In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the demigod and his comrade Enkidu rip out the heart of the Bull of Heaven as a gift to the sun god Shamash. This bloody act is far from the only time sacrifice makes an appearance in the world’s most ancient stories, and in some tales such rituals claim human lives, or almost. In Greek myth, King Agamemnon decides to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis as payment for letting the Greek fleet sail to Troy. In the book of Genesis, Abraham nearly sacrifices his son Isaac to God, with an angel staying Abraham’s hand only at the last minute.
But human sacrifice is not merely the stuff of legends: Archaeologists have found evidence of it at sites across the globe. Sacrificial pits that dot the site of Yinxu, the last capital of China’s Shang dynasty, offer one notable example. The earliest Chinese dynasty to leave an archaeological record, the Shang era spanned from about 1600 BC to 1000 BC. More than 13,000 people were sacrificed at Yinxu over a roughly 200-year period, scientists estimate, with each sacrificial ritual claiming 50 human victims on average.
Recent research is deepening archaeological knowledge about the practice of sacrifice through history. This work, which often uses techniques from fields outside traditional archaeology, is offering new insights about the victims — where they were from, what roles they played in society, how they lived before they were killed and why they were chosen to begin with.
These findings, in turn, could help answer more fundamental questions about the functions that sacrifices served and the nature of the societies that performed them.
