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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Which is more likely: ancient people sacificing their children, or ancient writers wanting to mess with future historians or simply writing horror?

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Ritual sacrifice, including of children is well documented all across the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sacrifice). So it's not a question of likelihood, we've dug up plenty of gravesites documenting it especially in Mesoamerica. There's even some modern examples, with an isolated tribe of Chilean natives sacrificing a 5 year old after the 1960 Valdivia earthquake.

You have it sort of backwards. These practices are only 'horror' by modern standards, it doesn't make sense to disregard history because we live by other values than an ancient civilization.

I think the fact that it seems incredible to us that people could sacrifice their children is a testament to the advance of civilisation.

children were not always so precious. if memory does not fail me, in the 20th century, there were still laws that stated that children were property of their parents who disposed of their lifes as they wish. that means you could kill your child without consequences. child labor : legal. etc...

They lived at the Malthusian population limit of their ecosystem anyway.

Sacrificing children was just another way to get rid of excess population and would absolutely improve the lives of whoever was left.

Any children not sacrificed would have to die by disease, war, or starvation at some point anyway, because again, the population cannot grow above the Malthusian limit.

This core concept - that preindustrial people all lived at their Malthusian population limit - is incredibly important in understanding the preindustrial world and it's shocking that it's not more broadly understood and applied.

Sounds like an overly simplistic answer. You got a source?

It is hard to argue against it as a first principle in population growth: reproduction is pretty simple math.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism

They mention it was documented by the Greeks & Romans, but was dismissed at the time as politically motivated slander. Those records plus physical evidence give it more weight, so I say the former is more likely.

The same people who wrote about mythical creatures, mythical cities, mythical wars and all kinds of propaganda and made up stories...

Yes that's why it being supported by physical evidence, which it appears to be, is so important.

You would be surprised: a child that was difficult to provide for and had no future of providing for you in your old age wasn't that hard to discard even 100 years ago.

Some people believe abortion is basically the same thing

…which it isn’t. We know that. Right?

Not if they follow biblical precedent.

In a society where tons of kids are born and half of them don't live to see their fifth birthday, children's lives are a lot less valuable than in the Western societies of 2023, where kids are something of a rare resource and they are expected to live full, long lives.

This difference needs to be taken into account when thinking about various probabilities in the past.

Psychologically, I don't think the value of children has changed. Mourning the death of children is as ancient a literary trope as any.

But from a microeconomic point of view, children were more valuable in pre-industrial times. Most people worked in agriculture or the trades and lived in multi-generation households, and children were necessary to help with chores and eventually take over the main occupation and care for the elder parents. There was no retirement fund, just your children. Food and clothing were more expensive and childbirth was risky, so children represented a major investment. That they were sacrificed is a testament to how much value people placed on the ritual, not the lack of value of children. See also how valuable farm animals were sacrificed.

"Mourning the death of children is as ancient a literary trope as any."

It might have been different between infants and slightly older children. The really young ones died all too often.

That is definitely true, we have diaries from folks who lived in the 1600s in London where you have the different reactions to their children dying at different age. They loved and cared for them but with close to a quarter of kids dying in their first year, it was something most families came to expect and experience but that they never completely numb to. When an older child died, it was an even bigger deal because they'd got past that dangerous first few years and you weren't expecting it.

What's interesting is that a "good" name would often be reused when a child died. So a former leader of my country had three daughters called "Catherine" (IIRC), but two are buried beside each other in a small gold mining town's cemetery, having died young, the last Catherine living to adulthood.

History as social science was basically invented between 19th and 20th century. Ancient writers generally had agenda and they happily filled missing pieces with ideologically-fueled speculation.

but, intelligence is not new. There were astute readers at that time, too. So there must have been a spectrum, and reading people knew something about that spectrum.. from fawning sycophants of the current despot, to tellers of tall tales, to scholars, and those close to traders and travelers.

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