Another fictional book, Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield, gives a glimpse of life in ancient Sparta, that’s also vivid and entertaining. Can’t speak to its authenticity or the quality of the facts behind it, but I enjoyed it.
In Israel, near Jerusalem is the Valley of Jezreel. Recently, there were human remains found which verified a Biblical legend; that that valley was inherited by a tribe (Canaanites? Moabites?) who regularly sacrificed children as part of the Baal worship ritual. If I remember Bible class right, it’s from this specific cult practice that the prohibition on idol-worship comes from. I believe the remains found were childrens’ bones with obvious human bite and cut marks on them.
There was a time there when people wanted to deny that cannibalism ever existed, or if it did, it was extremely rare and/or only found under exceptional conditions. Turns out it was a lot more common than anyone thought.
All it really takes is a mildly hungry barbaric people asking “Why are we throwing away all this meat?”
No, the worst thing would be nearly wiping out an entire pacifist people and eating many of them. Or holding captives like kine…and then eating them.
Shaka’s regime was pretty brutal in conquest, but no more so than most conquerors. Once tribes were assimilated into the Zulu kingdom, they were accepted as part of the new emerging polity, and the internal structure of the empire, while not a free-and-easy culture, was nevertheless stable for the, what, 70 years or so that it lasted?
Thanks for all the recommendations, everyone! This is all very interesting, and all your suggestions are now on my reading list. I’m particularly looking forward to reading “House of Rain”.
I’m reminded of Calvin and Hobbes… 
Also, the book you mentioned upthread - is it this one?
MrDibble, got any suggestions for further reading, on both Polynesians and Zulus?
My first intro to the Maori/Moriori cannibalism stuff was Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond. As for the Zulus, hard to say - Morris’s The Washing of the Spears is OK, if dry.
Incidentally, for a good book on cannibalism, check out Flesh and Blood by Reay Tannahill. Fascinating stuff, and well written, too.
That’s the one. I bought my copy in a used book store.
Keep in mind that the author is tracing the entire migration route of the Anasazi people across the Colorado Plateau and then over the escarpment into the forested part of Arizona. Only one chapter actually deals with tribal warfare, sacrifice and cannibalism. He doesn’t dwell on it, but rather presents it as archaeological fact. Still, he’s a very descriptive writer, and his verbal pictures of these arid areas and their inhabitants are excellent.
The Moche were pretty extreme:
I have seen some people claim that the victims’ skeletons were found with coproliths in the mouths of the skulls. To me, that suggests that the motive was political terrorism, rather than religious zeal.
It might work even better today. Suppose some homegrown media-savvy political fringe started doing widespread home invasion torture murders, taking advantage of popular images of extreme violence and the innocence of victims. Think the Manson Family with a manifesto and a web presence. They could conceivably bring the country to its knees in fear and mistrust before the feds mowed them down.
I ran into one of these Revisionist zealots on the IMDB when I happened to mention the Carthaginians’ practice of infant sacrifice. Hannibal himself couldn’t have rushed more fiercely to the Punic defense, as he launched into a diatribe against the Roman and other sources. One thing he left well alone, of course, was the archaeological evidence, although I suspect if I’d mentioned it I’d only have received a torrent of bitter invective about the West and their perfidious archaeologists.
I used to doubt the veracity of (or at least the extent of) Carthaginian child sacrifice (probably on these boards, even) and considered it just Roman blood libel, but the actual evidence is rather telling.
For Marco Polo, wouldn’t it make more sense to read the original? I used to love it as a child; later I made a game of trying to place the stories and descriptions (many of them second or third-hand) on an Atlas.
The original is a great story but it would probably be better described as “inspired by the memoirs of” than a historically accurate travelogue.
Years ago, a rather shallow Houston TV personality surprised me with his story of visiting Tunisia. He saw the site of Carthage & recounted a bit of ancient history. Then he visited a cemetery filled with victims of WWII battles. And waxed rather thoughtful about any civilization willing to sacrifice so many of its young.
