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Executions and sacrifices
This book offers age-appropriate insight into some of history's mysterious and gruesome practices -- from the walls of the Shaanxi Province in China to the murky red waters of Ireland's peat bogs.
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Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru
Propitiating the supernatural forces that could grant bountiful
crops or wipe out whole villages through natural disasters was a
sacred duty in ancient Peruvian societies, as in many premodern
cultures. Ritual sacrifices were considered necessary for this
propitiation and for maintaining a proper reciprocal relationship
between humans and the supernatural world.
The essays in this book examine the archaeological evidence for
ancient Peruvian sacrificial offerings of human beings, animals,
and objects, as well as the cultural contexts in which the
offerings occurred, from around 2500 B.C. until Inca times just
before the Spanish Conquest. Major contributions come from the
recent archaeological fieldwork of Steve Bourget, Anita Cook, and
Alana Cordy-Collins, as well as from John Verano's laboratory work
on skeletal material from recent excavations. Mary Frame, who is a
weaver as well as a scholar, offers rich new interpretations of
Paracas burial garments, and Donald Proulx presents a fresh view of
the nature of Nasca warfare. Elizabeth Benson's essay provides a
summary of sacrificial practices.
eBook
Of summits and sacrifice : an ethnohistoric study of Inka religious practices
In perhaps as few as one hundred years, the Inka Empire became the largest state ever formed by a native people anywhere in the Americas, dominating the western coast of South America by the early sixteenth century. Because the Inkas had no system of writing, it was left to Spanish and semi-indigenous authors to record the details of the religious rituals that the Inkas believed were vital for consolidating their conquests. Synthesizing these arresting accounts that span three centuries, Thomas Besom presents a wealth of descriptive data on the Inka practices of human sacrifice and mountain worship, supplemented by archaeological evidence. Of Summits and Sacrifice offers insight into the symbolic connections between landscape and life that underlay Inka religious beliefs. In vivid prose, Besom links significant details, ranging from the reasons for cyclical sacrificial rites to the varieties of mountain deities, producing a uniquely powerful cultural history.
eBook
Evil star : the graphic novel
\"It began with Raven's Gate. But it's not over yet. Once again the enemy is stirring. After defeating the Old Ones at Raven's Gate, Matt Freeman thought he could get on with his life. But someone has other ideas ... Far away in Peru a second gate is about to open. Only Matt has the power to stop the forces of darkness breaking through, but now they know all about him. This time they're going to destroy him first\"--Back cover.
BOOK
Sweeping the Way
Incorporating human sacrifice, flaying, and mock warfare, the pre-Columbian Mexican ceremony known as Ochpaniztli, or \"Sweeping,\" has long attracted attention. Although among the best known of eighteen annual ceremonies, Ochpaniztli's significance has nevertheless been poorly understood. Ochpaniztli is known mainly from early colonial illustrated manuscripts produced in cross-cultural collaboration between Spanish missionary-chroniclers and native Mexican informants and artists. Although scholars typically privilege the manuscripts' textual descriptions, Sweeping the Way examines the fundamental role of their pictorial elements, which significantly expand the information contained in the texts. DiCesare emphasizes the primacy of the regalia, ritual implements, and adornments of the patron \"goddess\" as the point of intersection between sacred, cosmic forces and ceremonial celebrants. The associations of these paraphernalia indicate that Ochpaniztli was a period of purification rituals, designed to transform and protect individual and communal bodies alike. Spanish friars were unable to apprehend the complex nature of the festival's patroness, ultimately fragmenting her identity into categories meeting their expectations, which continues to vex modern investigations. Taken together, the variety of Ochpaniztli sources offer a useful tool for addressing myriad issues of translation and transformation in pre-Columbian and post-conquest Mexico, as Christian friars and native Mexicans together negotiated a complex body of information about outlawed ritual practices and proscribed sacred entities.
eBook
The last Messenger of Zitol
Taken captive to the magnificent kingdom of Zitol, an ancient American city with a passion for food, gold, and human sacrifice, Rishi is forced to decide between betraying her virtue or being sacrificed to the city's pagan gods.
Book
Inka human sacrifice and mountain worship : strategies for empire unification
The Inka empire was the largest pre-Columbian polity in the New World. Its vast expanse, its ethnic diversity, and the fact that the empire may have been consolidated in less than a century have prompted much scholarly interest in its creation. In this study, Besom explores the ritual practices of human sacrifice and the worship of mountains, attested in both archaeological investigations and ethnohistorical sources, as tools in the establishment and preservation of political power.
Besom examines the relationship between symbols, ideology, ritual, and power to demonstrate how the Cuzqueños could have used rituals to manipulate common Andean symbols to uphold their authority over subjugated peoples. He considers ethnohistoric accounts of the categories of human sacrifice to gain insights into related rituals and motives, and reviews the ethnohistoric evidence of mountain worship to predict locations as well as motives. He also analyzes specific archaeological sites and assemblages, theorizing that they were the locations of sacrifices designed to assimilate subject peoples, bind conquered lands to the state, and/or justify the extraction of local resources.
eBook
Given to the sea
\"Khosa is destined to be sacrificed to the sea and struggles to understand her destiny as the kingdom comes under attack and the ocean threatens to destroy them all\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece
Numerous ancient texts describe human sacrifices and other forms of ritual killing: in 480 BC Themistocles sacrifices three Persian captives to Dionysus; human scapegoats called pharmakoi are expelled yearly from Greek cities, and according to some authors they are killed; Locrin girls are hunted down and slain by the Trojans; on Mt Lykaion children are sacrificed and consumed by the worshippers; and many other texts report human sacrifices performed regularly in the cult of the gods or during emergencies such as war and plague. Archaeologists have frequently proposed human sacrifice as an explanation for their discoveries: from Minoan Crete children's bones with knife-cut marks, the skeleton of a youth lying on a platform with a bronze blade resting on his chest, skeletons, sometimes bound, in the dromoi of Mycenaean and Cypriot chamber tombs; and dual man-woman burials, where it is suggested that the woman was slain or took her own life at the man's funeral. If the archaeologists' interpretations and the claims in the ancient sources are accepted, they present a bloody and violent picture of the religious life of the ancient Greeks, from the Bronze Age well into historical times. But the author expresses caution. In many cases alternative, if less sensational, explanations of the archaeological are possible; and it can often be shown that human sacrifices in the literary texts are mythical or that late authors confused mythical details with actual practices.Whether the evidence is accepted or not, this study offers a fascinating glimpse into the religious thought of the ancient Greeks and into changing modern conceptions of their religious behaviour.
eBook