The Child in Human Progress

by George Henry Payne

Among the Banjarilu, a caste of travelling traders noted in “Bhadrachellam and Rekapalli Taluquas,”[213] the custom in former years was, before starting off on a business journey, to procure a little child and bury it in the ground up to its shoulders. Then the traders would drive their loaded bullocks over the victim and in proportion as the bullocks “thoroughly trampled the child to death” was their belief in a successful journey increased. Probably very little credence can be given to their assertions that they have completely left off such cruelties.

The Chinese philosopher, Mih Tsze, who lived about the fourth century before Christ, wrote that there existed at one time in China a state called Kai-muh, where it was the custom to kill and devour the eldest brother as an offering to the gods.[214]

We come now to the results of recent excavations in Palestine.

There were discovered at Gezer, the bodies of adults that had been sacrificed at foundation rites and deposited with the corner-stones much as moderns deposit mementoes and newspapers. Mr. MacAlister, who had charge of the excavations at Gezer, says, however, that adult or adolescent victims were rare in comparison with the number of infants or very young children whose remains were found under the corners of houses. Such deposits were found in all the Semitic strata but were very rare in the Hellenistic stratum, showing that the practice died down when the Greeks came into control of the land. The children sacrificed at these foundation rites were deposited in the same manner as those found at the messobath or high place, where there was discovered a cemetery of jar-buried infants that went to show how general was the practice of sacrificing their new-born infants among the Canaanites.

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS FOUND IN A CHILD’S GRAVE, AT TELL TA’ANNEK
(REPRODUCED FROM “DENKSCHRIFTEN DER KAISERLICHEN AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFT”)

“That these sacrificed infants were the first-born, devoted in the Temple, is indicated by the fact that none were over a week old. This seems to show that the sacrifices were not offered under stress or any special calamity, or at the rites attaching to any special season of the year. The special circumstance which led to the selection of these infants must have been something inherent in the victims themselves, which devoted them to sacrifice from the moment of their birth. Among various races, various circumstances are regarded as sufficient reason for infanticide—deformity, the birth of twins, etc.; but among the Semites the one cause most likely to have been effective was primogeniture.”[215]

In the vessels in which the infants were placed, were found by the excavators smaller vessels which were probably food vessels with a viaticum for the victim.

At Ta’Annek[216] after the discoveries at Gezer, a cemetery containing some twenty infants, also buried in jars, was discovered about a rock altar, the age of the infants that had been sacrificed having been as much as five years. At Megiddo[217] underneath a corner of a temple, there were found four jars with the bones of children and near them smaller jars and a bowl, which undoubtedly contained the food that children were supposed to need in the other world. Professor Sellin suggests that the bones found at Tell Ta’Annek may have been the bones of children that had died too young to be buried in the family sepulchres, but the burden of evidence suggests a different explanation. Here, then, we have a double reason for the sacrifice of the children, for the foundation sacrifices were—one might almost say are, so recently have there been instances of the practice—of a different order from the sacrifice of the first-born.

On these foundation sacrifices, Dr. Driver has made some interesting notes. We are all familiar with our own foundation ceremonies, which are really nothing more or less than a modification of these primitive ceremonies that consisted almost entirely of the sacrifice of a human being and in many instances of an infant, inasmuch as the infant, having just come into the world, was purer and nearer to god and therefore more acceptable. Traces of the custom of sacrificing a human life in order that some destructive god or demon might be propitiated and the lives of those about to occupy the building thereby made safer are found in India, New Zealand, China, Japan, Mexico, Germany, and Denmark.