Yes, the ancients could be a bloody lot. But, let’s not forget the wars & genocides of the century just past–even in the heart of civilized Europe.
And a rewrite by someone 7 centuries later is better how? They’re basically doing what I did with my Atlas.
This is precisely why slavery was so ubiquitous in ye olden times. The Romans couldn’t afford to let an entire nation live undisturbed on the fringe while demanding tribute, they had to destabilize the tribes and take hostages, as well as punishing those who resisted. The Greeks would take slaves from rival city states on occasion (you hear mixed sentiments about using fellow Greeks as slaves), to reduce their power to make war. The Mamluks and Jannisaries were slave, usually Christian soldiers who would be taken as children to keep the religious and ethnic minorities weak enough to protect against rebellion. Subsistence agriculture isn’t very labor intensive, it’s only on large scale farms that extra hands become necessary, so it’s likely slavery first evolved as a form of punishment and stratification.
Honestly, that sort of eliminates the Mongols as well. Genghis Khan was well known for his generosity and patience, he only slaughtered everyone when he was, essentially, given reason to.
Terrifying civilizations are only going to be terrifying when compared with others. The Celts didn’t go around lopping their own heads off, and the Aztecs preferred to use war captives as sacrifice when available as opposed to their own people.
That said, you could check out some of the Mayan bloodletting rituals. Not quite on the same level as the Aztecs, but they would, for example, pierce their tongues and pull cordage laced with spikes through the wound to make the blood flow faster.
You should also look into the Spanish of the High and Late Middle Ages - specificully during and after the Reconquista and Inquisition.
You’re all referring to the Tophet, and the evidence honestly is shaky at best, and not because of any “agenda”, but to the near absence of unambiguous evidence. Diodorus Siculus is widely considered a propagandist who did plenty to make everyone seem inferior to the Greeks (his target audience), the bible was arguably seeking justification for demonizing the Canaanites as heathens (and never mentions a tophet in Carthage, but specifies Canaan), Tertullian lived hundreds of years after the sack of Carthage and absorption of its former territories and Romanization of its people (and as a dedicated Christian, he was not going to try and paint a pagan religion in a good light) and modern archeology says nothing more than that the children were cremated. You could just as easily assume all Greeks were victims of the tophet, because they were cremated as well. Clietarchus allegedly mentions the practice as well, and while he was relatively contemporary, he’s also accused of embellishment and outright fabrication by writers like Cicero. Not to mention his work is lost, and only known through references, so we can’t even be sure he did say it.
Archaeology doesn’t tell us how cremated remains died or if they were alive when they started burning, and as far as I know, there’s no proof the children weren’t stillborn, or died due to disease / famine. There are bones of fetuses, even - how were they sacrificed? Did they perform cesarian sections to extricate the unborn child to sacrifice?
People also make much ado about the animal bones mixed in with human remains, even though they can be explained. The children, if they were considered specially pure as children are considered today, may have been “returned” to Ba’al and Tanit like a sacrifice without being alive, like sky burials returning the deceased person’s body back to nature.
The ones with the agendas were the contemporary Romans like Scipio Africanus during the Punic wars, who didn’t make any descriptions of the Tophet or child sacrifice. And there’s no contemporary Carthaginian or Phoenician descriptions of the event / ritual, even though they most certainly would have seen nothing wrong with it, since they were the ones doing it. Why are there only foreign sources completely disconnected with Carthaginian culture and sources separated by hundred of years or more? There are no primary sources.
Go ahead and consider me a revisionist zealot if you guys want, and I grant the Phoenicians certainly could have practiced child sacrifice, all I’m saying is that the evidence is not nearly as abundant or clear cut as you guys seem to think.
Oh, they didn’t stop at tongues…
Interestingly, “tophet” (תופת) is Hebrew for “inferno”, both in the sense of a great fire, and of Hell.