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Who Did the Maya Sacrifice?
- neonate 7y agohttps://outline.com/urvuEC https://outline.com/urvuEC https://web.archive.org/web/20190803011609/https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/08/01/who-did-the-maya-sacrifice https://web.archive.org/web/20190803011609/https://www.econo...
- tptacek 7y ago"Sate their lust for blood"?
- whatshisface 7y ago"Bloodlust" is a common phrase that refers to a desire to kill.
- mc32 7y agoThat brings up a question. Obviously a whole civ didn’t wake up one day and realize “huh, we must carry out sacrifice”. It must have grown from some small ritual that snowballed into these ghoulish things though some odd dynamic of accident and then took on a shape its own.
- hodgesrm 7y agoHuman sacrifice was widely prevalent in prehistory. It's present in the Bible (Abraham and Isaac), in Homeric legends (Iphigenia at Aulis), and countless other ancient societies. [1] The notion that some must die that others may live is deeply ingrained in human behavior and still exists today. The interesting question to me at least is why did it stop? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice
- irrational 7y ago>The interesting question to me at least is why did it stop? And will it make a comeback with the mass society upheavals I expect due to climate change?
- whatshisface 7y agoBecause religions that said not to do it took over the world.
- Retric 7y agoThat’s a restatement of the change not an explanation of it. The context when religions say to kill people has changed, why?
- dondawest 7y agoIt did not stop. Scapegoating remained the same through all of time. All that happened was we stopped killing our scapegoats explicitly and now choose to scapegoat them from afar so we can feel better about ourselves.
- tptacek 7y agoEven denuded of its emotive connotations like that, a culture's willingness to commit human sacrifice doesn't logically indicate desire; indeed, the evidence suggests most cultures that practiced sacrifice (in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas) believed they obtained some utility from the act.
- BurningFrog 7y agoI'm more inclined to think the utility is a pretext. If you do human sacrifice, it's probably because you want to do human sacrifice. Smart people can always come up with a pretext.
- swagasaurus-rex 7y agoPerhaps they are linked. Perhaps at a certain time there was a need for it; the utility became apparent. I could imagine a collapse in the food supply necessitating either sacrifice, or cannibalism. It may have become fashionable to do for various religious and ritualistic reasons, even during good times.
- whatshisface 7y ago>I could imagine a collapse in the food supply necessitating either sacrifice, or cannibalism. That's not possible because (as every European famine ever has shown) if you choose "none of the above" then people will starve naturally until the famine is over. Not every hard situation is a trolley problem.
- Xylakant 7y agoWhich may result in more death than necessary. You observe a failed harvest. Your foodstock is sufficient for a thousand days for one person. You expect the next food to be available in 100 days. Your population is 100 people. If you feed all people for just 5 days, 5 people might survive. If you pick 10 at the beginning and sacrifice 90, 10 people can survive. Whatever you choose makes a difference in how many people die. It’s still kind of a trolley problem.
- crazyworldthrow 7y agoIronic to see a child genital mutilation culture condescend to a child sacrificing one.
- ryanmarsh 7y agoBabies
- gwern 7y agoHm. Is it that bad? The data would seem to at least falsify the warfare hypothesis: if they were mostly prisoners-of-war, you'd expect a few localities & demographics to be overrepresented (as they are from the usual enemy city-states, or a burst of young male sacrifices from a victorious battle with many prisoners). And a gradual dispersion of victims falling off steadily with distance yet with a long tail of very remote origins sounds to me like what you'd get from a mature long-distance network of slave traders.
- throwaway2048 7y agoI think the idea that they sacrificed slaves (exclusively?) is a bit overhasty of a conclusion, the Spanish reported that when they "freed" many "victims" waiting to be sacrificed by the Aztecs, they were indignant and demanded to be returned and sacrificed. A different time, and a different culture, but with a huge amount of similarities too. Perhaps people viewed it as their sacred duty to be sacrificed?
