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They dismiss Cortez and his men as exaggerating the number of skulls when they claimed 130,000, but if you start calculating how many are in the image of the re

They dismiss Cortez and his men as exaggerating the number of skulls when they claimed 130,000, but if you start calculating how many are in the image of the reconstruction in the article, it's easily close to 100,000. This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda, until they dug up the massive infant necropolis near the temple to Moloch (yes, that Moloch -- the Carthaginians were Canaanites). Even the Romans made human sacrifices (not just gladiators, or feeding Christians to the lions). When things got particularly grim in the Punic wars, they sacrificed two Gauls and a Greek in the forum. Human sacrifice was alarmingly common.

kimmk 8y ago
Romans very rarely practiced ritual human sacrifice (outside of gladiator games). The specific case of burying two Gauls and a Greek alive was an exception done by consulting the Sibylline books, a collection of prophetic instructions only to be used during extreme crisis like after the battle of Cannae during the second Punic War.
- 5DFractalTetris 8y ago
  Disagree completely. Capital punishment has always been little more than ritual sacrifice. War itself may be little more than ritual sacrifice.
  - ggm 8y ago
    Contextually conflating capital punishment with ritual is I think wrong.
    - jack9 8y ago
      It's fundamentally a philosophical question. I think it's a surprisingly insightful observation.
      - beaconstudios 8y ago
        I disagree. What god is capital punishment meant to appease? It's supposedly there for people who are too dangerous to keep alive right? Human sacrifice seems to me like it was meant to bring better harvests or otherwise give the illusion of controlling a chaotic/random natural process.
        pasabagi 8y ago
        I don't think so. I think it's current justification is typically framed in the form of 'punishment', and its historical justification was purely religious. And, coincidentally, was at least partially about giving the punished person a fair shot at redemption by punishing them while they were still on earth - which is literal god-appeasement. Regardless, I think equating capital punishment with ritual sacrifice is a fair judgement. No matter how rational our rituals and systems for killing people seem, there's no reason to suggest that the Aztecs did not feel similarly about their rituals and systems. Law is not supposed to be a science, so it's also not free from cultural relativism, even if you're not a cultural relativist generally.
        5DFractalTetris 8y ago
        I consider all distinguishing characteristics between people or groups of people to be projections utilized by human minds to motivate and bring forth highly-ritualized purifying violence, which ranges in intensity from inconsequential name-calling to full-scale genocide. My best historical example of this from pre-modernity was the 13th Century Cathar Purge, where the War refrain "Kill them all and let God sort them out" originates, and continues forth until this day. Records point to a similar practice within the Aztec regime, with self-sacrifice a common action to sustain the empire. Given the advanced bureaucratic practices common to empires in precolonial America, it seems the Aztecs simply required regular sacrificial deaths (via suicide or homicide) to maintain their office, in addition to regularly liquifying prisoners or the enslaved. Like a death camp which ran on self-motivated suicide, for reasons of cosmic accounting.
        8y ago
    - flatline 8y ago
      Perhaps in a modern context. I know that the ancient Chinese were big into sacrificing prisoners and captives of war. And the end result is eerily similar even when couched in terms of law and order. Sacrifice has both been used to appease or ask favor of the gods, and to assert ones rightness and an other’s wrongness. Capital punishment fits the second criterion to a tee.
  - projectramo 8y ago
    The big difference between human sacrifice and capital punishment is that the person sacrificed hasn’t done anything “wrong.” The big difference between war and human sacrifice is that the target of human sacrifice is not a threat or a random bystander.
  - yters 8y ago
    Based on this premise 56 million abortions a year is also ritual sacrifice, on a greater scale than any form of human sacrifice in the past.
dnomad 8y ago
> This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda, There is really no evidence of child sacrifice at Carthage. Not sure why this myth persists but the much more plausible explanation is that (wealthy) children who died of natural causes were cremated, a very common practice in the ancient world that goes back literally 10,000 years. > Human sacrifice was alarmingly common. Not so much. And in fact what the Aztecs did was very unique: human sacrifice was institutionalized and carried out on an industrial scale. This is very different from servants/wives being forced to follow a warrior or the occasional prisoner of war being tossed into a pit. There's really nothing else like it in all of history until the modern Europeans invented death camps.
- InTheArena 8y ago
  While this is still debated by a few hold outs, This is one where Wikipedia is out of date. Oxford and others released a paper in 2014 and it is now generally held by historians and archeologists that it did in fact happen. Archeoloists questioned Plutarch, and Plutarch won. Check out Antiquity 2012, 2014, and 2017.
  - dnomad 8y ago
    > Oxford and others released a paper in 2014 I'm familiar with the Oxford research. It's not conclusive and I don't think most archaeologists have signed on. We'll see how it holds up over time. Even if you accept Oxford, it's still the case that child sacrifice, if it did take place, was rare and reserved only for the very wealthy. The idea of Carthaginians all gathering in a stadium and hurling children into a pit of fire for Moloch is pure (Roman) myth.
    - 7952 8y ago
      Does this kind of question depend on what you consider to be the baseline of normal human behaviour? That defines what side of an argument evidence is required. Surely it is possible that human sacrifice was common throughout human history, and that the last couple of thousand years were the exception. How can you know?
narrator 8y ago
As a literary reader of the bible, I noticed that there are literally one hundred different passages in the bible where God says that he absolutely does not want his followers to sacrifice children to him or condemns other religions for this practice. https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice That they had to repeat it over and over again gives me the impression that this practice was disturbingly widespread in the ancient world.
- duxup 8y ago
  I'm imagining numerous editorials "I don't know how to tell you to stop sacrificing children...."
  - avn2109 8y ago
    Speaking of editorializing, the article's author took to Twitter [0] to defend her article's reverent/respectful tone and (nowadays-common) unspoken premise that all cultures and ideologies are equally good and valid. You'd think it'd be easy to use ritual vivisection, human sacrifice at scale, organized child murder, and cannibalism [1] as an absolutely unambiguous black-and-white line by which to demarcate civilization from barbarian savagery. But amazingly she's willing to defend the latter in writing. In my opinion this constitutes dispositive evidence that the article's author is absolutely batty. [0] https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 [1] She has conveniently omitted from her article any mention of the American natives' widespread and well-documented cannibalism.
    - duxup 8y ago
      I can get giving people in different situations various levels of leeway as far as comparing my decisions sitting at my computer here to their decisions and such. But damn... what does she even mean by "horrific"... how is that even a thing you would bother to dispute?
      - 8y ago
bhouston 8y ago
Wikipedia cities a number of sources for between 130K and 60K: > One conquistador, Andrés de Tapia, was given the task of counting the skulls on the "tzompantli" at Tenochtitlan and estimated that there were 136,000 skulls on it.[17] However, based on numbers given by Taipa and Fray Diego Durán, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano[18] has calculated that there were at most 60,000 skulls on the "Hueyi Tzompantli" (Great Skullrack) of Tenochtitlan. The "Hueyi Tzompantli" consisted of a massive masonry platform composed of “thirty long steps” measuring fully 60 meters in length by 30 meters wide at its summit. Atop of the aforementioned platform was erected an equally formidable wooden palisade and scaffolding consisting of between 60 and 70 massive uprights or timbers woven together with an impressive constellation of horizontal cross beams upon which were suspended the tens of thousands of decapitated human heads once impaled thereon.[19] There were at least five more skull racks in Tenochtitlan but by all accounts they were much smaller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli#Aztec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli#Aztec
happymandrake 8y ago
As a student of history, the amount of hate that pre-Israel civilizations get is really astounding.
ceejayoz 8y ago
> They dismiss Cortez and his men as exaggerating the number of skulls when they claimed 130,000, but if you start calculating how many are in the image of the reconstruction in the article, it's easily close to 100,000. The sources of that image indicate "several thousand" in the article. Not 100k. > Combining the two historically documented towers and the rack, INAH archaeologists now estimate that several thousand skulls must have been displayed at a time.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

