tamarru
Joined 3 years ago
Joined 3 years ago
I've also reached out to Dr. Ester Salgarella, so I'm familiar with attempts to apply computational analysis to the corpus, and where previous efforts erred.
Most, if not all civilizations, practice child sacrifice to this day. It's called war, and it's practiced to such a ritualistic, feverish pitch that it may as well be a public festival glorifying death and national identity.
The "proof" that the Carthaginians, Canaanites, and Bronze Age Minoans practiced child sacrifice begs a misanthropic perspective from the start. While our modern society may think nothing of animals, and even reject the notion that they possess a soul, this was certainly not the case for the Etruscans or Canaanites. We have ample evidence, in the case of Etruria, that children who died prematurely were embalmed and buried with the remains of household pets, in the hope that the souls of both the animals and the children would be enticed to reincarnate in the presence of their living loved ones again. Being as close to residential districts as they were, these Carthaginian "tophets" served the same purpose--directing the souls of those who perished to return in new forms. The concept that these children were murdered to appease barbarous, foreign gods exposes a level of ignorance and anti-Semiticism that is unfortunately altogether too familiar in the modern-day.
As for the "Southern House of Knossos", the keyword here is "excarnation" and is an alternative method of mummification.
https://github.com/tdimino