Human Sacrifice in the Ancient World

In many ancient societies, sacrifice was the central act of religion: something valuable was given to the gods so that the order of the world would continue. Most offerings were animals, grain or drink. In a small number of states, and usually at moments of great importance, the gift was a human life. The victims were most often war captives, sometimes slaves, and in some places children chosen for their purity. The practice was nearly always tied to kingship, to the founding of buildings, to the burial of rulers or to crises such as war and famine.

One of the best-documented early cases is Shang China. At Anyang, the last Shang capital, in use from about 1250 BCE until the dynasty fell around 1046 BCE, royal tombs held attendants buried with their lords, and nearby pits held the remains of many people killed in rites for royal ancestors. The kings recorded their questions to the ancestors on oracle bones, asking for instance how many captives of the Qiang people should be offered. Modern scholars counting these inscriptions have tallied more than 13,000 victims, a figure that reflects what was proposed in divination rather than an exact count of deaths.

On the other side of the world, the Mexica, or Aztecs, made sacrifice part of a whole cosmology. Their myths taught that the gods had given their own blood to set the sun in motion, and that human offerings repaid this debt and kept the universe alive. Most victims were captives taken in war, and some wars were fought partly to obtain them. Sacrifices took place at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan, the twin temple of the rain god Tlaloc and the war god Huitzilopochtli, and the skulls of victims were displayed on a great wooden rack, the tzompantli.

The Inca of the Andes practised a rarer rite called capacocha. On important occasions, such as the death of a ruler, children of high status were brought to Cuzco and then led to mountain summits sacred to the local deities. There they were left as offerings, binding the provinces to the centre of the empire. Their remains, preserved by cold and altitude, are among the most moving finds of Andean archaeology.

For a long time, knowledge of these practices came mainly from texts written by outsiders: Greek and Roman authors describing their enemies, and Spanish chroniclers describing peoples they had conquered. Such sources have value, but they also had reasons to exaggerate. Archaeology now allows historians to test them.

In Mexico City, excavations from 2015 onwards uncovered the platform of the great tzompantli and a circular tower of skulls set in mortar, close to the Templo Mayor. Hundreds of skulls have been recovered. Many belonged to young men, as expected for war captives, but some belonged to women and children, which surprised researchers and has prompted new questions about who was chosen and why. The finds confirm the descriptions of eyewitnesses such as the conquistador Andrés de Tapia, though not the enormous figures some colonial writers gave. A chronicle by the Dominican Diego Durán, drawing on Aztec accounts, claims that 80,400 people were sacrificed at the dedication of the enlarged temple in 1487. Most historians regard this as a symbolic or inflated number.

The tophet of Carthage, in modern Tunisia, raises a different problem. It is a cemetery of urns containing the cremated bones of infants and young animals, often marked with stones inscribed with vows to the gods Baal Hammon and Tanit. Some estimates suggest that many thousands of urns were placed there over several centuries. Greek and Roman writers said the Carthaginians sacrificed children, and the Hebrew Bible condemns a similar rite among neighbouring peoples. Some scholars accept that the tophet is direct evidence of child sacrifice; others, studying the bones, argue that many of the infants died before or shortly after birth and were buried there with special rites. The debate is not settled.

In the Andes, the best-known finds come from Llullaillaco on the border of Argentina and Chile, where in 1999 an expedition led by the archaeologist Johan Reinhard found three children, the eldest a girl of about thirteen. Chemical analysis of their hair has shown changes in diet and increasing use of coca and alcohol in the months before death, a record of the long ceremonial journey that preceded the offering.

The Greeks told many stories of human sacrifice. The best known is that of Iphigenia, daughter of King Agamemnon, who was to be sacrificed so that the Greek fleet could sail to Troy. In several versions the goddess Artemis rescues her at the last moment and puts a deer in her place. Tragedians such as Euripides used the story to explore the price of war and the cruelty of the gods. Other myths, such as the tribute of young Athenians sent to the Minotaur, also turn on the horror of human offerings.

Yet for most Greeks and Romans human sacrifice belonged to a distant mythical past, or to barbarians. Writers accused Carthaginians, Gauls and Britons of the practice, partly to mark them as uncivilised. Rome itself was not entirely free of it: Livy reports that in 216 BCE, after the disaster at Cannae, a Gaulish man and woman and a Greek man and woman were buried alive in the Forum Boarium as an extraordinary rite. In 97 BCE the Senate passed a decree forbidding human sacrifice, and later emperors suppressed the rites attributed to the druids.

The Hebrew Bible also shaped how later cultures saw the subject. The story of Abraham and Isaac, in which God stops the sacrifice and provides a ram, has long been read in Jewish and Christian tradition as a rejection of human offering, and the prophets condemned child sacrifice among neighbouring peoples.

Human sacrifice did not end in a single moment. In China, the burial of attendants with rulers declined after the Shang, though it did not vanish at once, and figurines increasingly took the place of people in tombs. In the Mediterranean, the rite disappeared with Roman rule. In the Americas, it ended with the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521 and of the Inca in the 1530s, when Christianity was imposed by force.

Historians today try to understand these practices without either sensationalising them or explaining them away. They were acts of deep religious meaning for those who performed them, and they were also exercises of state power over captives and the vulnerable. Modern Mexico, Peru and Argentina present this past in museums such as the Templo Mayor Museum in Mexico City and the Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña in Salta, where the Llullaillaco children are kept with care. For the descendants of these civilisations, the challenge is to remember the sacrifices honestly while recognising the achievements of the cultures that practised them.