Wait! NO Evidence for Child Sacrifices in the Ancient World?!

[@maribellelebre6809]

Thank you for correcting this! More vilification of Pagans

[@FiresideCreators]

Yep! Cover it in my book! :)

[@jonkomatsu8192]

Whoa, this important and interesting! I have always assumed there *was* archaeological evidence for all these claims about Moloch and all. I guess not. 😬 Great revelation, thanks! 👍

[@Flyspray420]

Thanks for your videos! I don't know if you remember me but I commented a while back about demons or something like that in history. At the time I was being influenced by a really dodgy scholar named Ammon hillman he is totally misleading people with his PhD it's insane!

[@JenniferBirdPhD]

I don't recall the specific questions from you, but I am sorry to hear about what was going on for you with Ammon. I heard bits and pieces about him, but never watched anything. Peace to you!

[@Flyspray420]

@@JenniferBirdPhD thanks! No worries! Well I'm not a historical genius just a casual watcher on KZbin and he takes advantage of people like me by waving his PhD around and pretending that he knows what he is talking about. If I heard him now I may not have fallen for it but I heard it early on on he started small and kept raising the temperature on his theories If that makes sense. then after listening to him for over year I realised I was listening to the fantasy of a very sick individual who is using all kinds of strange techniques to further spread that fantasy. I basically did some basic research and figured out he was full of it haha.

[@Flyspray420]

Pretty much he is a historical quack

[@JenniferBirdPhD]

@@Flyspray420 That is what I have heard, and it can be quite harmful for people to have an influence and not be accurate with your claims.

[@Flyspray420]

@@JenniferBirdPhD yep! thanks for the reply! especially with the kinds of things he is saying!

[@salparadise1220]

Passed through the fire... Walked between a pair of incense burners?

[@JenniferBirdPhD]

@@salparadise1220 exactly! Or two things burning, candles, at the entrance?

[@salparadise1220]

@@JenniferBirdPhD Yes. Braziers! To the bigger picture, something of a pattern emerging don't you think? Wild exaggeration of the iniquity of the other prior to delegitimising them/taking their lands/killing them, and of such virility that some have stood for millennia. People talk of baptism as figurative of the parting of the Red Sea, as a prequel to the Jordan River Baptism. Now imagine that, in order to demonise believers in baptism, they made the claim that, "they throw their babies into the sea", and that's all that survived by way of mention of what we know is a little splash on the forehead, perhaps a fully supported mini-dunk. It's easy to see how such claims, made to dehumanise, have remained because the horrific nature of the claim makes them less likely to pass into the collective forgetting.

[@JenniferBirdPhD]

@@salparadise1220 I wasn’t familiar with talk of the Red Sea parting as prequel to baptism. Interesting. Baptism itself originally was about a symbolic dying and rising, associated with such lore attached to a god. Whether or not this piece fits into the pattern you mention, I do think the pattern is there to a certain degree, yes!

[@sciptick]

Sadly, there is copious archaeological evidence of child sacrifice in Phoenician Carthage. Classical reports of such activity were taken as partisan libel until the proof surfaced. That biblical Abraham's willingness to engage in it, even as the subject of a divine jape, was seen as plausible by Jews demonstrates it was far from unthinkable in (at least) the semitic world.

[@JenniferBirdPhD]

@@sciptick thank you for chiming in. I’d love to know how I can read about the evidence you are referring to.

[@Akio-fy7ep]

@@JenniferBirdPhD The Algo does not seem to want to let me post any reference details, but a quick keyword lookup should get you to an article about the Oxford paper. I did "child s@crifice carthage archaeological".

[@awsanchezallred]

As an anthropologist working in Mesoamerica, I absolutely agree with @sciptick that there is copious amounts of archaeological evidence for child sacrifice. Take for instance the 2021 article "Inca human sacrifices from the Ampato and Pichu Pichu volcanoes, Peru," or another 2021 study "Child sacrifice in Tula: a bioarchaeological study." These were just two of the first hits in a quick Google search. Although the Carthage data is still heavily debated as far as I can tell, there are parts of the "Ancient world" that has nothing to do with the Mediterranean, or are indigenous Americans still the people who are "without history"?