kimmk 8y ago

Romans very rarely practiced ritual human sacrifice (outside of gladiator games). The specific case of burying two Gauls and a Greek alive was an exception done by consulting the Sibylline books, a collection of prophetic instructions only to be used during extreme crisis like after the battle of Cannae during the second Punic War.

5DFractalTetris 8y ago
Disagree completely. Capital punishment has always been little more than ritual sacrifice. War itself may be little more than ritual sacrifice.
- ggm 8y ago
  Contextually conflating capital punishment with ritual is I think wrong.
  - jack9 8y ago
    It's fundamentally a philosophical question. I think it's a surprisingly insightful observation.
    - beaconstudios 8y ago
      I disagree. What god is capital punishment meant to appease? It's supposedly there for people who are too dangerous to keep alive right? Human sacrifice seems to me like it was meant to bring better harvests or otherwise give the illusion of controlling a chaotic/random natural process.
      - pasabagi 8y ago
        I don't think so. I think it's current justification is typically framed in the form of 'punishment', and its historical justification was purely religious. And, coincidentally, was at least partially about giving the punished person a fair shot at redemption by punishing them while they were still on earth - which is literal god-appeasement. Regardless, I think equating capital punishment with ritual sacrifice is a fair judgement. No matter how rational our rituals and systems for killing people seem, there's no reason to suggest that the Aztecs did not feel similarly about their rituals and systems. Law is not supposed to be a science, so it's also not free from cultural relativism, even if you're not a cultural relativist generally.
        5DFractalTetris 8y ago
        I consider all distinguishing characteristics between people or groups of people to be projections utilized by human minds to motivate and bring forth highly-ritualized purifying violence, which ranges in intensity from inconsequential name-calling to full-scale genocide. My best historical example of this from pre-modernity was the 13th Century Cathar Purge, where the War refrain "Kill them all and let God sort them out" originates, and continues forth until this day. Records point to a similar practice within the Aztec regime, with self-sacrifice a common action to sustain the empire. Given the advanced bureaucratic practices common to empires in precolonial America, it seems the Aztecs simply required regular sacrificial deaths (via suicide or homicide) to maintain their office, in addition to regularly liquifying prisoners or the enslaved. Like a death camp which ran on self-motivated suicide, for reasons of cosmic accounting.
        8y ago
  - flatline 8y ago
    Perhaps in a modern context. I know that the ancient Chinese were big into sacrificing prisoners and captives of war. And the end result is eerily similar even when couched in terms of law and order. Sacrifice has both been used to appease or ask favor of the gods, and to assert ones rightness and an other’s wrongness. Capital punishment fits the second criterion to a tee.
- projectramo 8y ago
  The big difference between human sacrifice and capital punishment is that the person sacrificed hasn’t done anything “wrong.” The big difference between war and human sacrifice is that the target of human sacrifice is not a threat or a random bystander.
- yters 8y ago
  Based on this premise 56 million abortions a year is also ritual sacrifice, on a greater scale than any form of human sacrifice in the past.

