Note 245.1 — Chapter XIII · Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual.

Slightly more important is a passage in a legal document, to which Mr. Johns245.1 calls attention; whence it appears that a forfeit for reopening an already adjudicated cause was the consecration of one’s eldest child by fire to a god or goddess; and, as incense and cedar-wood are mentioned in the same context as concomitants of the threatened ceremony, the conclusion seems natural that this was once at least a real threat of human sacrifice inflicted as a legal punishment. This legal clause gives us the right to conclude that in the earliest period the Semites and Sumerians of Mesopotamia occasionally resorted to this rite. They would be indeed a peculiar people and a favoured nation if they had always been innocent of it. It is sufficiently attested by direct evidence, either of record or excavation, or by the suggestion of legend, of the Arabs, Syrians, the early Canaanites,245.2 the Israelites, the Phoenicians; also of the Phrygians and other non-Semitic peoples of Anatolia. Yet it must be put to the credit of the Babylonian culture of the second millennium, that the Mesopotamians had either completely or almost abandoned it. At this time it was doubtless in full vogue in Greece; and certainly Babylon could not have been their evil teacher in this matter. But they needed no teachers in what was an ancient tradition of their northern ancestors, and of the people with whom they mingled. Yet only twenty years ago a distinguished writer on Greek ritual could say, “It is certain that the Hellenes borrowed the practice of human sacrifice from the Orientals.”246.1