- drak0n1c 7y agoA related finding - a group (not Mayan, but not quite the Aztecs either) imprisoned an entire Conquistador convoy (Spaniards, Africans, and American Indians) for months and gradually sacrificed and cannibalized them. So the "anyone and everyone" at least in its later incarnations also included unusual foreigners. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/10/conquistadors-sacrificed-eaten-aztec-acolhuas https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/10/conquistadors-...
- daurnimator 7y agoOr maybe they were e.g. sacrificed to spare their loved ones. --> if they were freed then maybe their family would have to provide someone else?
- watwut 7y agoThe Spanish might be unreliable narrators. Perhaps we cant trust their assessment of situation and even less their reports. They could have been wrong in many ways.
- softbuilder 7y ago*Whom
- stan_rogers 7y agoHwæm, actually, if you really feel a need to attach yourself to obsolete words. Language changes, and the dropping of whom should not bother you anymore than does here having entirely supplanted hither or the near absence of whence in everyday conversation.
- asark 7y agoGarner's advice, to paraphrase—his entry on who/whom is, unsurprisingly, long—amounts to generally understanding and following the rules, but using whichever reads or sounds better if rule-following results in awkwardness, as it certainly sometimes does (he has examples). In this case I'd judge that either works, though the more formal-register the writing the more this use of "who" would stand out. This being a headline in the Economist—and considering that, apparently, at least some found this use of "who" distracting, while "whom" would have been at least as easy to parse and probably wouldn't have bothered anyone—it's probably fair to call it a small error. Garner also notes that predictions that "whom" is on its way out are, at this point, part of a long tradition, and do seem to capture the trend but do not yet describe current standard usage outside the fairly informal or colloquial. IOW for the best hope of communicating well at higher-formality registers, especially in writing, do continue (mostly) following the standard rules, in this case, avoiding it only when "correct" use is distracting or strange to a modern reader.
- enriquto 7y agoIn that case using the correct word would render the title unambiguous and comprehensible to everybody. As it is written I read it as "who was responsible for the act known as the Maya Sacrifice?". As a non-native English speaker who learnt the language in a rather formal way, interpreting the word "sacrifice" as a verb is ungrammatical to me.
- mkl 7y ago
- visal 7y agoHello
- visal 7y agoHello gug
- elpakal 7y agoNot sure i can agree with using the word “sacrifice” here. This could have been a voluntary trek into “some other world” - we simply don’t know what it was. When i hear sacrifice i think heads rolling.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoIt is hard to imagine the horror of exploring a new place and coming across Tzompantli made from children. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli
- puranjay 7y agoTo be fair, the people who were the first explorers in these lands were hardly the squeamish type
- mtsr 7y agoBut they were likely the zealous type for whom this was plenty justification to classify Maya as subhuman and have no trouble killing all of them.
- tapland 7y agoNot really the reason they are gone. As stated on wiki > It is estimated that 90% of the indigenous population had been eliminated by disease within the first century of European contact.
- lrei 7y agoProbably, they were the type that had no problem killing. Someone of a different type was in charge of justifications. The latter would’ve also been more the type that wrote, now historical, documents.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agokilling them ALL Lol. That’s definitely false.
- _petronius 7y agoAt least for the first conquistadores, this is wildly incorrect. It is true that they saw the Mesoamerican culture as wrong (particularly the human sacrifice bit), and put the conquest of territory for Spain as of high importance, but their understanding of the world was more complex than what you describe. I really recommend reading Bernal Díaz del Castillo‘a firsthand account of the conquest of “New Spain” to get an idea of how these people viewed the world!
- dmix 7y agoI was hoping it would dig into how they got all the bones and stuff out of the sinkhole but it glossed over this point. Anyone know if the source material is better?
- mobilemidget 7y agoThe list of cookie using parties on the economist.com is longer then the article...(?)
- blargmaster33 7y agoGod bless the Spanish for expungeing this evil from existence.
- mariojv 7y agoAt Chichen Itza, tour guides there will tell you that people there actually competed in pelota (ball) games for the honor of being sacrificed. According to them, it was something the competitors actively sought out. Unsurprisingly, it seems as though this is false. The losers of the game were the ones sacrificed during certain periods in Mayan history. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame#Human_sacrifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame#Human_sa...