dnomad 8y ago

> This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda, There is really no evidence of child sacrifice at Carthage. Not sure why this myth persists but the much more plausible explanation is that (wealthy) children who died of natural causes were cremated, a very common practice in the ancient world that goes back literally 10,000 years. > Human sacrifice was alarmingly common. Not so much. And in fact what the Aztecs did was very unique: human sacrifice was institutionalized and carried out on an industrial scale. This is very different from servants/wives being forced to follow a warrior or the occasional prisoner of war being tossed into a pit. There's really nothing else like it in all of history until the modern Europeans invented death camps.

InTheArena 8y ago
While this is still debated by a few hold outs, This is one where Wikipedia is out of date. Oxford and others released a paper in 2014 and it is now generally held by historians and archeologists that it did in fact happen. Archeoloists questioned Plutarch, and Plutarch won. Check out Antiquity 2012, 2014, and 2017.
- dnomad 8y ago
  > Oxford and others released a paper in 2014 I'm familiar with the Oxford research. It's not conclusive and I don't think most archaeologists have signed on. We'll see how it holds up over time. Even if you accept Oxford, it's still the case that child sacrifice, if it did take place, was rare and reserved only for the very wealthy. The idea of Carthaginians all gathering in a stadium and hurling children into a pit of fire for Moloch is pure (Roman) myth.
  - 7952 8y ago
    Does this kind of question depend on what you consider to be the baseline of normal human behaviour? That defines what side of an argument evidence is required. Surely it is possible that human sacrifice was common throughout human history, and that the last couple of thousand years were the exception. How can you know?

narrator 8y ago

As a literary reader of the bible, I noticed that there are literally one hundred different passages in the bible where God says that he absolutely does not want his followers to sacrifice children to him or condemns other religions for this practice. https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice That they had to repeat it over and over again gives me the impression that this practice was disturbingly widespread in the ancient world.

duxup 8y ago
I'm imagining numerous editorials "I don't know how to tell you to stop sacrificing children...."
- avn2109 8y ago
  Speaking of editorializing, the article's author took to Twitter [0] to defend her article's reverent/respectful tone and (nowadays-common) unspoken premise that all cultures and ideologies are equally good and valid. You'd think it'd be easy to use ritual vivisection, human sacrifice at scale, organized child murder, and cannibalism [1] as an absolutely unambiguous black-and-white line by which to demarcate civilization from barbarian savagery. But amazingly she's willing to defend the latter in writing. In my opinion this constitutes dispositive evidence that the article's author is absolutely batty. [0] https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 [1] She has conveniently omitted from her article any mention of the American natives' widespread and well-documented cannibalism.
  - duxup 8y ago
    I can get giving people in different situations various levels of leeway as far as comparing my decisions sitting at my computer here to their decisions and such. But damn... what does she even mean by "horrific"... how is that even a thing you would bother to dispute?
    - 8y ago

bhouston 8y ago

Wikipedia cities a number of sources for between 130K and 60K: > One conquistador, Andrés de Tapia, was given the task of counting the skulls on the "tzompantli" at Tenochtitlan and estimated that there were 136,000 skulls on it.[17] However, based on numbers given by Taipa and Fray Diego Durán, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano[18] has calculated that there were at most 60,000 skulls on the "Hueyi Tzompantli" (Great Skullrack) of Tenochtitlan. The "Hueyi Tzompantli" consisted of a massive masonry platform composed of “thirty long steps” measuring fully 60 meters in length by 30 meters wide at its summit. Atop of the aforementioned platform was erected an equally formidable wooden palisade and scaffolding consisting of between 60 and 70 massive uprights or timbers woven together with an impressive constellation of horizontal cross beams upon which were suspended the tens of thousands of decapitated human heads once impaled thereon.[19] There were at least five more skull racks in Tenochtitlan but by all accounts they were much smaller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli#Aztec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli#Aztec

happymandrake 8y ago

As a student of history, the amount of hate that pre-Israel civilizations get is really astounding.

ceejayoz 8y ago

> They dismiss Cortez and his men as exaggerating the number of skulls when they claimed 130,000, but if you start calculating how many are in the image of the reconstruction in the article, it's easily close to 100,000. The sources of that image indicate "several thousand" in the article. Not 100k. > Combining the two historically documented towers and the rack, INAH archaeologists now estimate that several thousand skulls must have been displayed at a time.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]