empire history prof for one of his summer jobs, IIRC, plus he wrote books on the historical context of the bible. For the short story mentioned I assume he researched the details fairly well, so the “probably not, it was likely propaganda” is about as close to the answer as we’ll get absent some really interesting evidence.
SPOILER: The short story (“The Dead Past” IIRC) was interesting logical and symbolic; the prof, whose daughter died in a house fire, is obsessed with finding out if the Carthaginians had burned their children. Some technology commission restricts access to the time viewer, so he collaborates with a physics student who figures out how to build an illegal one. The technology police use their viewer to find out what he’s done, but not before he broadcasts the plans to the world.
Turns out the viewer is useless for viewing over about 50 to 100 years ago, but ideal for almost-real-time big brother activities, which is why it is suppressed. His wife has never gotten over the loss of their daughter years ago, and is using the time viewer to watch their little girl over and over again. The story ends with the police guy telling him how he’s destroyed the world order and any semblance of privacy now; and wondering how long before his wife takes the viewer up to the point of the house fire that killed the daughter and finds out how the fire started. It ends with the police agent asking if the prof has ever wondered if the house fire was a result of one of the prof’s careless smoking? (Which has probably eaten away at the guy’s conscience for 10 years).
Asmiov hated smokers, even before it was fashionable.
I can see that scenario easily happening in the past. Parents have been known to kill their children rather than watch them starve. Imagine how much easier the motivation would be if religious leaders were telling them the sacrifice would make their child a page or handmaiden to the gods.
Just reading Robin Lane Fox’s recent book ‘Travelling Heroes’. In passing he mentions and accepts the evidense (written and archaelogical) for the Phoenicians practicing child sacrifice in the 8th century BC. I don’t know the evidence myself, but am more than prepared to take his word on this.
In the Hebrew Bible, the prophets take the Israelites to task for occasionally performing child sacrifice during times of apostasy- closest thing I know of for a culture admitting that they fell into it occasionally.
The story of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaak is, according to what I heard from major Biblical scholars, usually assumed to be a warning story and explanation for the abolishment of human sacrifice. Generally, a lot of religions start out with “We need to offer the Gods something valuable to get rain / a good harvest / relief from the plague / favour in general. The most valuable thing is not my hand-carved stone or the copper axe, but human life. So lets throw lots to determine which life the Gods want to have”.
In the Bible, Isaac is the only hope for Abraham, to have his descendants be as multiful as the stars on heaven. Killing him means killing the future. So this story isn’t mean to show that obeying God even if it means sacrificing your child, it means that killing your children for God is dumb and kills your own future, and God is content enough with animals for that reason.
Likewise, the story of Agamennon and Iphigenie shows that this is not normal - he sends a messenger with a false story (a wedding to Achill), and when Iphigenie and her mother hear that he wants to sacrifice her to Artemis who’s pissed about his hunting her sacred deer and therefore holding the wind back from the fleet, they clutch his knees to beseech him and tell him that this is gruesome and cruel. Achill, upon hearing this, takes up arms to defend her against the other men, who are tired of waiting for wind and ready to go kill a girl. There are several moving dramatic speeches about “we don’t do this, we are civilised, not barbarians, how can I live with honor if I allow this to happen” while the other side is “Dude, you want us to kill other guys for your brother’s wife, the least you could do is to suffer a bit yourself”. And then, when Iphigenie realizes she’s tearing the Greeks apart and gets ready for a noble self-sacrifice for the greater good, Artemis is moved by her great courage, and whisks her away (to Tauris, so Schiller can write a play about her there :)) and replaces her with a fawn. So for the Greeks, it wasn’t okay.
Some guy analyzing folk tales suggests they are meant to teach what’s acceptable behaviour - the interpretation of Hansel and Gretel says that if times are tough it’s OK to abandon your children - the children are happily re-united with the parents when they come home with the hoard of food.
However, it’s never OK to eat them; hence the witch who dies whle trying to make hanselburger.